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.

As a new member I am really hesitant to post this but I recently posted an article to ~news that was related to lgbt issues and it was moved to ~lgbt. I fully support a sub section devoted to lgbt but news should be news regardless.

Just because it has an lgbt angle does not mean it should be moved. I'm not even lgbt myself but I find it sort of hurtful that a news article was pushed off ~news. So I ask this, and once again not trying to make waves. But why?

Edit: I would love to be a member of this community as I am personally seeking a less asshole filled reddit alternative. But pushing a news article to another ~ just because it relates a bit more to them shouldn't be a thing. If you are tolerant it relates to us all. And yes I know I posted it in ~news because I was trying to participate and I'm a news junky.

Sorry.

Edit 2: This was a sad sorry way to come in to this community. I apologize.

🤷🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️🤷🏻🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏼🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏽🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏾🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♂️🤷🏿🤷🏿‍♀️🤷🏿‍♂️

The person shrugging emoji works fine in topic titles, topic text, and comments, including the skin tone versions.

However, the gendered versions of the emoji, with or without skin tone, do not work in topic titles. They do work in topic text and comments though.

As far as I can tell, this is because Tildes strips the zero width joiner character from topic titles automatically, breaking emojis that rely on it.

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 know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

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.

TL;DR: I did not know each individual group had wikis and I find them pretty great (the LGBT and tech ones in particular). Do they get updated regularly, are they searchable via the site-wide search, and who can contribute to them exactly?

I was looking through the "note-taking" and "productivity" tags for recommendations on a new note-taking app when I came across the extension resources wiki article in "Tech". It hasn't been updated recently but it made me realize one of the reasons why I find places like reddit useful is that the "Pinned FAQs", "Beginner Guides to <Hobby>", and "Megaposts" on reddit are an excellent source of (for lack of a better term) "peer-reviewed" recommendations and are often the catalyst for fun discussions.

I have, through my time here on tildes, discovered so many excellent recommendations even by just using the search bar and browsing threads - to the point that if say, a reddit and tildes post give me conflicting recommendations, I would trust the tildes post 9 out of 10 times. The climate of posts here are less inflammatory and the discussion on pros/cons are more calm, friendly, and thought through. I admit they have impacted my views on a bunch of things (not least of which is trying firefox as my main browser).

Are resource dumps like that something that the community here find viable in general? Are there plans for updating their implementation to be more easily accessible or is it too far removed from the discussion-based fluidity of the site? I understand that there are other places online to find information, but rarely do I find it at this level of transparency of bias and (on average) free of any bloat.

I guess I'll end this little thought stream with a thank you for all the people who post here and a curiosity for the future discussions to come. I've lurked a lot and learned a lot.

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?.

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.

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.

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.

I wish I had more data to base these assumptions on, but just from my time on the site and having checked the groups page for the past few days, it's pretty clear to me that the ~health.coronavirus subgroup is dominating Tildes at the moment. An overwhelming amount of the site's activity is concentrated in that subgroup. (It might even be more active than the rest of the site combined.)

I also feel like its level of activity is stifling the other groups and making them less active.

So my question:

Should we do anything about this? Should the standard of what is acceptable to post in that group be raised?^[1] Should we stop the daily discussion topics, or at least reduce their frequency (as suggested by @Adys)? Should anything at all be done to try to normalize the distribution of site activity?

This is an open question, not a suggestion, so please be charitable with your responses.

Also, consider a few things before deciding on your position:

• What percentage of the site's users very actively post topics?

• How many of those users have "switched gears" to posting almost exclusively coronavirus related topics?

• Does a concentration of activity into one group represent a natural interest-shift in the community?

• Topics related to technology had (have?) a reputation of dominating Tildes. The response to that problem was for users to diversify the topics they post and to post more in other groups.

• Obviously this is an unprecedented, international event. How should that affect how we deal with this (if at all)?

1. That is not to say that the topics posted in there so far have not been "high quality" or up to the site's standards overall (I suspect they would be removed otherwise).

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.

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?

There's a related issue on GitLab:

• Save draft posts and restore when the browser page is reloaded?

And a sort of related discussion from back in March:

• Prompt for unsaved changes on iOS?

However, no one has yet, to my knowledge, actually suggested a drafts feature for comments and topics, so I thought I'd take advantage of some free time to write something up.

Basically, I think it would be nice if, when writing a comment or posting a topic, we could save a draft of that topic or comment to Tildes to be picked back up later on.

@Deimos very, very briefly mentioned an opt-in '"drafts"-like feature' and I think that's what we ought to shoot for, as opposed to just temporarily storing closed comments or topics in localStorage.

So, something like a "Save draft" button next to the "Post topic" button on the "new topic" page and a "Save draft" button next to the "Cancel" and "Post comment" buttons when writing comments is how I imagine this working. It could very easily work in other ways though. Also, if this were to get implemented, I think it'd be very nice if there was an opt-in option for comments or topics whose tab gets closed to be automatically saved as drafts (and maybe we should only retain drafts for thirty days, or whatever).

As for accessing drafts, I'm imagining that a user visiting their own profile page might see a "Drafts" button up near the top, next to the "All posts", "Topics", and "Comments" buttons. After clicking the "Drafts" button the user would be brought to a page listing all of their drafts. Breaking convention a little bit, they would filter between all their drafts, just their topic drafts, or just their comment drafts via a dropdown menu like how you currently sort your posts, topics, or comments on profile pages. So, filtering between the types of drafts would work like how we can sort our posts, comments, and topics on our profile pages.

I understand that differs a little from what users might expect so, if we really wanted to, we could just add "Topic drafts" and "Comment drafts" buttons at the top of profile pages instead. That would be more in line with how we currently choose to view just our comments or just our topics.

Anyways, once a user finds the draft they want to open, I imagine they ought to be able to click an "Edit", "Link", or some other button to take them back to the place in a comments page where they were originally writing that comment, or take them back to the "new topic" page with their restored draft. However, it might also be useful for users to be able to post drafted comments directly from their profile page without having to re-visit the comments page the draft was written for. Although, this would mean that users would be allowed to bypass the context of the discussion they're replying to, including any changes made since their last visit, so I'll leave that up to y'all to discuss.

And that's about it, actually. There are a ton of additional details that (I suspect) would need to be figured out to implement this, but I'm going to leave that to the folks smarter than I.

I'm not going to post a topic or comment every time I update this silly thing, but this was a pretty big change that I felt necessitated a new topic.

Link to the script

Tildes Automated Posting Script, or TAPS, is a Python script that posts topics to Tildes. Using the script's configuration file, you can define which account you want the topic to be posted under, the group the topic should be posted to, the link for that topic (if any), the comment or text for that topic (if any), as well as what tags the topic should have (if any, but highly encouraged).

It also now works with accounts that use two-factor authentication.

I wrote this because every Monday and Friday I post topics to ~talk at 11:00 AM. However, I'm a forgetful person, sometimes wake up late, and will be starting classes soon, so I thought it would be nice to have a script that I can schedule, using something like cron, to post those topics for me.

The documentation should explain everything that can be done with the script, but anyone with questions or issues can message me for help.

With these recent changes, the script no longer requires a web browser or Selenium. It should be able to run on pretty much anything. I'll be using the script on a Raspberry Pi Zero W to post my recurring topics.

I wanted to have this update posted Sunday night, but at the last minute I decided to use @deing's tildee.py library, which made things a lot easier. I finsihed rewriting the script's code last night and updated the documentation today.

This thought was brought to you/sponsored by my perception that there's an increasing number of comments on Tildes that attempt to "answer" questions posed in the titles of posts, but don't necessarily demonstrate that the user has read the article before commenting. I won't link specific comments, but I've noticed a fair bit of it as of late. I get that those titles bait people into voicing their opinion, but often it's at the detriment of overall discussion. Should a prerequisite of clicking the actual link in question be a requirement before the user is allowed to post a top level comment? Or perhaps a cooldown period of entering a thread versus commenting may help?

The goal here would be to disincentivise the posting of "driveby" or similarly reductive comments that often don't demonstrate nuance or knowledge that is conveyed in the associated article. Sure, we can't ever know if the user has actually read the article, but it's not designed to be a foolproof strategy, just a discouraging one.

There's a few ways this could be implemented, probably via the utilization of a small bit of javascript that toggle's a user's reading state for a particular post. Thoughts?

Just to clarify since I've edited this post: I mean top-level comments only. Replies are more likely to be in response to the parent comment, rather than the title and wouldn't be affected by this proposal.

Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:

After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.

I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.

Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.

The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week - #1

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

https://gitlab.com/hungariantoast/taps

So yeah, this took a bit longer to get out than it should have, but that's because my summer classes are eating up all my free time.

Tildes Automated Posting Script, or TAPS, is a Python script that, when properly configured, will post a topic to Tildes under the account credentials, to the group, with the title, comment, link, and tags that you set. I created it because every Monday and Friday around 11:00 AM I post a topic to ~talk, but that can be a problem for someone who is forgetful like me, so I wrote a program that posts the topic for me, and now I can just run it on a schedule with something like cron.

The documentation should explain enough for you to get started with it, but I should have time tonight to answer questions and discuss feedback or suggestions.

Some features I might add in the future:

• [Done] An argument that posts all the topics defined in config.py instead of having to name them individually
• Check that topics defined in config.py have all the necessary values and fail if they don't
• Check that the username and password variables are set, fail if they aren't
• Check that the link, title, or tags of a topic will be accepted by Tildes and fail if not
• Add an "interactive mode" where the program just prompts the user to answer a couple of questions then posts a topic using the provided answers
• Add the ability to post comments to topics (maybe)
• Add a config option that waits a certain amount of time between posting topics to avoid the rate limit

Some quick thoughts about this approach to automating interactions with Tildes:

• I'd much rather drive a text based browser, but I haven't found anything (yet) with Python bindings

• I'd much rather just send HTTP requests, but I don't know how to do that (yet)

• I'd much rather Tildes just have an API, but I don't know how to build one (yet)

It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we could see more unread content on the page, but still keep long running topics going. Have it not affect search, so people can still find posts for reference.

I suggest that if a user other than the topic submitter makes a change to the topic that is reflected in the Topic Log (e.g., tag/title/group change), then the topic submitter receives a notification.

This may or may not apply to topic deletion and/or topic locking—to be discussed.

https://tild.es/55n has some discussion about this already, and now that this feature is actually implemented, I'd be interested what your opinions on allowing users to edit their own topic titles after posting are.

My main argument is that it would allow fixing typos and providing significant updates — think adding a [Solved] marker in the title for topics related to some problem or reflecting a title update of a linked article — without having to contact other users that have permissions to do that. The topic log allows that to happen transparently already.

I think it'd be useful to merge duplicate threads when there's two topics that are very close to each other. I don't want the stackExchange style "closed as duplicate of x," but I think it would be worthwhile to simply have the comments moved to the oldest thread and transfer any votes that are different users on each topic.

This way, we aren't losing discussion by flat-out deleting topics that are dupes, and we're also able to take some sort of action on threads that are dupes.

Just a thought.

I'm fairly sure it's either a Reddit or RES feature, but whenever I select text in a comment and then click Reply, it'll copy that text to the comment box and add a > in front so it'll turn into a quote. It makes it a little quicker to respond to a specific part of someone's message.

I'm no IT bird and as such I don't know if this is something that can be implemented easily(if at all). It'd also require more JS, not sure if that's an issue as well.

In any case, let me know what you think.

Edit: I'd like to suggest something else, should I make a secondary post or append it to this one? I'd like to avoid cluttering up the front page.

I'd like to be able to bookmark posts from the front page. Right now it really isn't an issue yet since posting frequency is low, but I often quickly check the front page for interesting reads, while not having the time to actually read them. I'd like to see a "Bookmark" button on front page posts that allow me to save those posts for later when I actually do have time to read the posts.

For quick scrolls over the front page, tapping the post and then bookmarking is one click too many.
You could argue I'm lazy, I call it efficiency.

While on the subject, if I click "bookmark" on a topic, it'll read "bookmarked" but does not offer an "unbookmark" option until I refresh the page. Since I have big thumbs(large bones) I often tap wrong, so it could be nice if there was a quick way to undo this, similar to how we can undo votes.
Edit: this seems to be a bug: it does work for comments.
Edit2: Made this into an issue.

Basically, the ability to receive a notification whenever someone comments on a subscribed topic. Currently, there is a save option (Unless it's been removed? I'm looking now and can't seem to find it) which makes for a decent solution for the time being, but personally I know how easy it is to forget all about what you have saved and have it fly completely under your radar. I, for one, think it would be a good idea if you could subscribe to a topic you're interested so you don't completely forget and miss some discussion.

1. What is this topic about

A little over two weeks ago I posted a comment answering a question that Deimos asked me in the penultimate ~tildes.official topic "Experimenting with some changes to information that's displayed on topics, and some other tweaks" and in that comment I mentioned that I would give additional feedback later on, once I had time to live with the changes mentioned in that topic.

For those wondering, the change in question was the removal of displaying usernames for link topics on the listing page, and the movement of the domain that a topic links, to the spot where the username previously inhabited.

On listing pages, the domain for link topics is now shown in the "footer", to the right of the number of comments (replacing the submitter's username), instead of in parentheses after the title. This makes it so that the information about the source of the post is always in a consistent position.

If you want a little more context as to why this change was implemented in the first place, this topic contains a lot of discussion:

"What if we eliminated "ownership" of link topics?"

With all of that out of the way, this topic is my follow up feedback to these changes. I was originally just going to post this as another reply to Deimos, but I figured that I might as well just make it a new topic of its own, potentially generating more discussion this way than it would as a comment in an old thread. This is of course, at the risk of garnering more dissenting opinions to my feedback and suggestions than a comment would have likely received, but oh well, this feels more appropriate.

2. What were my thoughts on the change

My original opinion on the decision to remove usernames from link topics was negative. I mentioned this in my reply to Deimos, but I am the kind of person who likes informative clutter on their screen. I like to be able to see all the details at once and not have to go fishing for them, so it was natural that I would have a negative reaction in the immediacy of this change, as it removed information that I considered (and still do) vital to the way that I browse content on Tildes.

Further thoughts I had on the change generally reflected those of other users, that this change could potentially harm more groups than it helps, especially "taste-based groups." It's arguable that most groups on Tildes are "taste-based groups" so depending on your opinions and how you browse the site, this change could be very detrimental to your experience here.

In the immediate aftermath of this change, I was very much against it, but as mentioned in the last paragraph of the topic announcing this change, I was going to wait for some time before providing my feedback.

Well, that was a mistake, because now I've written this stupidly long topic.

3. What are my thoughts on the change

I think this change was a good move, but it still really messes with how I browse the site, and I think it messes with some other users too.

But, how do I browse Tildes? Well, you can read my reply to Deimos that I linked at the top of this topic for a little more context, but the gist of it is that, using Tildes Extended, I've tagged several users on the site that I think commonly post enjoyable content, that I know have the same interests as me, or dozens of other reasons. When I get on the site for the first time in a given day, I'll skim over all the topics that have been posted since I last visited (since Tildes is still small enough for this to be possible) and typically bookmark any topics that I think I'm going to want to read later on. Topics posted by a user that I've tagged with a certain tag get bookmarked regardless of what the content is, because I've already tagged that user as someone whose content I want to pay attention to, and any other topics posted by users that haven't been tagged are typically bookmarked if I think I'll find them interesting.

I want to stress the meaning behind that last sentence. I'll bookmark a topic posted by a user I haven't tagged if I think the topic will be interesting, but I'll bookmark anything posted by users I have tagged a certain way.

Browsing the site this way moves my interest away from looking for topics with certain tags, and towards diversifying my reading based on the activity of other users. It helps me find new interests, while topic tags help me find established ones.

So, if I tagged a user because they are always posting interesting articles to ~tech, but one day they post an article to ~enviro, I'm probably going to check it out, even if it doesn't stand out to me as something I'd normally be interested in.

After I skim over the dozen or so topics posted since the last time I visited the site, I'll usually start reading them throughout the rest of my day, starting around noon when I am having lunch and later in the evening, once I get home.

By the way, for the unaware, Tildes Extended is a browser extension that allows you to tag users with a message and optionally choose to highlight that message with a color. So when I notice a user has similar interests to me, or if there's a user who is the author of a piece of software, or whatever the case may be, I can tag the user in question to help me remember some detail about them. If you've ever utilized the tagging feature of the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension, you know how tagging works and understand what I am talking about. If you've never used RES and are clueless as to what I mean by "tagging users" then don't worry, there will be pictures later on.

I have to admit, with Tildes currently being small enough that you could probably read every topic posted in a given day, browsing the site like this doesn't matter that much since how you sort content becomes meaningless when you can easily digest it all regardless, but as the user base grows and more content is posted to the website, this approach will grow more important to me, and I suspect others as well.

When this recent change was made and usernames were removed from link topics on the listing page, it removed most of the benefits gained from tagging users, since I now have to check the comment page of each link topic to see who posted it. I understand the benefit of removing usernames from link topics on the listing page, but I think there's a middle ground between this change and tagging users that will deliver to us benefits from both systems while eliminating some complaints others and myself have had about the change.

Okay, I've outlined my concerns, but what should change?

First of all, I think certain groups should get their usernames back on the listing page, for reasons largely explained by @cfabbro in these comments:

on ~music the user who submitted something is also usually a good indication of whether or not I will enjoy it.

E.g. certain users have submitted multiple things to ~music I have greatly enjoyed in the past and so I am more likely to give their next submission a listen immediately too.

in taste-based communities like ~music and ~creative, removing ownership over topics is an absolutely terrible idea IMO since it makes the community feel cold/impersonal and makes cognitive filtering based on shared preferences that much harder.

E.g. User ownership of a topic in ~music is generally a good thing because it lets people get to know one another through their musical preferences

The general idea I extracted from those comments is that there are certain groups on Tildes where being able to see, from the listing page, who posts a link topic, is important for multiple reasons. Perhaps the most prominent being that you can recognize users who share similar tastes to your own (even without tagging them through a browser extension), and know that when the user in question posts a link topic in a specific group, you should probably check it out.

Of course, the inverse of this is also true. Instead of wanting to seek content out based on who posted it, you might actually want to avoid that content because, just as you know that you agree with the tastes of one user, you might find yourself constantly upset by another user's comments and topics.

@cfabbro (sorry for picking on you so much today) discusses this in this comment:

I also think that who submitted a topic is an incredibly valuable piece of information to know at a glance. E.g. There are a number of users I actively avoid reading anything they submit because I know it will just make me angry

So, if there is a user on the site who, while still acting within the rules established for the site, manages to consistently upset you with their content or the content they link, it's going to become very difficult to automatically avoid their topics if you cannot immediately see their username from the listing page.

Before this change, the username of a submitter of a comment or topic was readily visible and you could use the Tildes Extended extension to apply a message and a color to their username, making them immediately identifiable.

With the removal of usernames from link topics on the listing page, it is no longer possible to determine whether the submitter of a link topic is someone you have tagged or not. This discrepancy is the main point I want to address by writing this topic, and hopefully convince some of you along the way that a natively implemented tagging and highlighting tool for users would be an excellent addition to the features available to this community.

To summarize my thoughts on this change so far, I'll say that I think removing usernames from the listing page for some groups is a good idea, while for other groups it could be a negative change. I think the best way to remedy this in the immediate future would be to decide, on a group-by-group basis, whether usernames should be visible from the listing page.

The downside of doing this in a group specific way is that, even in groups where usernames are visible, there will still be some link topics where a submitter's username should be hidden from the listing page, such as to discourage the idea of "ownership" over that topic. However, until this becomes enough of an issue to warrant further implementations, I think deciding the display of usernames from the listing page for each specific group is the way to go.

If we ever do get to the point where we have to prune specific topics in specific groups for the ability to display the submitter's username, we can just leave that choice up to the user by allowing them to include a special tag, select a check box when submitting, or one of a hundred other possible ways. If the feature is abused by a user, we can just take it away from them.

3a. Should we remove usernames from link topics entirely

I want to address the idea that we should remove usernames from link topics entirely. As it is right now, the username of a submitter of a link topic can only be discovered, intuitively, one way, and that is to navigate to the comment section for a link topic, from which you can find the submitter's username beneath the title of the topic. (There are some other places where it's recorded in the HTML, but that's not important.)

If the username for the submitter were to be removed from the comments page of a link topic, there would be no way to easily check who submitted a link topic. I feel this is important to bring up due to @cfabbro's comments about avoiding content posted by certain users.

So, the question we have to answer about this theoretical change is, should we retain a user's right to avoid content based on who posts it, or should we encourage a user agnostic approach that focuses on the content alone, at risk of making the experience worse for some users?

Note that this question only applies if we remove the username of a submitter from link topics entirely and not just from the listing page. I don't think there are immediate plans to go ahead with anything like this, but I wanted to include my thoughts on this idea for the sake of completeness.

4. Let's implement a user tagging system

To remedy a lot of the challenges that this change has created for other users and myself, I feel like a tool built natively into the website that allows us to tag and highlight users is a great idea.

For the record, when I say "tag" a user, I mean that, when you are logged in, there will be a little message displayed next to a user's username. By "highlight" a user, I mean that the message will be surrounded by a shape of a certain color, selected by the user. If a highlight/color is chosen for a user but they are not tagged with a tag/message, then just a simple, colored shape, such as a circle or a square, could display next to the user's username.

This is how Tildes Extended handles user tagging:

• A user tagged with a tag and a highlight (a message and a color)

• A user tagged with just a tag (just a message)

• A user tagged with just a highlight (just a color)

• Tagged users who submit topics and have their username visible are displayed like this

Keep in mind that the tags applied to users don't have to exist beside that user's username. If a user you have tagged is the submitter of a topic and you navigate to that topic's comment page, the tag you have created for that user could exist in the sidebar where the normal topic tags go. On the listing page, topics that show the submitter's username could similarly have that user's tag sit next to the topic tags, underneath the title.

I will say that, for username @mentions, it's probably going to be necessary to just include the tag right beside the mentioned username (which Tildes Extended does not do).

For comments, again, the tag for a user doesn't have to go beside their username. It could be displayed below the username, similarly to how the Exemplary... label is displayed now.

I also want to just mention real quick, in order to make sure we are all on the same page still, that the tags you give other users when you are logged in to your account will only be visible to you. Other people won't be able to see them.

Now, I'm partial to just putting a user's tag right beside their username, but I haven't taken the time to see if this would work on the mobile layout or smaller resolutions, and I probably like that solution more just because it's the most common, familiar place to put a user tag, but I'd be interested to hear opinions on where else user tags can go.

The length allowed for user tags is also something else to consider. Eighty characters is probably a safe limit for most user tags, but how will longer tags display in the mobile layout? Should they just be truncated after a certain length, or have a hard limit? What colors should be available to highlight users with? Should we have a set list, a color picker built in somewhere? Well, that really depends on how user tagging is implemented, which I'll get to later on.

At this point, since I didn't explicitly mention it, you might be wondering how this ties in to usernames no longer displaying for link topics. Well, first of all, how would we display a user tag for a link topic that a tagged user is the OP of if we can't see their username? Well, we could just stick that user's tag in with the topic's tags like was mentioned earlier, or we could add a secondary bar to the right side of the topic that's the color of the user's highlight, similar to how our own topics get a purple bar on the left side, there would be a mirrored bar on the right side of a topic, again, colored to whatever color was selected for the tagged user.

If we wanted to be very imaginative, we could just do both.

Doing this keeps the usernames hidden on link topics in the listing page, but does give us some indication that the user who posted that topic has been tagged, perhaps categorically depending on what scheme you used to tag users, and that allows us to retain browsing habits based off of user tags like I wrote about earlier.

Some people might point out that displaying the tag of a tagged user on a link topic, even if their username is hidden from the listing page, kind of defeats the purpose, since the message of that tag could just be the username of the user, thus their username is not really hidden any longer.

Personally, I don't see a problem with this, because I doubt anyone is going to tag all the users on the site, but similarly to how I mentioned adding an additional bar in the color of the user's highlight, we could not include a user's tag in the topic's tags on the listing page and just add some other, non-identifiable indicator that the submitter of the topic in question is a tagged user.

So yeah, there are a lot of ways to go about this, but how should we actually enable users to tag others? Should we use a traditional user interface, similar to what Tildes Extended or Reddit Enhancement Suite does? I think this would be the best approach to adding tags to users for most people on the site, as it's quick, easy, intuitive, and doesn't require navigation to a separate page, but programming a feature like this can be difficult.

Another approach would be to make the tagging and highlighting of users (and even certain topic tags) a text-based process.

Before I continue on, I'm going to assume that everyone reading after this point is familiar with the topic tag filtering page. Adding tags into this input field will hide any topic containing one or more of those tags.

How does this relate to user tagging? Well, we can do the exact same thing here, just with a slightly more complicated syntax.

Let's say I want to tag @cfabbro with the message "cool person" and a red color. A way to do this could be to navigate to a page for adding user tags and input the following syntax into an input field:

cfabbro : cool person: #ef1515

If I wanted to remove the tag, I could type:

remove cfabbro

If I wanted to edit the tag:

edit cfabbro

The input field would then populate with the tag for @cfabbro if it existed, and return a message if it didn't, and I could edit and submit it as if I were just adding a new tag.

You don't even need to call the tag down with the edit keyword if you don't want to. It should probably just be possible to edit existing user tags by submitting them as if you were adding them for the first time.

Hitting the Enter key or clicking a button can then submit the tag to Tildes where it'll obviously be tied to my account and displayed anywhere that I log in.

It doesn't really need to be anymore complicated than that, and we can probably even simplify it more if we wanted to.

Unlike the input field for topic tag filters, the user tags inputted into this field will disappear after being submitted, because that input field would become very cluttered if we just left them there.

If a user wanted to edit their entire list of tagged users, we could have a separate text box below the input field where they can call the entire list of tagged users to and edit it programmatically.

Both this text-based approach and a conventional user interface like what Tildes Extended uses are good solutions and if user tagging does get implemented natively, I'd recommend we eventually add both methods, as the user interface is very convenient and easy, but the text-based method is also incredibly powerful.

With the current size of Tildes still allowing users to digest its daily posted content, these features and suggestions are not that important, but with time and an increasingly large user base their importance and relevance to others and myself will grow.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: So, in order to get a tag to display next to a @mention of a username, you have to tag the username when it is @mentioned. If you want a tag to display for a username when that username is the author of a topic or comment, you have to tag it there all well.

So yeah, you have to tag @mentions and submitter usernames separately to get them both to show up. Weird.

As per subject - it'd be nice to hide topics from the front page.

The use case is very simple - if I see a topic that I have no interest in, I'd rather for its spot to be taken by some other topic that currently sits "below the fold".

Hiding a topic should remove it from the front page only, but leave it visible on the group page. It would also probably make sense to mark the topic there in some way and have an "unhide" option there.

Alternatively, have a switch for the front page to toggle between "full view" and "view without hidden topics".

Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?

We have the "Exemplary" label for comments, which identifies comments as particularly good, and even boosts their ranking within threads.

Now that we've had this for a while, I keep finding myself want to do the same for topics. I'll read an article and want to give it an extra boost because it's better than average.

I'm ready for an equivalent to the "Exemplary" label for topics.

I've been thinking about my experience on Tildes with news and articles. It's mostly been seeing high quality content and discussion that I'm happy with. However for the sake of this, I want to discuss avoiding something negative.

Lately I've noticed news and articles with headlines that I feel are biasing in nature and potentially inflammatory.

I would guess that we're all pretty familiar with this method in general. At some point when a forum/aggregate becomes large enough it provides an profitable opportunity for third parties to distribute content. Or an individual is pursuing their fulfillment of a personal ideal.

I have a few suggestion to handle the issues productively.

News sources that put a higher priority on traffic versus their reputation tend to do so consistently. It would be valuable for users to be required to tag the parent domain when posting external links to allow users to discern sources case by case using tags.

Blocking something a news source versus <inciting-phrase> has the benefit of allowing higher quality sources mentioning the same topic to have an impact on the user. That's potentially very valuable in encouraging informed perspective.

Linking news and articles for commercial or personally motivated reasons is posted on subs that have a marginal relation. E.g. Posting a story on Mike Pence denouncing all white men working in agriculture in an agriculture sub. The connection can certainly be made but I don't think that's a good way of organizing that information. I think it would be more productive to post that in a news or news/political thread. Having the ability to choose when we see and engage with that type of content is important. It benefits the individual and encourages healthy and engaged communities.

Blocking users ( I wasn't sure if this existed ) Alternatively, a system for linked content reputation per user. But I think that's a bad solution overall.
I meant filtering users content and comments as a preference for users. I'm not talking about site wide.

I'm curious if other Tilde users agree with my issues or suggestions.

Yesterday @talklittle posted the topic Halloween game sales are live. What are your Horror/Halloween-themed recommendations?. There have been some good recommendations and whatnot. If you like horror games and weren't aware of the ongoing sales, go check out the comments for some recommendations.

Being the meta-killjoy that I am, I started this sidebar about the top comment. tl;dr: I don't think this type of content engenders Tildes's discussion forward community.

Fell free to read the whole thread of comments for some civil discussion on the matter, but I do want to open this up to all of Tildes: should this type of comment be policed on Tildes?

Also: do you think this type of comment is good? Do you agree with me that it's retroactive to Tildes's goals? Am I just a big killjoy? Given that the comment I'm calling into question is the top comment of that topic, I'm probably David in this arena but I want to hear it from everyone else.

At the moment, there are two types of topics that can be posted on Tildes:

• Link topics, which consist of a title and a URL.

• Text topics, which consist of a title and text.

These two types of topic are supported by having three input fields for new topics: Title; Link; Text.

I propose that we combine these two topic types into just one topic type. The submission page for all topics will include only two fields: a title field and a general all-purpose text box. The submitter will type a title for their post, and then put anything else into the general all-purpose box.

If the submitter is posting off-site content, they can put the link to that content in the all-purpose box. If they want to provide a summary of the off-site content, they can write the summary in the all-purpose box, with the link.

If the submitter is posting their own original content (no link), they can type their text into the all-purpose box.

The single all-purpose box includes everything that is currently split between the Link and Text boxes. When the topic is posted, everything entered in that all-purpose box is displayed in the main body of the post.

At the moment, summaries of off-site content are usually being posted as comments under the main topic, as a result of a change made a few months ago. These comments merely clutter up the thread. If these summaries were in the post itself, that clutter would be reduced.

One topic type, one streamlined submission page, one place for all topic content.

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

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

However, I recognize that there can be some downsides:

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

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

As a lurker on the somethingawful forums one of my favorite features is a button which will show all the posts a single person has made in a thread. It'd be really handy if someone (like the OP) is answering questions about a topic. It's really nice to have on a more traditional forum website, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be here. Regardless, I thought I would suggest it.

Here is an example: Before and After

I don't know if it seems too pedantic but I feel like it would be much more convenient to tag any posts linked to articles as such, so that people could focus in on or filter out articles at their convenience. Personally, I never read articles people post unless the subject matter greatly intrigues me, and in that case, I've read it because of reasons beyond it being an article. I think it'd be a pretty easily enforceable thing, as we have tagmods now and tagging articles (if anybody forgets) would be simple and quick.

Something you see frequently on Reddit are subreddits that have developed their own slang, jokes and references. That's part of the reason why Reddit feels like a collection of communities more than one website divided into sections, which is what Tildes look like right now.
The question is, do we want that sort of stuff here?

I'm currently using 24 hour sort, and it's great, minus one thing - threads older than 24 hours just disappear. Perhaps a better implementation would be to keep the threads showing up underneath the <24 hour ones, but prevent them from being bumped up by new posts.

Example - if I go to ~comp right now, there are only 5 posts. Older ones, imo, should still be visible, just no longer bumping.