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

blog.tildes.net

51–60 of 104 posts

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

#51
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…

I thought they kept the money from banned people? Surely that's the point?

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

#52
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…

Definitely familiar with it, I used to use Metafilter quite a bit.

I think it's an interesting approach, but overall I disagree pretty strongly with requiring people to pay to access the site. That cuts off a huge amount of people that can't justify spending $5 to be able to post. It's great from a perspective of reducing issues, but it also hurts the site and community in a lot of other invisible ways.

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

#53

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?…

Not all points of view are morally equivalent; the site should not be friendly to certain extremist points of view.

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

#54
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm talking about whatever shows up when I go to reddit.com without an account (which is all of the time)

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

#55
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…

On the announcement page you suggest not emailing you for an invite, yet here you are explicitly asking to be emailed for an invite.

I'd like an invite, and would be very interested in seeing how you built your Pyramid application (I'm a core dev for Pyramid/WebOb/Waitress) when it goes open source.

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

#56
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm talking about whatever shows up when I go to reddit.com without an account (which is all of the time)

I think you also get /r/popular. They essentially switched from a whitelist model to a blacklist model.

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

#57
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…

To request an invite to the Tildes alpha, email invites@tildes.net. Do not email any other addresses to ask for an invite. source: https://docs.tildes.net/contact

I am sorry, I usually don't do this but I guess the person you're replying to is the creator of Tildes.

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

#58
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I find that even a highly curated subreddit subscription adds little value to my life. A subreddit often looks appealing at first, but after a few weeks I notice a pattern in the submissions, and I notice the echo chamber in the comment section. Reddit has become an okay place to occasionally visit and explore, but it's not a daily read for me anymore.

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

#59
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…

On the announcement page you suggest not emailing you for an invite, yet here you are explicitly asking to be emailed for an invite. I'd like an invite, and would be very interested in seeing how you built your Pyramid application (I'm a core dev for Pyramid/WebOb/Waitress) when it goes open source.

I think you are just misreading that. He only says don’t email deimos@tildes.net for invites. The contacts page says invite requests go to invites@tildes.net.

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

#60

What will be your policies on adult content? And I don't just mean porn. For example, the BDSM community counts as "adult" but it's not necessarily pornographic.

This is something I think we'll definitely need to discuss more to try to figure out a good definition (and I know it's not simple at all), but in general I'd love to be able to have groups that support "adult" discussions, but not ones that are just for posting things for sexual gratification, if that makes sense. So for example, a BDSM discussion community would be fine, but not one solely for posting links to BDSM porn.

It's not that I'm opposed to porn or anything, but I've seen how many issues (legal, spam, etc.) can be attracted by directly supporting porn, and I feel like it would push in a very different direction from my main objectives for the site. There are plenty of other places people can find porn on the internet.

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