A lesser known feature of Tildes that is VERY useful:

You can ignore any topic on Tildes! There are two ways to do it:

• From the main page, click Actions ▼ then Ignore this post

• From the topic itself, click Ignore

The topic will leave your feed, never to be seen again (unless you want to or made a mistake, in which case you can see it under Your ignored topics on your user page and remove it from your ignore list).

Use this to cut down on clutter from your feeds by eliminating high-activity topics you are not interested in.

It will also mute notifications from that topic as well, so it’s a good way of disengaging from a conversation if you wish.

I saw a few longtime users in other threads who were unaware of this feature until today, so I figured I’d make the PSA.

Go ahead everyone, try it on this post!

Ignore it, PLEASE!

Something you want to follow but don't have the energy to post? Something you want to start but not sure if there's an audience for it? Worry if it'd fit with existing culture? Share your ideas here to gauge interest.

Cold posting can be scary, maybe this thread can help break the ice.

I joined Tildes a couple of days ago, and I'm absolutely loving the interface and community.

In the last few days of using Tildes, I noticed a particular problem that was mildly annoying; if you have the "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting on, and you click on a link that is supposed to lead to a comment in a topic you have already visited, it won't jump to that comment.

Searching around, I found a post about it from a day ago, in which long-time users have mentioned that it's been a known problem for a while now. In those comments, someone mentioned permalinks as a solution, but it appears that's still in the works.

For now, I've made a quick userscript that will address this issue (and adds some slight related functionality). It hasn't been thoroughly tested yet, so if any issues occur, please let me know. This userscript is designed to be used with Tampermonkey (a privacy-friendly alternate that should work is ViolentMonkey), which is available in all popular desktop browsers. Installation instructions for Tampermonkey are available on their site (it's installed like any other extension).

To install the script, you can head to this GitHub Gist which contains the code (click "Raw" to open the TamperMonkey install prompt), or you can copy and paste the code from the following dropdown block into a "New script" on the TamperMonkey dashboard. The dropdown is not guaranteed to contain the latest version.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Tildes Comment Link Fix
// @namespace    https://gist.github.com/blankdvth/6da89fff580e8cf6e50f88847ddb5729
// @version      1.2.0
// @description  Fixes comment links (anchors) not working as a result of Tildes' comment collapsing feature.
// @author       blank_dvth
// @match        https://tildes.net/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=tildes.net
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

/* 
    USER SETTINGS
    This script is not big enough to warrant a visual settings menu, so adjust settings here.
    true = enable, false = disable
*/
const alwaysRun_S = false; // If enabled, will always run the script, even if the comment was not collapsed (site works fine in this case). This is useful if you want to make use of the other settings.
const smoothScroll_S = false; // If enabled, will smoothly (animated) scroll to the comment. If disabled, will jump to the comment.
const uncollapseIndividual_S = true; // If enabled will uncollapse parent comments into one line instead of fully uncollapsing them.
const uncollapseChildren_S = true; // If enabled, will uncollapse all children of the comment. If disabled, will leave them collapsed.
const collapseIrrelevant_S = true; // The script uncollapses all parents to ensure the comment is visible. This will collapse irrelevant (not direct parent) comments again.
// END OF USER SETTINGS

/**
 * Uncollapses the comment if it is collapsed.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 * @param {boolean} individual If true, will "uncollapse" into one line instead of fully uncollapsing
 * @returns {boolean} True if the comment was collapsed, false if it was not
 */
function uncollapse(element, individual = false) {
    if (element.nodeName !== "ARTICLE") return false;
    var removed = false;
    if (
        !individual &&
        element.classList.contains("is-comment-collapsed-individual")
    ) {
        element.classList.remove("is-comment-collapsed-individual");
        removed = true;
    }
    if (element.classList.contains("is-comment-collapsed")) {
        if (individual)
            element.classList.add("is-comment-collapsed-individual");
        element.classList.remove("is-comment-collapsed");
        removed = true;
    }
    return removed;
}

/**
 * Uncollapses all direct parents of the comment.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 * @param {boolean} collapseIrrelevant If true, will collapse irrelevant comments again
 * @param {boolean} individual If true, will "uncollapse" into one line instead of fully uncollapsing
 * @returns {boolean} True if any parent was collapsed, false if none were
 */
function uncollapseParents(element, collapseIrrelevant, individual) {
    const relevant = []; // List of relevant elements (direct parents)
    var wasCollapsed = false; // Whether any parent was collapsed
    while (
        element.parentElement &&
        element.parentElement.nodeName !== "SECTION"
    ) {
        element = element.parentElement;
        relevant.push(element); // Add parent to relevant list
        if (uncollapse(element, individual)) wasCollapsed = true;
        // Collapse all irrelevant sibling comments (if feature enabled)
        if (collapseIrrelevant && element.nodeName === "ARTICLE") {
            element
                .querySelectorAll(
                    `article#${element.id} > ol.comment-tree > li.comment-tree-item > article:not(.is-comment-collapsed)`
                )
                .forEach((child) => {
                    if (!relevant.includes(child))
                        child.classList.add("is-comment-collapsed");
                });
        }
    }
    return wasCollapsed;
}

/**
 * Uncollapses all direct children of the comment.
 * @param {HTMLElement} element Article element of the actual comment
 */
function uncollapseChildren(element) {
    element
        .querySelectorAll("article.is-comment-collapsed article.is-comment-collapsed-individual")
        .forEach(uncollapse);
}

(function () {
    if (!location.hash.startsWith("#comment-")) return; // Not a comment hash
    const comment = document.getElementById(location.hash.substring(1)); // Get comment element
    if (!comment) return; // Comment does not exist
    // Uncollapse the comment itself, and it's parents, then perform other actions if needed/enabled
    if (
        uncollapse(comment) |
            uncollapseParents(
                comment,
                collapseIrrelevant_S,
                uncollapseIndividual_S
            ) ||
        alwaysRun_S
    ) {
        // Uncollapse all children (if feature enabled)
        if (uncollapseChildren_S) uncollapseChildren(comment);
        // Scroll to the comment
        if (smoothScroll_S) comment.scrollIntoView({ behavior: "smooth" });
        else comment.scrollIntoView();
    }
})();

I know a lot of people have been asking for an app, if just for a home screen/app drawer icon, so I cobbled together a small WebView wrapper that installs on your phone as an app.

It's for Android only (sorry iOS users) and probably will receive very little support, since I'm not an Android developer! In fact, this is just a fork of the vastly more capable woheller69's gptAssist, ported over to support Tildes and with some limiting functionality removed. Absolutely check out some of their stuff! My app and the original gptAssist are both licensed under the GPLv3. If anyone would like to contribute, please do! In fact, if you're an Android dev, feel free to fork and make it much better.

I absolutely appreciate the design philosophy of the Tildes devs and think that a WebView wrapper is a good compromise between having an app and using the thoughtfully-built website. If you're anything like me, you just like being able to tap on an icon to get to where you're going. I put this together with that in mind.

After reviewing all the beginner friendly tags on the GitLab and figuring out easy answers the hard way, I finally made my first merge request for issue #700 to an open-source project! It isn't much, and probably took me 10x the amount of time it would take for someone who knows what they are doing, and it probably has some issues that needs to be worked out (although I tried to test as thoroughly as possible), I still submitted it. Even if it doesn't get accepted, I'm sure if someone wants to pick up my pieces, they can do so and build out this functionality in a better way.

I just wanted to share and put it out there that you don't have to be a master programmer to make contributions to this site))

Hi all,

I just took a look at the Tildes subreddit after the recent announcements, and there are tons and tons of invite requests there. I just wanted to draw the site's attention to that as right now it seems like mostly @cfabbro (and probably @Deimos behind the scenes) handling them. I almost never use my invites, so I intend to go through and send out my 10 and help with the backlog a bit. I would encourage you all to do the same as well! Some good practices;

• Reply to users once you have sent so that we do not double up, and can reach the most people with finite invites.

• As always, be mindful of who you are inviting, and take a cursory look at their post history to make sure there are no crazy red flags. We are all responsible for the community we build here, so be mindful of who you are inviting!

Hey all, I think we're getting a lot of new people over the past and next couple days thanks to Reddit's latest ideas of how to manage a social media website.

First of all, welcome! Tildes caught your eye probably partly because of its community / friendliness and we'd all like to keep it this way.

Recommended reading:

• All the documentation is on docs.tildes.net. Most of it is current.
• The philosophy page especially will answer some of your immediate questions
• Since you're here and like the site, think about donating :)

Some personal words: Tildes is not Reddit. But, at least if you're anything like me, it can replace Reddit as your own online social/discussion outlet.

Tildes aims to:

• Grow slowly, not exponentially.
• Elevate the discussion, not lower the bar
• Offer an alternative, not be the new Reddit

Tildes has a lot of threads that are not time dependant, be they asks, surveys, recommendations and hypotheticals. Should we make an effort to give these posts an evergreen tag, and maybe even auto bump them back into circulation after a few years?

I usually browse Tildes logged out, however today I decided to log in to participate. Before doing so, I wanted to explore Tildes' user interface a little. I opened the "Invite Users" page and was greeted with a message stating: "You aren't able to generate more invite links right now.".

To the best of my knowledge, I have never invited anyone before. I have a strong, random password on my Tildes account so I believe it to be unlikely I was compromised.

Are invites globally disabled, or could a site administrator take a look at my account and check what's going on?

I think it would, that's something that interests a vast number of users. Things like construction, bridges, buildings, city planning, trains, etc. Right now they can go to ~misc or ~design which doesn't seem appropriate.

Sometimes you want to reply to a comment with a remark that may not be of interest to the wider Tildes audience, but posting that reply is going to bump the post up in the recent changes list anyway. It would be nice if a reply-to-a-reply had a checkbox allowing you to mark it as a non-bumping comment, like the “minor edit” feature on Wikipedia. The drawback is that it might enable more clutter in the form of off topic chatting. The advantage would be that it keeps the top of the recent changes list free of uninteresting updates.

One implementation detail regards the question of a non-bumping checkbox on replies to an already non-bumping comment. My sense is that once a comment has been marked “non-bumping”, all subsequent replies to it should be non-bumping as well.

Title. I often think of things to add to my comment after they’ve (presumably) been seen by the OP. Sometimes I end up making a separate comment because I want to ensure visibility. Any way to give edited comments a similar visibility to new comments?

hey tilders,

so I mostly read tildes.net content through my RSS reader, and it's 98% great. the remaining 2% is due to two things:

• HTML entities (fancy quotes, etc) don't degrade nicely; I get a lot of &#xxx; in my feed reader - Edited topics (I think) get posted twice to the RSS feed, giving me duplicate items.

I don't know how hard it might be to fix these issues, but is there anything I can do to help?

After using this method to block a user on here I can no longer see the number of votes a comment or a post gets.

I can see it fine when I switch to a browser without uBlockOrigin, but not on FireFox.

Any reason for this?

Edit: I also can't see anyone's username in the comments.

Is there a way to get email alerts when someone responds or votes on your post? I ask because I don't check Tildes each day and last week I posted a question and forgot to return to look at the responses. If I had something like an email alert, it'd be a nice reminder to return.

Clicking a tag provides the search results for that tag in the local group. Since some topics appear across groups, I think it'd be useful to view site-wide results as well, optionally. Does that already exist?

When you click in a tag in a tildes group, you see the topics that have been posted in that group with that tag according to your filters. There's also a link to go back to normal viewing. I think an option to see that tag in all groups would be a neat addition, even if not particularly important. Thoughts?

I've heard many people here like truereddit and the depthhub network and so would probably pop up a lot here but I wonder what other suggestions we might have.

I'd probably like r/imaginarymaps and a lot of related fantasy subreddits. It would probably also be interesting to call more hobby/social/'extravert' subreddits (or, odds are, any subreddit about anything that requires going outside, physical effort/tools or requires multiple people.)

It would probably also be interesting to bring some subreddits for minority/discriminated against groups like r/ainbow, r/TwoXchromosomes or r/transgender.

Lastly, there are namesake subreddits like r/hobbies.

It is pretty clear there are certain subject areas where the discussion simply never goes well here. This isn't a Tildes thing really. Frankly these topics rarely go well anywhere online but, as we have aspirations 'round these parts of being more sophisticated than the Reddit rabble, I think it's worth digging into.

Overall Tildes is a fairly low-activity site, but if I ever see a topic that even tangentially touches on "identarian" issues get past double-digit comments, there will almost surely be an acrimonious exchange inside. I don't want to pretend I'm above this, I've been sucked into these back-and-forths myself as, I think, has almost every regular poster at one time or another. I've largely disengaged from participating in these at this point and mostly just watch from the sidelines now.

Unlike most of the common complaints with Tildes, I don't think this one will get better as the site grows and diversifies. If anything, I think it's going to end up creating norms and a culture that will bleed over into other controversial topics from tabs/spaces to iOS/Android. To keep that from happening, the community will need to form a consensus on what "high quality discussion" means and what we hope to get out of having conversations on these issues here.
To start, when I say "doesn't go well" I'm thinking of indicators where some combination of the following happen:

1. None of the participants learn anything new about the subject, themselves, or another viewpoint
2. Preponderance of "Malice" and "Noise" tags
3. Heated back-and-forth exchanges (related to the above)
4. Frequent accusations (and evidence) of speaking in bad-faith or mischaracterization of peoples' statements

These threads end in people being angry or frustrated with each other, and it's become pretty clear that members of the community have begun to form cliques and rivalries based on these battle lines. It also seems like the stridency and tone are making people leave out of frustration, either deleting their accounts or just logging off for extended stretches of time, which is also an outcome we don't want. So let's go into what we can do to both change ourselves and how others engage with us so people feel like they're being heard without everything breaking down into arguments.

The "Whys" of this are varied and I'm sure I don't see the whole picture. Obviously people come into any community bringing different background experiences and with different things they're hoping to get out of it. But in my view the root cause comes down to approaching discussions as a win/lose battle rather than a shared opportunity to learn about a subject or perspective. From observing many of these discussions without engaging, there are evident patterns in how they develop. The main thrust seems to be that criticism and pushback pretty quickly evolve from specific and constructive (e.g. "This [statement or behavior] is problematic because [reason]") to general and defamatory (e.g. "[Person] is [bad thing], as evidenced by them doing/making [action/statement]").

This approach very quickly turns a conversation between two people into a symbolic battle about making Tildes/the world safe for [community], defending the wrongfully accused, striking a blow against censorship, or some other broad principle that the actual discussion participants may or may not actually be invested in. Once this happens the participants are no longer trying to listen or learn from each other, they're trying to mine their posts for things they can pick through to make them look bad or invalidate their participation. This has the effect of obliterating nuance and polarizing the participants. Discussions quickly devolve from people speaking candidly to people accusing each other of mischaracterizing what they've said. This makes people defensive, frustrated, and creates a feedback loop of negativity.

The win/lose battle approach permeates political discussion on Tildes (and elsewhere), which is a separate issue, but it gets especially problematic in these threads since the subject matter is intensely personal for many people. As a result, it's important to take care that pushback on specific positions should always endeavor to make people feel heard and accepted despite disagreement. On the flip side, there needs to be a principle of charity in place where one accepts that "no offense/harm intended" actually means no offense intended without dissecting the particulars of word-choice to uncover secret agendas. If a charitable interpretation is available, it isn't constructive to insist or default to the uncharitable one. It may not feel fair if you know that the more negative interpretation is correct, but it is literally impossible to have productive discussion any other way. If you can't imagine that a well informed, intelligent, and decent person might hold a certain view then the only conclusion you can draw is that they're either ignorant, stupid, or evil and every response you make to them is going to sound like you think this of them. That's not a position where minds are going to be changed from. English isn't necessarily a first language for everyone here and, even if it is, not everyone keeps up to date on the fast moving world of shifting norms and connotations in social media. What's more, not all cultures and places approach these issues with the same assumptions and biases you're familiar with.

Now I don't actually believe in appealing to peoples' sense of virtue to keep things going constructively in situations like this. Without very active moderation to reinforce it, it just never works and can't scale. So I think operationalizing these norms is going to take some kind of work. Right now we freeze out comments when they have a lot of back-and-forth, which I think is good. But maybe we should make it a bit more humanistic. What if we rate limited with a note to say "Hey this discussion seems to be pretty heated. Maybe reflect on your state of mind for a second and take a breather if you're upset."

Or, in long threads with lots of my bad indicators, the submit button can send to the post preview rather than immediately posting. It could then flash a banner to be a quick reminder of the ground rules (e.g. Try to assume good faith, Remember the Human, Listen to understand rather than respond, Careful with the snark, It's not about winning/losing, etc.) This would introduce just a touch of friction to the posting process, hopefully just enough to make people think "Maybe I could phrase that better" or "You know, this isn't worth my time" and disengage (Obligatory relevant XKCD)

Alternatively, maybe it is the case that this is honestly just intractable without some sort of third-party mediation mechanic and we freeze out comments under such topics entirely. Like I said before, I worry the frequency with which these discussions turn dispiriting has a chance of acculturating new users or signaling to prospective users that this is an expected way for this community to engage.

This is a long post, and I hope it does not itself turn into another case study in the issues I'm trying to raise. I want to open the floor to anyone who has other ideas about causes and solutions. I also ask that we try to keep any critiques to specific actions and behaviors without trying to put blame on any groups of people. We all contribute to the vibe one way or another so we can all stand to try a little harder on this front.

It seems like there are not that many new topics posted on Tildes, and that we could post a lot more. But I sometimes find myself reluctant to do so. Don't I post too much already?

Recently there was a survey and apparently many people think Tildes is too tech-oriented. I don't think it's all that tech oriented, not like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but that makes me a little more reluctant to post tech links. (Though, really, other people should post more of the kind of links they want to see.)

I suspect it's not just me. Periodic topics sometimes get a lot of comments. Periodic topics have been started specifically to avoid having too many top-level topics on one subject.

But, why are we avoiding this? What's wrong with posting more links? If this were a social bookmarking site, I'd be saving more links. Maybe I'd save a bunch of accordion links, without any regard for whether people are interested?

It seems like we need something like folders. When new links are posted in a folder, they don't get listed individually at top-level. You could drop a bunch of links in a folder if you felt like it, without feeling like you're monopolizing conversation, because people would have to open the folder to see what's there. Or maybe instead of folders it would be something like creating a playlist. You could start a topic that's basically a list of links, and then anyone can add links to it if they want.

It seems like groups don't really do this, somehow? They feel a bit too open and exposed. Everything shows up on the front page regardless of group. (I mean, you can filter or unsubscribe from groups, but many of us don't. Partly because they're too broad. Who's going to unsubscribe from music just because they aren't interested in some music?)

So instead we use topics and post links as comments. It sort of works, but it's given me a lot of practice at writing markdown-formatted links on a mobile keyboard, and they appear differently in search and aren't tagged.

It seems like links posted within a topic and posted top-level should be more similar in the UI. Maybe if there's some conversation about a link within a topic, a moderator could promote it to top-level? Maybe a lot of topics would start that way, and then the site would feel a bit more full.

I was thinking about how much the quantity of election news is likely to increase as we get closer to Nov 3. And more specifically the likelihood that this election will not be clear cut, will be contested, lawsuits filed, etc in the days and weeks after Nov 3.

With that in mind, do we want to proactively put up a weekly (maybe daily for the actual week of) megathread to consolidate some of it?

I've been on Tildes for several months now, but, to this day, I still have trouble discerning from the UI that I've already voted on something. I end up clicking, which makes it unvote, and I have to click to vote again.

This is less of a problem in the feed, because a voted post stands out more, but when you click through to a post page, that context is gone, and the problem is very pronounced.

I don't have any great solutions top of mind, but you could explore colour changes, wording changes, or extra wording.

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

It could look like Wikipedia, where green shows what was added in the bottom section and red shows what was removed in the top section. Maybe orange and blue for coloblind people. Useful for typos or small title tweaks, not so much bigger changes

I can never tell how it is currently without reading through the titles at least twice if it's a typo.

This idea is inspired (at least for me, there are probably actual forums like Tildes to draw better comparisons to and take better inspiration from) by Danbooru (P.S: This image is just SFW scenery but the site as a whole is not) , where they have meta tags for stuff like image resolution, if it has commentary, it it's translated, animated, GIF, etc.

Should we consider that but for tags like long and short read or watch, videos, reposts/duplicate posts, spoiler threads, recurring.[ ], maybe news article authors too (also appropriated from Danbooru), since these can supercede any topic or group and will rarely be suggested in any single one of them?

If it's not clear what that looks like, imagine all the normal tags being suggested/typeable at the top and all the meta tags being suggested in a separate search box just below the current one, which are displayed regardless of which group you're in, since they can apply to all the site.

Apologies if this has been discussed already.

I had this idea of a compromise between Tilde's need to grow, and the desire to avoid an Eternal September. Couldn't we make Tildes open to registration one day (or one week) a year?

This avoids a lot of the problems associated with open registration websites. For example, a spammer/troll can't just re-open an account after being banned. Of course, they could have opened several accounts and re-invite themselves, but I think these could be easier to track (especially with invite tracing).

It would also give time to train new users before the next batch comes in.

Of course, the exact timing could be tuned. It could be a day a month, for example.

What do you think?

IDK if this is just me, but, in some cases, the dotted lines are not enough. I become easily lost, and have to "manually" retrace the discussion.

I'd like to suggest for Tildes to use even more colors on these lines, kinda like color-schemes do for Org Mode on Emacs.

I could go even further and suggest a major "Org-Modization" of Tildes: IMHO, Org Mode has nailed this kind of structure. I know it's a bold suggestion, but there it is! ;)

Cheers!

I recently floated this idea in a comment elsewhere, but I wanted to gauge interest in having an unofficial Tildes IRC channel. The purpose of this channel would just be general, casual discussion with other users of Tildes about anything, and particularly those topics which may not warrant an entire thread on the site here. I know that these days IRC isn't the most popular chat option, with things like Discord filling the void. However IRC is appealing in that users can choose between multiple clients, and in that such a Tildes channel would not need many of the features offered by Discord. How would people feel about such a space?

This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

One of the future mechanics for tildes is the trust system (see https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future). People talk about building it but I think we already have a small part of it in place.

Invites are a form of trust.

By allowing inviting the community is trusting you with the ability to add new members. That ability can be taken away or could even result in the banhammer if you persistantly invite assholes. I know that made me cautious with who I've invited to join.

With there being a clear trail of who invited who, bad actors will have to work harder to get a foothold here. I also think that spammers are deterred with having to get an invite for every new account they make.

A simple analogy is that you're having a party and a friend asks if they can bring a friend of theirs you don't know. Your friend says they're cool and you trust your friend due to past experiences with them so along they come. Now if this person ends up kicking your cat, pissing in the fridge, and then trying to burn your house down then the trust you had in your friend is going to diminish. Next time they want to bring a guest the answer is hell no!

We can use the invite system as an initial way to build trust.

What is our policy about posting original contents (e.g. me submitting a blog post I wrote, which I just did a few minutes ago)?

IMO, if it is a personal blog, it should be okay, and not really different from submitting a text topic here. Especially if the blog is not tracking you.

cw: discussion of specific types of bigotry

I used to kind of think that Reddit's bigotry was relegated to the hate subs (TD and friends), and that you'd only find it if you went looking. But wow, Tildes has made me realise that it is EVERYWHERE.

Whenever I take a trip back to Reddit, I'm always blindsided by the fact ordinary threads about unrelated topics are so hateful. For example today I was on an r/movies thread about the new Terminator movie and there's queerphobia, transphobia and sexism all highly upvoted, right near the top of the comments. I guess being immersed in that environment for the last seven years of my life made me a bit desensitised to it, but now I'm horrified everytime.

Reddit is a far worse cesspit than I realised, I'm glad Tildes exists and I hope it keeps getting better and better. The internet needs it.

One thing (amongst many) that always bothered me in my 6+ years of using Reddit was their lax rules about posting clickbait articles and straight up misinformation. In my opinion this was something that contributed to the rise of radical communities and echochambers in the website.

In this post I'll talk about Clickbait, Unreliable studies, and Misinformation. I'll give examples for each one and suggest a way to deal with it.

Clickbait-

Let's start with the most benign one. These days most big websites use clickbait and hyperbole to gain more traffic. It's something that they have to do in order to survive in today's media climate and I sort of understand. But I think that as a community in Tildes we should raise our standards and avoid posting any article that uses clickbait, instead directly link to the source that the article cites.

An example would be: An article titled "Life on Mars found: Scientists claim that they have found traces of life on the red planet".

But when you read the original source it only states that "Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules" and that "These results do not give us any evidence of life,".
(This may be a bad/exaggrated example but I think it gets my point across.)

On Reddit the mods give these kinds of posts a "Misleading" tag. But the damage is already done, most of the users won't read the entire article or even the source, and instead will make comments based on the headline.
I personally think that these kinds of posts should be deleted even if they get a discussion going in the comments.

Unreliable studies-

This is a bit more serious than clickbait. It's something that I see the most in subjects of psychology, social science and futurism.
These are basically articles about studies that conclude a very interesting result, but when you dig a bit you find that the methodologies used to conduct the study were flawed and that the results are inconclusive.

An (real) example would be: "A new study finds that cutting your time on social media to 30 minutes a day reduces your risk of depression and loneliness"
Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-instagram-snapchat-social-media-well-being-2018-11

At first glance this looks legit, I even agree with the results. But lets see how this study was conducted:

In the study, 143 undergraduate students were tested over the course of two semesters.

After three weeks, the students were asked questions to assess their mental health across seven different areas

Basically, their test group was 143 students, The test was only conducted for 6 months, and the results were self-reported.

Clearly, this is junk. This study doesn't show anything reliable. Yet still, it received a lot of upvotes on Reddit and there was a lot of discussion going. I only spotted 2-3 comments (at the bottom) mentioning that the study is unreliable.

Again, I think that posts with studies like this should be deleted regardless if there is a discussion going in the comments or not.

Misinformation-

This is in my opinion the biggest offender and the most dangerous one. It's something that I see in political subreddits (even the big ones like /r/politics and /r/worldnews). It's when an article straight up spreads misinformation both in the headline and in the content in order to incite outrage or paint a narrative.

Note: I will give an example that bashes a "left-leaning" article that is against Trump. I'm only doing this because I only read left-leaning to neutral articles and don't go near anything that is right-leaning. Because of this I don't have any examples of a right-leaning article spreading misinformation (I'm sure that there are a lot).

An example would be this article: "ADMINISTRATION ADMITS BORDER DEPLOYMENT WAS A $200 MILLION ELECTION STUNT"
Link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-troops-border-caravan-stunt

There are two lies here:

1. Trump administration did not admit to anything. (The article's use of the word 'Admit' is supposedly justified with 'They indirectly admitted to it'. I personally think this is a bad excuse.)
2. Most importantly, the 200 million figure is pure speculation. If you go to the older article that this article cites, the 200m figure comes from a speculation that the operation could cost up to 200m if the number of troops sent to the border is 15,000 and they stay there for more than 2 months.
   In reality the number of troops sent was 8,500 and they stayed for only a few days/weeks.

A few days after this article was published it turned out that the operation costed 70 million. Still a big sum, still ridiculous. But it's almost a third of what the article claimed.

The misinformation in this example is fairly benign. But I've seen countless other articles with even more outrageous claims that force a certain narrative. This is done by both sides of the political spectrum.

Not only do I think that we should delete these kinds of posts in Tildes, in my opinion we should black list websites that are frequent offenders of spreading misinformation.
Examples off the top of my head would be: Vanity Fair, Salon.com, of course far right websites like Fox News, Info Wars and Breitbart.
A good rule in my opinion would be: If three posts from a certain website get deleted for spreading misinformation, that website should be blacklisted from Tildes.

In conclusion:
I think we should set some rules against these problems while our community is still in the early stages. Right now I don't see any of these 3 problems on Tildes. But if we don't enforce rules against them, they will start to pop up the more users we gain.

I'll be happy to know your opinions and suggestions on the matter!

#tildes:matrix.org

So there are many, many Matrix clients but the most popular one seems to be Riot which is available on iOS, Android (F-Droid, Play Store), and as a web app which you can join by clicking the link above.

It's similar to Discord in the features it offers, but being open source I thought it might be more in the spirit of Tildes than some of the proprietary alternatives.

That being said I'll be the first to admit Riot is a bit rough around the edges and Matrix seems to be under both heavy load and development. If there's demand for it I should be able to get a dedicated server up since it's an optionally federated service.

Oh, and as a bonus the Matrix chat links with the Tildes IRC channels (#tildes and ##tildes) on freenode, so there's that. (Thanks @tyil)

Don't forget to visit @Kat's wonderful ~tech wiki for links to other options such as Discord and Telegram if them's more your fancy.

Happy wordsing!

Just got invited here and looking at the content of the front page, Tildes is basically a "poor-man's version" of reddit right now. That's OK: it's a new community and I imagine a big part of users are coming here from reddit so they're doing what they're used to doing on social networks, that's only fair.

However, more than that, looking at the groups, they are set up pretty much similarly to reddit's default subs - if not on a 1:1 basis, at least in the general tone: pretty casual, daily life topics, big focus on entertainment media, etc. Maybe again this is, by design catering to the people who are bound to be incoming from reddit, so they can immediately relate to a similar user experience. Good.

So I think it's fair to say that it's proven that Tildes can be "like reddit". It kinda looks like reddit, it kinda feels like reddit. That part of the deal is covered. Now, what can makes us different? I doubt anyone here has no ambition besides being a soft-fork of reddit.

What topics make you tick? What sort of online discussion makes you go "that's the good stuff"? What subjects are you truly passionate about? I'd like to know what the community here is all about, whether the current ~groups represent their interests and passions or not and, hopefully we could come up with some less generic ideas for new ~groups out of the discussion.

EDIT I realize Tildes has a specific policy of "lesser active groups are better than a billion inactive groups" but at this point in time a good selection of groups would really help define the identity and content, not to mention promote quality discussion that actually aligns with people's interests. Hopefully seeing common trends in the replies would allow us to identify a few potential new groups, perhaps.

The only benefit that I can think of is that it gives users a rough idea of how good a post or comment is, which in my opinion, is not a very good thing. It prompts us to judge a post based on how many votes it has, when we should judge the post based on its actual content instead. It doesn't do a very good job as a quality meter either. A post with 12 votes is not that much "better" than a post with 10 votes but seeing those number, it sure does feel like it. On the other hand, is a post at 100k ten times better than a post at 10k? Voting as a way to sort content is fine as the sorting is like a suggestion, the number next to it however makes it feel like a popularity contest.

I know this is a very petty thing to complain about, just want to know if anyone else feels the same way. Personally, I've caught myself getting jealous when my submission "only" have 2 upvotes while also thinking of comments with higher vote count as more trustworthy before actually read them.

I suggest we require decluttering clickbaity titles. The rule can be: if the title leaves you asking "Which X?", include that X in the title; if it asks you "Why X", change it to "X Because Y". It can be a spoiler, but I'd rather have an idea of the content than the suspense, which with this sort of articles is almost never really gratifying. What do you think?