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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "suggestions". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Could we have a different color for exemplary new comments?

      Currently exemplary comments are highlighted with a blue outline, and new comments are highlighted with an orange outline. Is it possible to use a different color, or to interweave the colors when...

      Currently exemplary comments are highlighted with a blue outline, and new comments are highlighted with an orange outline. Is it possible to use a different color, or to interweave the colors when a comment is both new and exemplary?

      The reason for this is that it's impossible to check back into a thread that has a dozen new comments and know if the exemplary ones have already been read or not, or it's impossible to see that a new comment is exemplary (not sure which color takes priority).

      19 votes
    2. Should we be able to view comments/posts where mods/admins are doing their roles and not doing them separately?

      What I mean by this is: Sometimes @Deimos posts something related to his mod/admin work, like saying he will be locking a thread or adding something new, but that's not all he does, he makes...

      What I mean by this is:

      Sometimes @Deimos posts something related to his mod/admin work, like saying he will be locking a thread or adding something new, but that's not all he does, he makes regular topics and comments about regular things, he doesn't have need to use an alt-account for that. I feel that when he's talking or posting about his mod/admin work and talking about anything else that interests him should be able to be viewed separately.

      Thoughts?

      9 votes
    3. Scheduled topics should link to the previous post from the week before

      Would it be possible to add a link to the previous weekly post? For example, https://tildes.net/~comp/rml/what_programming_technical_projects_have_you_been_working_on could link to...

      Would it be possible to add a link to the previous weekly post?

      For example, https://tildes.net/~comp/rml/what_programming_technical_projects_have_you_been_working_on could link to https://tildes.net/~comp/rhk/what_programming_technical_projects_have_you_been_working_on from the week before.

      Bonus points if it can be applied retroactively.

      13 votes
    4. Easily distinguish text topics from link topics?

      So currently as far as I know the only way to tell the difference between a link or text topic is by the username section if it’s a name it’s a text and if it has a website name/URL it’s a link,...

      So currently as far as I know the only way to tell the difference between a link or text topic is by the username section if it’s a name it’s a text and if it has a website name/URL it’s a link,

      When I’m slowly browsing it isn’t too hard to distinguish them but sometimes if I’m flicking past quick “as I often do” it can be nearly impossible to tell them apart without stopping and looking an each individual topic, could we not make them a different colour or maybe add the word link somewhere just so it’s easier on the eyes?.

      11 votes
    5. Post estimated reading time next to the article/post length

      Basically, convert Article: 5234 words to Article: 5234 words, 23 minutes. Not much to explain, I'm lazy and I don't like to do math just to see how much time it would take me to read an article,...

      Basically, convert Article: 5234 words to Article: 5234 words, 23 minutes.

      Not much to explain, I'm lazy and I don't like to do math just to see how much time it would take me to read an article, it would be great to have an estimate similar to how Medium does it. It doesn't have to be as precise, a rough estimate would do the job, for my example I divided the number of words by the average WPM for the english language (228±30 according to Wikipedia).

      Additionally, a setting can be added to set a personal reading speed.

      16 votes
    6. I’d like to suggest avoiding long excerpts

      I’d like to suggest the practice of posting smaller excerpts. Long excerpts are less likely to be read and resemble articles in themselves. Their comprehensiveness may render them irrelevant, and...

      I’d like to suggest the practice of posting smaller excerpts. Long excerpts are less likely to be read and resemble articles in themselves.

      Their comprehensiveness may render them irrelevant, and demotivate readers from going to the source before commenting.

      IMHO an excerpt should generally have no more than two paragraphs, with exceptions for long reads (3500 words+).

      For reference (and out of personal choice), 750 characters may be an ideal max, give or take.

      29 votes
    7. Should we have a separate meta tag group for stuff that transcend Tildes groups and any given subject?

      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...

      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.

      12 votes
    8. Can we have an option to collapse all the threads too?

      Meant primarily for long threads (35+ comments) Mainly because sometimes we just want to get to the reply box after reading through a long comment section and checking several times over now that...

      Meant primarily for long threads (35+ comments)

      Mainly because sometimes we just want to get to the reply box after reading through a long comment section and checking several times over now that highlighting new comments is a default feature and the fastest way to do that is closing a bunch of threads or tapping the screen a few times/scrolling.

      Admittedly it's kinda silly but being able to collapse all the threads and get straight to the reply box seems like a pretty good QoL feature.

      7 votes
    9. A way to click through to threads after marking notifications read

      I have a UX pain point: From the notifications / new comments (replies) page, if I mark all notifications as read, all the nice, handy links to the threads go poof on the page refresh. So now, I...

      I have a UX pain point: From the notifications / new comments (replies) page, if I mark all notifications as read, all the nice, handy links to the threads go poof on the page refresh. So now, I have to manually hunt down all/any of them to return to the OPs and revisit the broader discussions.

      Can we make the "mark all read" link do its job without clearing the page? I realize this will probably make things more complicated (a notif that is already seen/read is being displayed on the "unread notifs" page, so how will that work, UI- and UX-wise), but... this is just a pain point that I hit again and again. I thought I could tolerate it (which is why I haven't said anything till now), but it's an issue for me nearly every single time.

      10 votes
    10. Maybe it’s too easy to delete comments on mobile

      In numerous occasions I accidentally deleted comments on mobile. Sometimes I can use navigation history to restore them but not always. This can be rather frustrating. Maybe there should be some...

      In numerous occasions I accidentally deleted comments on mobile. Sometimes I can use navigation history to restore them but not always. This can be rather frustrating. Maybe there should be some extra confirmation that’s not easy to accidentally click in order to delete stuff on mobile

      14 votes
    11. User level preference to black-list posts from domains

      My question is would it be possible to have a user-level preference to not show posts which link to a certain domain? I want to clarify, this would only affect the user (based on their...

      My question is would it be possible to have a user-level preference to not show posts which link to a certain domain?
      I want to clarify, this would only affect the user (based on their preferences) and what they see on tildes.

      Asking this question after seeing a bunch of posts from intlnewsdesk.org being posted here, and I am not able to find much about this site and would prefer not to provide more traffic to this site. (Seems like the user posting this signed up a day ago and pretty much has posted only articles to the above mentioned site).

      13 votes
    12. The case against ~news

      The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news. /r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be...

      The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news.

      /r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be better served by eliminating ~news entirely and replacing it with a news tag with a date property, which would allow for nice chronological filtering for catching up on news stories, especially if the article date could be scraped somehow. Miss a week of news? Search the tag with a date range, get all news stories for last week, perhaps with a minimum comment threshold to see what sparked discussion.

      I think ~gov (or politics) would be needed as a replacement, as it's a major driver of most news stories, but there's so much more to politics than just news, and those discussions don't exactly fit anywhere nicely at the moment, esp if it's a random blog post relating to recent events in the news. Almost every other group serves as a nice catch-all for most other common news categories.

      The only issue I would see would be when ~gov would overlap with the other categories, which would likely happen a lot..but that happens with the current ~news too. I think that could be further mitigated by having a sort of x-post system blurring the lines of tags and groups even more, where ~gov would take precedence but posts would then also appear in the tagged groups for users not following governance otherwise.

      That's actually a foundation of my more insane idea of completely eliminating traditional groups by letting people build their own groups in the form of prioritized tags, but that's another post for another time.

      17 votes
    13. ~personal should be a thing

      I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective. We could also...

      I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.

      We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.

      Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.

      24 votes
    14. Should we consolidate all the George Floyd protest threads into a daily megapost/thread like we did when COVID began spreading?

      The main advantage of this is that updates can be organized and followed daily like on the COVID threads (which is especially useful if you don't live in the US and can't keep track of what's...

      The main advantage of this is that updates can be organized and followed daily like on the COVID threads (which is especially useful if you don't live in the US and can't keep track of what's going on) and the main disadvantage is that unlike COVID, we have no idea if this will go on long enough or be dynamic enough to truly merit that. (Although in @dubteedub's COVID post he doesn't discount doing updates every 3 days, which we could do although that conflicts with 7-day weeks)

      12 votes
    15. New topics request

      I’m sorry if this isn’t the correct avenue or if I have missed a previous post about this but I was wondering how new topics could be requested. I think a DIY topic would be great, as a woodworker...

      I’m sorry if this isn’t the correct avenue or if I have missed a previous post about this but I was wondering how new topics could be requested. I think a DIY topic would be great, as a woodworker I think something more specific to woodworking would be great but with the current size of the user base a more broad topic might be better suited.

      4 votes
    16. The case for an "Escalation" label for political threads

      This is a follow up to the thread from a few days ago, and specifically my comment in that thread regarding the use of a "Escalation" label. As many users identified in that topic, political...

      This is a follow up to the thread from a few days ago, and specifically my comment in that thread regarding the use of a "Escalation" label.

      As many users identified in that topic, political discussion on Tildes has the potential to become very heated, very quickly, and often the standards of discussion on these topics is below what we expect elsewhere on Tildes. In that thread, many suggestions were offered in order to remedy the situation, including banning overt political content entirely, more liberal moderation by @Deimos, more liberal usage by the community of labels, addition of new labels, and more. All of these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, but I want to talk about the one I believe would be the most effective and least disruptive to the site as is: addition of new labels.

      Right now, there are two main tags that might be used on a comment that is seen as falling short of Tildes's standards: noise and malice. Users seem to have some variation in how they interpret how each tag should be used, but it seems like there is at least some agreement on the 'noise' tag being used for comments that are clearly low effort. Users seem to have more hesitation to use the 'Malice' tag, however. While it is sometimes clear when a comment is hostile or malicious, this is not always the case. Argumentative is not always hostile, and sometimes topics are naturally contentious. One takeaway from that thread (for me) is that labeling something as malice confers a judgement on intent, and users are not always comfortable doing this as it can be difficult to tell if someone truly meant to be malicious. But in political threads, the intent matters less than the effect a comment has in a discussion. Someone can not be acting maliciously, but still be clearly making the situation worse. This is the point of an 'Escalation' label.

      An "Escalation" label should be applied to comments that have made the situation worse.

      Furthermore, an "Escalation" label would not only affect the sorting of a comment or thread, but has the potential to halt the discussion if there is too much escalation in a short amount of time. Here is what I envision:

      Define the heat of a comment (as in, "ohhh this conversation is getting heated") as follows:

      H = k*n ∑ Ni / di

      where k is a tuning constant, n is the number of escalation tags given to the comment in question, and the sum ranges over the comment's direct ancestors and descendants in the thread with Ni being the number of "Escalation" labels given to the other comment and di is the distance from the current comment to that other comment. Here is an example thread:

      .
      ├── A
      ├── C0
      │   └── C1 (N=1)
      │      └── C2 (N=0)
      │          └── C3 (N=2)
      │               └── C4 (N=1)
      └── B0
          └── B1
      

      The heat of comment C3 would then be

      H = k*2 (1/2 + 1) = 3k

      Finally, define the heat H(T) of a thread T to be the sum of the heats of its comments. My proposal is that if the heat of a given thread surpasses some threshold value Hc, replies are locked in that thread only. This essentially shuts down extremely heated conversations before they get out of control and cause an entire topic to be locked.

      The above definition can obviously be modified, but it has a few good properties that I think should be retained.

      1. It takes into account the relative positions of comments. A thread that is 20 comments long that has a comment with 1 "Escalation" at the beginning, midpoint, and end is probably a better and more controlled situation than a thread with 3 "Escalation" labels in a row.
      2. One extremely heated comment (n is large) that generates many okay or slightly heated replies (n~1) is oftentimes just as bad as many comments that each escalate a bit (a long chain of comments, each with n~1).
      3. It considers a the whole thread as opposed to on a comment by comment basis. If there is only one person in a thread posting heated comments, even if the replies are measured and reasonable, there is a good chance that thread is not producing a worthwhile discussion. If that one problem user stays problematic too long, eventually the heat of the thread will surpass the threshold and the chain will be locked.

      I am sure there are disadvantages that I am not thinking of right now, but I truly think a system like this could be beneficial if implemented and used by Tildes. Furthermore, if two people are genuinely interested in the discussion and want it to continue, it is in their interest to avoid posting comments that get generate a high heat score so that the thread doesn't become locked. If they are not interested and keep escalating anyway, that conversation probably shouldn't continue.

      I am interested in your thoughts on this idea. However, I don't intend for this topic to become a repeat of many of the suggestions and comments in the thread linked at the beginning - I don't mean to reignite that discussion.

      31 votes
    17. Open Tildes day?

      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...

      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?

      17 votes
    18. Is there any consistent definition for what a long read is?

      This article I posted has been marked as a long read with 2.7k words but this other article I posted has 4.7k words and hasn't been marked as such so what gives? We should probably also consider a...

      This article I posted has been marked as a long read with 2.7k words but this other article I posted has 4.7k words and hasn't been marked as such so what gives?

      We should probably also consider a 'medium read' and apply some of these standards to videos as well.

      10 votes
    19. "Watching" a comment in a thread

      I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a...

      I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

      10 votes
    20. Don't record topic history by submitters within the first 5 minutes of posting?

      Quick one for the Gitlab: Just how comment submitters get a few minutes of breathing room to make adjustments and edits to their comment before an indication the comment has been edited appears,...

      Quick one for the Gitlab:

      Just how comment submitters get a few minutes of breathing room to make adjustments and edits to their comment before an indication the comment has been edited appears, it'd be nice if the topic history which records title adjustments/tag changes/tilde moves doesn't record history by submitters just after posting?

      Usually, I'll forget to add a tag or two, or decide the title can be appropriately clarified further within a minute or two of submitting. Today I made a particularly egregious mistake which is now recorded for all time (and further documented here!) by submitting that post to ~tildes initially!

      Usually, edits by the post submitter within the first few minutes aren't of particular consequence, so recording them is a bit much, in my view. This would generally dovetail well with the notion that Tildes discards information if it isn't needed. Thoughts?

      9 votes
    21. Feature suggestion: One-to-many user thread format

      This may seem like I'm rambling but, please bare with me, I think I have some point(s) to make. I've been trying to locate a common ancestor image to the album cover of Gnarls Barkley's single...

      This may seem like I'm rambling but, please bare with me, I think I have some point(s) to make.

      • I've been trying to locate a common ancestor image to the album cover of Gnarls Barkley's single Crazy and the banner of an interesting talk titled Imagination and it's resistance to chance. I think the resemblance is sufficient to suggest one an ancestor exists and it's not just a crazy coincidence. Can anyone help identify it?

      • The same academic conference linked above hosts a fascinating introduction to Intensionality, Invariance, and Univalence. It captures some of the most exciting mathematics going on at the moment. Presumably I should be posting this in ~science tagged as mathematics. Is there some limit at which particular tags become popular enough to warrant their own subtilde? Are there queries users can run to determine tag counts? These questions were prompted by the slight irritating thought of classifying mathematics under science.

      • People could respond to many different parts of this thread since I've written so much. However, the points are slightly related, at least in how I present them. If I were to split them up into separate posts, not only would it add to the noise, each point would lose whatever relation they had. So, I wonder if, much like r/IAMA, could there be a better format for conversations where many users are speaking to a particular individual? An expert or celebrity perhaps. Trying to track all the replies of the main user was always a hassle in those IAMA threads.

      If there's interest in such an extension to tildes, I'd like to offer my help in implementing it. That's my main point really and why I posted here.

      7 votes
    22. Simplified markdown to </avoid> typing <this> type of text?

      I'm complaining mainly because <these> 2 keys tend to be in the symbols tab on a mobile keyboard and are really annoying to keep going back from and to while making something like a <details> box....

      I'm complaining mainly because <these> 2 keys tend to be in the symbols tab on a mobile keyboard and are really annoying to keep going back from and to while making something like a <details> box.

      Some replacements I imagine (0 programming knowledge) could be:

      >small text here< ( for > to not make quotations at the beginning you could maybe put some unrelated character like ) or ] before it)

      ^superscripted text here/ (or you could just use parentheses to delineate which text is formatted like on reddit and probably all normal places)

      _subscripted text here_ (admittedly I know this messes with underscore being equal to asterisks in formatting, but I don't know which key you could use avoid this that still is intuitive)

      
      {Details
      [Summary text here]
      
      Details text here}
      
      

      Replace the <details> prompt with { and </details> with } and presumably everything should work, right? (The brackets can have the summary functionality limited to within the details box because they're encased within the curly brackets? Admittedly I don't really know.)

      7 votes
    23. An idea on how to allow anonymous posts/comments without ruining Tildes

      @deimos has expressed before his dislike for alt-accounts, a position I happen to share. Alt-accounts makes users less accountable and more prone to misbehavior. At the same time, deeply personal...

      @deimos has expressed before his dislike for alt-accounts, a position I happen to share. Alt-accounts makes users less accountable and more prone to misbehavior.

      At the same time, deeply personal threads frequently require anonymity to be of any value.

      To avoid alt-accounts altogether, I propose an anonymity with caveats:

      1. Only accounts older than 60 days can comment and create threads anonymously.
      2. Mods and admins can take action against the account that posted anonymously just like with any account
      3. For the most part, the identity of the poster will remain a secret even from mods and admins.
      4. For practical reasons, in the case of banning a user from the entire website, the identity of the user would have to be revealed to the admin that banned him/her. But that will only happen after the action is taken. This seems like a bad idea.

      EDIT: PLUS FEATURES

      1. The creator of the thread must tick a box to allow anonymous posts (they are opt-in).
      2. Moderators and admins have the power of disabling this permission if deemed necessary.
      30 votes
    24. Should there be a way to turn off replies for a comment?

      One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional? For example, for someone...

      One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
      For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
      Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
      Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?

      17 votes
    25. Suggestion: Automatically link to video timestamps in comments in posts where the topic type is a video/song (on supported platforms)

      There are three platforms that I'm aware of that are included in the Tildes SiteInfo dictionary—YouTube, Vimeo, & SoundCloud—that support linking to specific parts of a media resource via...

      There are three platforms that I'm aware of that are included in the Tildes SiteInfo dictionary—YouTube, Vimeo, & SoundCloud—that support linking to specific parts of a media resource via timestamps. This is useful to reference a particular portion of the video/song during discussion.

      It should probably be possible to automatically apply hyperlinks to timestamps in the video (link this) when someone posts a comment with a timestamp-like string inside of it. This would make it a bit easier to share and link to specific portions of what's being shared in the main topic.

      This seems like a decent value-add feature for Tildes. Whether it's a good idea to directly edit the comment string, I'm not so sure. I'd probably be in favour of implementing either a post-markdown middleware that added an icon next to the timestamp, kind of like how external links on some sites are suffixed with an icon that indicates the resource is not on the current domain.

      10 votes
    26. Do you think a ~community would be helpful?

      I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be...

      I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.

      2 votes
    27. Limit the number of posts from a particular site?

      Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and...

      Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and there are 5 or 10 posts that all link to different pages on the same site. I think this would help increase the amount of variety in the stories that are showing and make the site more interesting to users.

      9 votes
    28. An active user count

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where...

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

      19 votes
    29. Username search?

      Nearly every time most of us want to mention someone, we need to find a post they commented in or posted, which will get increasingly harder over time, and especially so for less active users.

      12 votes
    30. Can there be a 'new comments only' sort for people who toggled 'mark new comments' on?

      As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to...

      As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to scroll down the homepage anxiously looking for new comments on the topics I like.

      8 votes
    31. Ability to hide posts that link to specific websites

      I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So...

      I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So I'd like the option to just not see any link to youtube.com or vimeo.com. Maybe I think all content posted to example.com is inflammatory click-bait, so I just want to ignore those links, too.

      Would that be possible?

      11 votes
    32. Some level of autotagging?

      (Emphasis on Some.) Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long...

      (Emphasis on Some.)

      Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long reads/watches,individual blogs and YouTube channels?) It could serve as a QoL feature and save some taggers and forgetful posters some time (I almost always forget to tag my videos accordingly and they're only tagged because someone remembers to, which is way too menial a tag to still need be added by humans.)

      11 votes
    33. Feature request: Just like with votes, disable labels after vote retention period expires

      I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect...

      I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect ordering of comments even in old topics, which isn't something one would expect to happen. This is potentially confusing, as newcomers to a topic can affect comments even years after.

      16 votes
    34. Tildes and multi-dimensional weighted votes

      hello, I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a...

      hello,

      I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a suggestion to make. I've originally posted this on another website, but I thought that it could also be fruitful to discuss this here, seeing that efforts have already been made in that direction (similar features have even already been implemented).

      Looking forward to reading you!

      I was wondering whether Aether should support downvotes or not, seeing that they are often misused on other discussion platforms to suppress content that is disliked rather than non-contributory or low-quality. People may then not view content that was heavily downvoted, even though it may have been high-quality.

      Should we rather use some other mechanism to serve that function? If so, what would it be?

      Personally, I'd suggest that we experiment with two-dimensional weighted voting.

      In a word, it would allow users to express both whether they agree or disagree with (alternatively, like or dislike) a piece of content (and how strongly so) and whether they think that that piece of content is high-quality or low-quality (and how strongly so).

      In practice, it could look like this (for users): upon clicking on the voting icon, a square with two scaled axes would appear. One for the quality of content, the other for the level of (dis)agreeance. A user, who had for instance found a piece of content to be very high-quality, but who somewhat disagreed with it, could then express that opinion by click and dragging right to the top of the square, but somewhat left of its center.

      That simple mechanism would therefore allow us to distinguish between those two criteria and better capture the intention behind a vote, and help alleviate the issue of seeing deeply unpopular content being buried despite its high quality. It would also allow users to express how strongly they feel about a piece of content by letting them adjust the weight of their vote. Plus, it wouldn't be too cumbersome to use (in my opinion).

      (Voting strongly should be slightly inconvenient or cumbersome to do, so as to deter users from voting strongly every time, thereby rendering strong votes meaningless. In practice, that could mean having to move one's mouse only a little for a soft vote, but more and more as the vote gains more weight.
      Axes should also be sticky, so as to make it easy to vote with respect to one criterion only (we shouldn't need to try and aim precisely).)

      We could also put in place some additional mechanism to let users rate content with regard to other criteria (how informative it is, or impressive, exciting, funny, etc.). I do not expect users to rate all the content they read, but allowing them to do so could still be useful. They may still bother to do it for content they find especially informative, impressive, etc., and that would then allow other users to sort content with regard to one or several of these criteria and find content tailored to their interests.

      (We could then also display for any piece of content a chart (that could look like this) showing how it was rated with regard to all these criteria. That's not really important, but I find that cool.

      We could also plot the number of votes as a function of vote strength, find the average vote strength and so on... That would also be cool, and interesting.)

      What do you think?

      24 votes
    35. Notify people who replied to a post/comment when it's edited?

      Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media)...

      Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media) or source their claims, or detail it after finishing the main body. Admittedly we might want to let the user choose whether their edit is worth notifying to all who replied for the sake of stuff like typos though.

      9 votes
    36. Better support for long-running topics?

      I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread...

      I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread out among a lot of different topics.

      It seems like it might be nicer if in the games group, there were one topic for each game? Similarly for movies or books, or creative projects. This is how we did things on the Well, though there was also a "movies that didn't get their own topic" topic. But it seems like that was a limitation of a system that didn't deal well with having lots of topics in a group.

      To support this well, we'd need to make coming back to long-running topics more pleasant to read somehow. With a linear conversation the software can start you off wherever you left off. I'm not sure what's best for threaded conversation?

      In short, maybe there should be a way to do things more like forum software and less like Hacker News or Reddit? Or should we just try it out without changing the software?

      11 votes
    37. Feature Idea: Tildes Playlist - Would it be useful to have some sort of automated, easy to use, media categorization?

      My use case: I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be...

      My use case:
      I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.

      Possible other use case:
      Accessibility?

      I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?

      What do you all think, is this useful?

      From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?

      edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.

      13 votes