I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are usually good responses. These folks clearly played with the time filter. Other users are missing out on these responses.

I agree that a 3 day filter may be the ideal filter at the normal activity level of Tildes at large, at this point. But Tildes is still really fluctuating in activity, as may other sites based on the codebase. This may be an even bigger issue in specific groups.

Would there be any workable and beneficial way to make the default time filter a function of recent activity? This may apply to the main feed, and each group feed. This would help in site/group times of low activity, and might scale to the much higher activity of the future.. does this make any sense at all?

Would it be better to make the default time filter a function of activity, instead of a arbitrary setting which an admin selected?

Edit: the list box label might default to a dynamic “recent”, or similar, and then still have the other options of “last 1 hour, last 12 hours,” etc...

I'm a big fan of "discussion threads" over on reddit, if you're unfamiliar they're essentially threads a subreddit will pin every day or week where you can post things that don't deserve a full post or are slightly frivolous or off topic. To give an example, a while back I wanted to make a post with some thoughts on Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection", but after typing it out didn't think there was enough to warrant making a thread over it. I didn't feel like doing a more extensive analysis or trying to artificially broaden the scope (ie, doing something like "what's a poem you like?" as an excuse for sharing my thoughts), so I just trashed it.

I like discussion threads because they help save "small" content like that as well as helping to build a sense of community and are just generally quite comfy.

However, I recognize that there can be some downsides:

• May end up being "low quality" in the minds of certain users. I know this is somewhat contentious, since the site culture is still being established, I personally don't want Tildes to be that serious but I know some people do.

• Normal group activity could drop if people opt to use the discussion thread instead of making a post. This is doubly bad because the site is small.

~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events.

also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused around soft-core news events from around the world. An example of this is this post: "Man tries to open plane’s door, thinks it’s way to the loo - Times of India." it is just like interesting news stories that aren't too serious from around the world. Not sure if that would fit here, just a sugesstion

I think ~culinary would be beneficial to see, it could include areas like;

~culinary.news

~culinary.recipes

~culinary.videos

~culinary.photography

I am a little biased because of my profession (Sous Chef), but I do see a lot of Culinary related posts that are spread out over several different groups. It would be nice to have them organized into their own group.

And if anyone is worried about it being active, I subscribe to several culinary news sites that I rarely post here so It would give me a chance to share some of that stuff. Not to mention giving us a place to share already popular Youtube series and recipes.

I know this content doesn't lend to discussion as much as others, but it would still be high quality.

EDIT: Maybe a solution is to have more of those posts end up in ~food instead of being spread out. Although I feel like the ~food heading is a little more restrictive, so maybe rename ~food to ~culinary?

Hi, I wanted to suggest the creation of an esports specific group.

The taxonomy would work in a similar way to ~games, however it would home both the business and news side of our industry as well as allowing for the competitive communities of various games to have sub groups. ~esports.leagueoflegends, ~esports.dota2, ~esports.overwatch for example.

Would like to hear other people's thoughts.

There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but strategy-oriented discussions around positions in markets and the way changes in the world will effect your financial future seems like high-quality content to me.

Is there a way to view all the subgroups in a group? Right now I don't see any way to access them without someone directly linking a subgroup. I think it would be helpful if there was a list of subgroups in each group sidebar, or a link to a page of them.

I just got here, so sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.

This post is meant to provoke a discussion and possibly find a resolution or at least set an expectation as far as where to post esports content.

I don't really have an opinion either way but would like to discuss the topic, because it seems like not setting an expectation might lead to similar content being posted to one or the other of the two communities when all the content would be prefered in one community to make finding things easier.

Basically, with groups being admin controlled rather than the reddit system of mods, will all bans be site wide or should group bans be possible? Let's say somebody is harassing or being an asshole on ~LGBT, should they be banned from ~LGBT or from the website?

As of right now of course, users can not create their own groups, however this may change in the future as is stated here.

What do the users think about this? Although tildes is similar to reddit, it's obviously not got the same goals in mind, and I think it makes sense to keep groups up to the admins.

Was asked to post here about this:

Is there a plan for migrating sub-tags (or top-level groups too)? The scenario I'm thinking of is that things may either fork, or change their name unanimously.

Let's say a tech product changes its official name from XX to be YY, Would there be a way to migrate
~tech.XX.stuff to ~tech.YY.stuff?

I can't say that this will be a common occurrence, but may affect historical usefulness of the tagging system, as people looking for things in the past won't be able to easily - plus it may divide communities once existing (do they keep posting in the old tag or the new one?).

For now, this isn't too important as @Deimos (from what it seems?) is in charge of creating new topics and presumably modify them too, but for the future (according to this) we may start having user created groups pop-up.

Cheers,

With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

I'm certain this has been discussed before, but seeing that
A: There's no search function and
B: Maybe people who joined since the last discussion would like to talk without necroing anything

Is there a cycle/timeline for adding new groups as interest seems to appear?
What's the plan for how to choose which new groups get added?

If not, could we (and the site's staff) discuss possibilities on good ways to do that?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no good fit for topics ranging from personal finance, investing, portfolio management, budgeting, running a business, markets, etc. Seems ~finance or similar could be a catch-all for a massive category of topics that don't have a place currently.

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.

How far should/will it go?

I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

You have to look for the (d) at the end of Subscribe on the Browse The List Of Groups page. Please change the wording to say Unsubscribe, put a dashed box around it, change the color or something.

Edit: Someone in my house mentioned that they are different colors. Please choose a different color as it is not color-blind friendly :)

It's kind of awkward to have to go to the main tildes page then click to one of the ~groups to navigate between groups. Either having the home bar under the group bar on the right, or having a list of other ~groups on the top (possibly customizable, RES style?) would fix this.

So this is based on experience from Reddit. I see there is ~talk , which is great, but talk is distinct from advice I think, which is more focussed and potentially a bit more serious. You could consider ~talk.advice but i think you might have a culture/trust clash between them a bit. I think having them distinct allows for ~advice to be given in a safer space while ~talk stays more open and flexible.

I suspect, from my experience, that you would have different behavioural patterns, conventions and broad rules in the two trees of tildes.

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

I spend quite a bit of time on the NASA Spaceflight forums and r/spacex and r/space on Reddit, and I was wondering if anyone would be in favor of creating a ~space group or something similar here.

As things stand now, I feel like ~science would be the most appropriate place for talk about space, space tech, and rocketry, but the general feeling of that group seems to be multidisciplinary science discussion and news, rather than the cross of news, science, engineering (and a bit of nearly-corporate-espionage if it's r/spacex...) that one usually finds in a discussion/forum about space and rocketry.

Would the creation of such a group be something others would like to consider? Do you have other thoughts on the matter?

To me one of the biggest problems on the internet is the lack of a "hub" or somewhere it sort of centralizes. In my opinion the current "staleness" of the internet is due to a lack of central hub.

So i thought about how I could solve this problem. You see without a central hub, starting anything is a problem.

Imagine I am a new user on the web, and I want to learn 3D modeling. Where do I go? This is a problem I am facing right now, like which site do I goto to be part of a community. I don't want to make an account on facebook and join ragtag groups with no real activity. There is no sense of community or anything, just random noise. All I can do is google, and youtube videos to learn 3d modeling. If I goto forums, they are all very stale or "dead" and I leave cause I don't know what to do there.

I basically wanted to have a starting point where I knew for a fact that everyone knows this place and starts here and belong to a community. Two months, and I still have the same problem. I don't belong to a community within 3d modeling or feel like I belong there. Just hardly any chitchat, irc channels barely anyone speaks. Days go by without a new thread.

The biggest problem I notice is that everyone is spread apart, some devs on twitter only, some on that certain site only. No one is really connected or rather there is no central hub. Still using 3d modeling as an example, I noticed that without a central hub, there is no real "right" way to do something. I mean this, no one has any idea on what software to use. I keep asking myself am I using the right software, what is he using, what are they using. It turns out they all have this question, I'm still not sure. NO ONE IS. So if no one is sure, then the communities unintentionally keep closing themselves off.

But There is one rule that must be set

YOU CANNOT EVER ALLOW A USER TO CREATE A GROUP. Do not make this mistake.

Have Things constant at times, I'm tired of unlimited everything. A limit creates a sense of belonging.

Why?

Reddit's biggest flaw and strength is the subreddits and it made a mistake when it allowed anyone to create one and you are seeing the cascading effects now. When you can make a new group, you are no longer a tight nit community with set focus. You are separating the community on a large scale, right off the bat and as you can see on reddit, subbreddits clash which leads to drama and ultimately the destruction of the site from within.

So what am I getting at?

We go back to a tried and true method and something that we know everyone will like. Something that Appeals To Everyone ish.

YOU BRING BACK THE GEOCITIES NEIGHBORHOODS AND KEEP THEM NAMED AS GROUPS.

Have 29 Groups, or let the community decide the # of groups and lets start naming them. No petsburgh please

Simple Short Descriptions. and the name creates an INSTANT connection with someone who might have an interest in that group.

The Only Time You Add A Group is every 6 months to a year and ONLY THE OWNER CAN. Community Decides the name.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SET # OF GROUPS. This creates unique culture.

List of IDEAS:

1: Add a count for the amount of posts in the group list if you can, might be database heavy.

2: Everyone is subscribed to all the groups but can unsubscribe.

3: A list of trending "topics" or call them "marks" or "underscores". (Suck it twitter)

Original post here

What if subgroups were totally dynamic?
ie:

If I post to ~music with a post tagged [hip-hop] [instrumental], that post could exist in ~music.hip-hop.instrumental, ~music.instrumental.hip-hop, ~music.instrumental, ~music.hip-hop. Is there a benefit in structured hierarchy? Users could sub to the root ~music for everything, if they want, or they could sub to specific hierarchies that they enjoy (ie: i'd sub to ~music.instrumental but not ~music.hip-hop.instrumental.

This would also drop the need for specific moderation teams or support structures for larger subgroups. Additionally, it creates an interesting structure where posts aren't relegated to single groups, allowing for more discover-ability.