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?

Other than Exemplary, it might be useful for the ability to self label a comment. While in some sense it might be desirable for anyone posting a comment that falls under such a category, and is self aware, to simply refrain from posting, some of the boundaries for labels such as joke and off-topic can be rather fuzzy.

I have a nice video about butterflies to post. It's not really ~enviro material because although there is a little bit of mention of climate crisis I want to post it mostly because "aren't butterflies awesome look at these awesome butterflies and how cool they are"

Sure it could go in ~misc but it seems odd there's a group for ~space and not one for down here on ~earth. I prefer ~earth to ~nature because I think there's human earth stuff which is cool too (I know, I know, humans are part of nature but you know what I mean). Also because it balances with ~space.

Anyway, was just a thought. Not going to lose sleep over it.

Additionally, in the sidebar, putting group descriptions in the title attribute might be useful - so I don't have to click into each group to see what it's criteria is when I'm trying to find where to post something non-obvious.

Right now when I click user menu I see this:

User menu
Profile
Your posts
Your bookmarks
Your votes
Your ignored topics

I think it would easier to if we could differentiate between posts we made on other's submissions and our own submissions. Don't know if this is easy to implement, but for me at least, it would make searching through my stuff here way easier.

I am wondering if this could be implemented as a 2FA method on Tildes. Although not super mainstream, I think it is the gold standard for account security. Is there anyone else interested in this option?

Sometimes I write an introduction to an article and add relevant tags, and then discover it is a repost when I hit post. I know I should use the search function, but since there's an automatic anti respost feature already, could it maybe be made available sooner? Maybe others would find this useful as well. Thanks!

This is an idea I've had for awhile, I wanted to have it written down somewhere for future reference. This would likely be a substantial undertaking, but I haven't seen much discussion on the concept.

What if Tildes was able to have internal tildes? We would be able to 'start a tildes group' and have all~group.tag discussions under it. You could invite members to your ~group, and only those members could vote/comment/see on the internal group that they are part of.

This would make it so we can grow tildes, keep it small, and have personal obsessions and ideas. For example, I run a few discords that are part of nascent old/antique ideologies and philosophies, and we have been looking to move off of Discord (horrible for conversations and debates). I realize we could start our own forum or Tildes server, but the idea of tilde branches would be interesting to see play out in practice. I'm sure this has already been brought up, and will likely never happen, but I would love thoughts on the matter if you have them. This would likely be a large undertaking and I haven't really peeked at Tildes source since launch, so I'm not sure how the structure is these days.

So I'm on Tildes less often these days so I'm not keeping up with certain things as much as I used to. In particular, I really like the recurring "What games are you playing" topics but I'm often not noticing them in my skimming of the front page, especially if I haven't checked in in a day or two and it's not near the top.

So what if there was a feature, specifically for recurring topics, to subscribe to them where it gives me a "New Instance of Weekly Topic" notification in the same was as the "New Comment Reply" notification? It's probably not useful since we basically just have one recurring topic right now. But I'd honestly like to see more of these recurring topics, especially a "What are you listening to right now" one and even ones that automatically reoccur for TV shows (Episode 1, Episode 2, etc.) rather than an open thread.

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.

Sorry if this is dumb, I just woke up and had this idea randomly. What would happen if the site had a built-in mechanic for correction spelling mistakes. It could be opt-in (or opt-out?) if you don't want anyone to bother you. This would allow other people that notice them to ping a comment author privately with perhaps a short message explanation.

Not everyone has English as their first language which is why I think it could be valuable. If the feature is not built into the site, correcting someone would be seen as a negative experience (I think) both in public or private messages.

It would be up to the comment author to edit their comment. (Or perhaps a way to accept the changes would be nice?)

Thoughts? Is this a thing anywhere else?

Edit: I put feature request in the title, but this is more of a discussion of the idea in general. I don't expect this to become a thing, but I feel like it's interesting to think about.

So this is a very simple question. There's a free talk thread for everyone to talk about the TV shows they have watched in the preceding week. Every once in a while we use that thread to talk about movies (I did that just now. My justification is that I watched the movies on my television), but the thread asks specifically for TV shows so it feels kinda weird. So maybe we should have a recurring thread for movies? If not, I'd suggest changing the TV thread to make it explicitly welcoming to discussions about movies (in that case, maybe it would be ideal to make the thread appear both in ~tv and in ~movies? I don't think that is technically possible right now, but I leave the suggestion).

When I get comment reply notifications, I normally prefer to read them in context of my own reply, and potentially other replies. However when I do this, the notification doesn't go away on its own, so I have to return to the page to click "mark as read".

I know I can also mark the notification as read by voting on or replying to the reply, but I often don't do that. Yet I always seem to want to view the comment in its context, which requires me to leave the notifications page. In this specific use case there is no convenient way to mark the notification as read without going back.

To avoid the extra page load, I would like the notification being marked as read when the link to it is opened, to be an option. (Actually, I'd like it to be the default behaviour, but since the current default behaviour is to not mark comments as read until an explicit action is taken on them, I suppose I'm in the minority. An option is just fine.)

Malice implies intent to break the rules (or just the general conduct of the community). On one end, sometimes a user gets caught up in the heat of the argument and writes something they know they shouldn't. On the other end, sometimes a comment isn't particularly inflammatory at all but you can feel from the content that its author was in a place of of hurt, or anger. You can either label them as Malice and let the moderators sort out who are the real trouble makers and who just need some help, or you can reply to them in a helpful manner and possibly have a side conversation regarding their wellbeing.

I think it'd be a nice if there's a label to tell the moderators that "I think this user needs some talking to", for usage other than "I think this user needs a warning". More users are probably comfortable with clicking a label than putting themselves out there in a conversation about mental health, some may also not want to derail the discussion. Mental wellbeing and rule enforcement are 2 different skills with 2 different mindsets so having 2 different mod teams for each function probably also help.

This suggestion was partly inspired by, but not limited to, this comment by kfwyre. I feel that most social media's features (Tildes included with the way labels are currently) are designed to be content-centric and not much in the way of taking care of the wellbeing of their members, maybe we can improve.

Sometimes a comment thread is very very toxic/controversial and I would like to avoid getting sucked into it. Just because my decision-making is much better at 2pm than it is at 2am. I understand I can and should exercise self-control, and I'm working on it, I assure you! In the meantime, if at all possible, it would be nice to remove certain comments from my view, along with its children. Thanks!

Sometimes Tildes users give people healthcare advice. Sometimes that advice disagrees with the advice already given by a qualified registered healthcare professional. That might be okay if the tildes advice was compliant with national guidance, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's bad, dangerous, advice.

Should Tildes have rules about this?

I was trying to add andré bazin as a tag on an article about the film theorist André Bazin, but the box became red and prevented me from submiting. So I had to use the incorrect andre bazin.

I suppose there's a very rational technical reason for not using accentuation on tags -- even so, I believe it would be useful to suport those characters, since many languages use them.

I know chat about cryptocurrency hasn't been extremely popular here in the past, but I am curious if there is enough interest now to make a group for it. I am looking for a place to discuss it from an enthusiast's perspective because Reddit is just getting a little too crazy for me.

The last group request thread was last year. With all the meta-chat lately it might be time for a new one, and maybe expand a bit more in terms of site organization in general.

I mainly want to take this opportunity to make the recent meta feedback a bit more actionable: Which current problems can be solved via site mechanics? Will leave some thoughts in the comments.

I constantly hit the "Enter" key in the middle of writing a comment, usually when moving my hand over to my mouse. To avoid this, I'd love it if there were an option in settings to require a confirmation before any comments are actually submitted. It shouldn't be required, but it would be helpful for me personally.

It would be nice if there was an extra box that allows you to add info that is private to the people on tildes. For example I would like to share creds to a game account, but I only want people on tildes to get that info, not the public who aren't users and just visit.

I have some music links I was thinking of posting. However, I didn't want to flood ~music with 10 new links at once. It can make a category look like it has really homogenous content to newcomers when a single poster has posted a bunch of links at once. What I'd like to do is post one per day for the next several days. But I don't want to potentially forget one day because I got a little busy, or whatever. Would it be useful to be able to create a topic but set it to not post until a particular day or time?

I don't think I saw a feature like this in the gitLab, apologies if it's already in the works or been suggested.

The gist of it would be to have an @/help ping so if someone needs an edit to a title or tags or something, they can use that and it'd flag the topic or somehow show those who have the permissions that this thread needs attention. This might be helpful for users (like moi) who might not know the people who CAN do this already off the top of their head, beyond Deimos.

Let me know your thoughts or if this could be a useful feature for anyone else.

I know we have talked about it to death, and even run experiments on the mechanism, but I think it's worth re-evaluating the idea of voting on comments.

I know that voting provides value to Tildes as a social platform; it acts almost like a social currency; you know that if you have a lot of votes, people appreciate what you have to say. That provides incentive for people to write more comments and participate with the community.

What I and others have come to realize is that votes also have negative effects on our community. Here's a short list of negative effects:

1. Voting is addictive. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the process of clicking on our usernames to see how many votes our last few comments have gathered. We do this because it's a dopamine hit; they act like tiny digital love letters telling us how awesome we are.

2. Voting is a measurement of popularity. Those love letters aren't actually how good you are, they measure how popular your ideas are. In other words, votes encourage group-think and creates an echo chamber that will prevent you from taking competing ideas seriously.

3. Because of number 2, we alienate people with other ideas and reduce the richness and quality of discussion on this platform.

4. Also as a result of number 2, the information that gets put into those popular threads becomes the de facto truth - weather or not it's actually true. This can prevent us from seeing the "bigger picture" or from understanding problems others might have with how we think.

5. The end result of all of these effects is that we will slowly become more and more extreme and insular as time progresses. We essentially become the same as the people stuck in conservative media prisons that we tend to look down on.

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth. I know we probably have a few conservatives that are lurking around, but I think that they are largely disincentivized to contribute because they don't get the same kind of votes left-leaning comments do.

With that being said, I would like to hear back from everyone what they think we should do about voting. Should we go back to hiding vote totals again? Should we get rid of them entirely? Or maybe you think things are good as they are? Please let us know your reasoning.

I have an idea for Tildes.
You can give people the option to promote their own posts ,using either real money or cryptocurrency, so their posts can appear on the homepage, they get exposure and they support Tildes whilst doing it! Other people can also tip posts, both Tildes and the OP get a share of the revenue! The money Tildes makes from this will be able to support the site!

Please add this. I don't want annoying Google ads.

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?

When a comment is collapsed, either through tags or already being read, it shows a one line preview of the comment. This preview skips any quotes in the comment. This works perfectly when quotes are used to reference a part of the comment they are replying to. But if the comment includes only a quote, the preview line is just blank. This makes it look like an error. I think that, if a comment has only a quote, it should do something like this:

Quote

Or

Quote: This is the quote text…

Just noticed that the contents of expandable comments are automatically shown in the one-line summary when comments are collapsed; see here. Considering we often use them for spoiler comments, maybe this warrants changing this behavior? Or at the least it adds to the case for implementing dedicated spoiler tags within comments.

Basically the title. I'm not going to navel-gaze too much here because it's not that much of a complex problem.

Currently, as it stands, if a submission is older than x days (where x may be 3, but I'm not sure), new comments in that submission will no longer cause Tildes to bump the thread to the top of the list in activity view. Additionally, after 2 weeks, a note will be appended to the comment posting view indicating community standards around commenting on older threads.

The scenario I'm seeking to solve is where one submission covers an event of some duration longer than a few days—where Tildes users feel repeated or recurring submissions are not warranted. My example is this thread about a YouTube video series that was released in three parts, but all discussion has been placed in that submission, presumably because no one has felt that duplicating a post for each new part of the series is worthwhile.

Perhaps if a certain proportion of comments occur within a timeframe, after the submission has been aged out of the sliding window where new comments cause a bump in activity, a bump should still be allowed, but should require more than 1 comment to trigger said bump?

There's some fairly good discussion in that thread that feels wholesome enough that it could be exposed again to the wider Tildes community—because right now everyone interested in that thread is operating under the implicit assumption that to read and participate about this topic, they have to remember to go back to thread y.

I made a new bio recently and here been tweaking it for a while and hit the 2000 character cap and messed with some of the formatting and wording for it to fit in.

Thing is, you don't read markdown formatting. My bio has quite a bit of formatting and the text with the formatting is ~1960 characters, but the text you read is only ~885 characters (according to word counter), or less than half that. I feel like that's not how it should work.

In text posts, like this one,, we can see the name of user who created it. But if it is a link post then it shows site name in it's place. To see who created that post we have to open the comments page. Site name can be moved to article details line where the date of publishing and word count is. That way both info can be shown.

Reason. Both information is shown at same place currently 1. which can confuse new users. for example. Notice after four times mentioning site name there is a username. 2. both can't be shown together.

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?

Tildes should support Latex using MathJax, or something similar. Having a standard implementation would also act as an easy way to use advanced formatting, while extensions beyond the _sub and ^sup tags are being made. It would greatly increase the ease of using ~math (actually ~science). Though I could be wrong, it doesn't look like $$\LaTeX$$, $$x^2$$ $\int_{x=0}^p e^{-x^2}dx$ is rendering.

Edit: Katex (not my MathJax recommendation) was a good suggestion, using a partial font download and server side html/css generation.

Edit: Also, to be clear, this is not a must-have-now feature (though that would be nice), but I would like to see support for this in the future, as latex is almost universal in the mathematical sciences.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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?.

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.

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.