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Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

blog.tildes.net

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Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#21

Post by hkmurakami »

pythonistic wrote: post #6

Over the years, we've seen reddit increasingly turn into an echo chamber. I've been personally voted down for telling people in a general subreddit that the anger they feel about ${Political Party A} is the same way that the opposition feels about ${Political Party B}. What mechanisms are you planning to implement to, for lack of a better phrase, increase exposure to and improve tolerance of different points of view?…

>the anger they feel about ${Political Party A} is the same way that the opposition feels about ${Political Party B}.

Do you ever talk about this in meatspace? Personally, the inability for many people to grasp this has been quite frustrating.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#22

Post by trendia »

zellyn wrote: post #18

It's been fascinating to watch every online environment almost inevitably turn to mush over time. Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system. Actually, I have little hope for Wikipedia's solving the problem, due to their governance model and political structur…

> albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit…

I'm more concerned about the opposite effect -- that the default subreddits have become pointless and boring, focusing mostly on "funny" images and cat gifs. Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

At the same time, I think the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#23

Post by kodablah »

I've mentioned this for other projects, but why not do the work in the open too? Why not just make the code public as you work on it? It's hard to believe openness and transparency are the goal if there is none during development (even if the code is ugly and you have to turn away too-early assistance/suggestions). No invites, nothing hidden.

Also, wrt AGPL, as a contributor I would personally prefer a "commitment" the other direction. That I can contribute without putting restrictions on the recipient. I think in our current times, preventing commercial and closed source use has little value as people just go elsewhere. I don't want this to devolve into a pros/cons of copy-left discussion, but in general the fewer adoption restrictions the better I'd say for projects like these.

I will say I agree with almost all of your other goals (except some of the stack :-).

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#24

Post by Chardok »

Genuinely curious, can you expand on how you will achieve the middle-ground between safe space and hate speech?

I would assume you are aware of Voat.co and think everyone would agree they are suffering from the "paradox of intolerance", how can you draw the line without stifling legitimate conversation? For example I can't even post an honest question about the Israel/Palestine conflict on numerous subreddits due to the inflammatory responses that usually accompany them.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#25

Post by knowuh »

zellyn wrote: post #18

It's been fascinating to watch every online environment almost inevitably turn to mush over time. Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system. Actually, I have little hope for Wikipedia's solving the problem, due to their governance model and political structur…

Thanks to pedantic rules, Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the two most useful sites online right now.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#26

Post by Deimorz »

http-teapot wrote: post #17

I find the Technical Goals page particularly interesting and debatable: https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals Accessibility and i18n aren't mentioned which is unfortunate.

A lot of the docs pages are still very scattered and incomplete, but those are definitely things that I should add.

Accessibility is definitely important to me, and luckily a lot of it comes naturally because I'm doing things in a very "old school" way like... actually using semantic, hand-written HTML instead of building it as an SPA that outputs unaccessible div-soup.

I've done at least some checking to make sure it's decently accessible, but I know there's a lot more that I can do. I'm hoping to get some people involved that are more familiar with screen-readers and other assistive tech to help me figure out things I need to change. And of course, once it's open-sourced (should be in the next couple of weeks), if people want to help contribute accessibility improvements that would be hugely appreciated.

As for i18n, it's not something I'm planning in the immediate future. Since one of the main goals on the site is keeping up quality, it's necessary for me to be able to understand what's going on in all the groups. However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#27

Post by empath75 »

_ps6d wrote: post #3

Hi HN - I left my job at reddit about a year and a half ago, and a few months later decided to try starting a non-profit and work on building a new site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I felt were hurting online communities. I've kept it very quiet until recently, but have started telling people about it and inviting them to the alpha over the last couple of weeks. The site's still very minimal…

Are you familiar with metafilter.com and their moderation model?

They charge a one time $5 membership to join, and it's heavily moderated, and they don't tolerate trolls or jerks very long before banning them and returning their money. They're a small scale site, and have a handful of moderators, but requiring someone to lay out actual cash to post seems to deter a lot of the behavior you see at reddit where anybody can create as many sockpuppets as they want with no problem.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#28

Post by petsagouris »

trendia wrote: post #22
zellyn wrote: post #18

It's been fascinating to watch every online environment almost inevitably turn to mush over time. Of particular interest to me are Wikipedia and StackOverflow, where the pedantic rule-following, rule-enforcing insider group eventually squeezes all joy and then all productive life from the the system. Actually, I have little hope for Wikipedia's solving the problem, due to their governance model and political structur…

> albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit… I'm more concerned about the opposite effect -- that the default subreddits have become pointless and boring, focusing mostly on "funny" images and cat gifs. Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer. At the same time, I think…

> Gone are the interesting askreddit threads or useful world news commentary, replaced with content designed to keep you browsing and staying on the site longer.

I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#29

Post by rc_bhg »

Chardok wrote: post #24

Genuinely curious, can you expand on how you will achieve the middle-ground between safe space and hate speech? I would assume you are aware of Voat.co and think everyone would agree they are suffering from the "paradox of intolerance", how can you draw the line without stifling legitimate conversation? For example I can't even post an honest question about the Israel/Palestine conflict on numerous subreddits due to…

I feel like this will be addressed when it happens. But its not an issue until its an issue.

Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

#30

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Chardok wrote: post #24

Genuinely curious, can you expand on how you will achieve the middle-ground between safe space and hate speech? I would assume you are aware of Voat.co and think everyone would agree they are suffering from the "paradox of intolerance", how can you draw the line without stifling legitimate conversation? For example I can't even post an honest question about the Israel/Palestine conflict on numerous subreddits due to…

I don't know if this is a sentiment others share, but I feel like at some point from 2003-2015 (thinking in terms of 4chan's history) the Internet went from having people who said really crazy shit just being weird people from the Internet to people who said really crazy shit distinctly being far-right and far-left people. Or, they were labeled as such, when in the past, they wouldn't have been.
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