Sorry if this is due to my own ignorance, but what's the pronunciation of this? Is it plural "~"?
Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
31–40 of 104 posts
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#32Genuinely 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.
I think the idea is that when you seed a community, it will attract a particular type of person. If you're seeding it in the same exact way Reddit did, sans-ads, that doesn't actually say you're changing anything, other than the marketing model. It says absolutely nothing about the people you're trying to attract.
HN distinctly attracts tech people, and Voat explicitly attracted Reddit outcasts.
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#33It'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…
I make a point of actively curating my subscriptions–it's easy to get lulled into thinking the whole site is garbage when it's really just a few noisy subreddits. As any subreddit with a clear topic grows large, there needs to be strict moderation or it will devolve into crowd-pleasing gifs/memes/jokes, upvoted by people who aren't engaged in the original topic, in which case I'll unsubscribe.
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#34[deleted]
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#35Over 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?…
This is definitely one of the most difficult aspects, and already something that we've had some good discussions about on Tildes. There are some people involved already that have been moderators of some of the really divisive subreddits, and I've also had a lot of conversations over the last year with mods from subreddits that work very hard to promote civil discussions even on controversial topics - places like /r/C…
>so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies
On the other hand, reddit's ability to have user-defined sub-groups has given rise to good communities. To come at this from a personal perspective (though I believe it to be true from many other perspectives), there are a whole bunch of communities on reddit centered around various facets of being transgender. I think in a lot of ways, this kind of community has replaced the old siloed bulletin boards we used to have ten, fifteen years ago, and there's both advantages and disadvantages to that - but either way, I think the point I'm trying to make is that user-defined sub-groups can be a legitimately useful feature that benefits people's lives in a meaningful manner.
What reddit might get wrong is making it _easy_. Have you considered a system like stackexchange use, where setting up a new site is a big deal that requires use cases to be drawn up, example content, users who pledge to partake and maintain the site in accordance with the network's standards, and so on?
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#36Hi 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…
Hi, I remember you ;) Anyway, quick question: How do you expect to prevent people using "troll" or "noise" comment tags as their alternative to a downvote button?
I think the really key aspect is that we can recognize when someone is using tags improperly like that. Downvotes are generic, you can't really say that someone used one "wrong".
So we can look at systems like the "meta-moderation" that Slashdot had, where you can ask other (trusted) users whether they think someone else is abusing their tools. If they are, you can start trusting their tags less, or eventually even take away their ability to use them. And if they also have to build up to being able to use tags in the first place, that makes it way more difficult to keep abusing something since they can't just create a new account to immediately circumvent any punishment.
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#37It'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…
Reddit no longer has default subreddits. New accounts show /r/popular and have no subscriptions.
/r/popular is /r/all but with some more controversial/niche subreddits filtered out.
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#38We're trying to do that too with IRC for a community of people interested by programming (http://dailyprog.org/chat).
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#39It'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.
Indeed. Say what you want about the bar for contribution, but those sites rarely disappoint me when I visit.
Re: Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
#40I would love to see a federated platform for reddit-like use. Sort of like what Mastodon is to Twitter. Of course I'll admit that it would be probably orders of magnitude more difficult to create, but federation would be a major differentiating factor. Personally I think federation is the only sound architecture for internet systems.