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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

#61

Post by evilnight »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

So, what is it? No screenshots, all talk. The world doesn't need another Digg clone, it needs something brand new. We have enough ripoffs already. Are you going to implement up and down voting? If so, why promote a voting model that empowers the 51% and silences 49%? Sorry this isn't a popular sentiment, but downvoting my comment proves a point. I have a valid concern, but repeated downvoting on HN leads to a situati…

If you want screenshots, here you go. https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk

The jury is back on downvoting, there's enough science to prove it has a negative effect on community dynamics. While tildes doesn't have precise 'downvoting' it will have tagging that will apply negative effects to those comments and submissions. Think of it as contextual downvoting - and if people abuse tags like 'troll' and 'flame' and 'joke' they will lose their ability to use those tags.

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

#62

Post by eitland »

zellyn wrote: post #48
lev99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I can't be the only person that still finds both productivity and joy in StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I've had mixed reactions with the moderator class on those websites, but overall the websites are fantastic.

I do too. But it saddens me how often the most enjoyable StackOverflow discussions also contain notices that they're closed for being offtopic, allowed to continue to exist only because grandfathered in, etc.

I found myself more and nore hesitant to use stack overflow and I think a big reason why is vecause of all the useful questions I've seen crushed there.

"This could have been my question, even after reading stack overflow for years I cannot see why this is should attract flags. Better be careful." Or "If this really useful question is not productive, what will my be." Or "They'll certainly find a question about something related and call mine a duplicate."

I'm working on a concept for a q/a site for people who would enjoy answering questions and/or get answers to questions more than they like playing teacher, mod or what do I know.

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

#63

Post by cfabbro »

annabellish wrote: post #35
Deimorz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Tildes plans on opening up group creation at some point, deimorz just didn’t want to do that to start since it has hurt other similar startups by doing so, e.g, imzy. Open community creation to start fractures the user base too much and as a result most wind up as ghost towns.

One of the primary ideas with group hierarchy and tagging on tildes is to give us a way to judge interest level in subjects and allow new communities to form organically from that. However Deimos has also said he is not opposed to others ways for communities to form, such as a few trusted users simply saying “hey, this would be a good idea for a community to add” or even a petition from users.

The other nice thing about group hierarchy is that if a new subgroup spawns but after a few months is inactive it can simple be merged back into its parent. E.g. ~music.metal.numetal forms but is dead after a few months, it can just be merged back into ~music.metal. And if, further down the line, more users join and show an interest in Nu Metal it can be given its own community again.

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

#64

Post by SheepSlapper »

dragonwriter wrote: post #50
SheepSlapper wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shift in culture, with an added heap of laziness. We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize, because it's easier to do that than challenging ideas (someone else's or your own). We went from one identity in the US (American) to putting ourselves and others in boxes (black, white, man, woman, whatever) to the detriment of us all. Identity politics: a…

> We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize As opposed to exactly what time in the history of humanity where this was not the case?

Maybe I phrased that poorly, because you're right that we've engaged in this 'otherization' since the beginning of time (for good reasons and bad). Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES into boxes, which increases the polarization of discourse (because now WE identify as a group and not a whole, and those OTHER groups aren't US so clearly they're wrong/bad/etc).

This ebbs and flows throughout history (or rather the US and THEM changes, based on circumstances). There are plenty of unifying events in US history that lead to more of an 'American' identity (wars, 9/11, generally dangerous times or shitty events drive unification out of necessity). Those aren't the times we're in now, but it's cyclical. Some day we will be again, then not, ad infinitum. The pendulum always swings.

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

#65

Post by DanBC »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

So, what is it? No screenshots, all talk. The world doesn't need another Digg clone, it needs something brand new. We have enough ripoffs already. Are you going to implement up and down voting? If so, why promote a voting model that empowers the 51% and silences 49%? Sorry this isn't a popular sentiment, but downvoting my comment proves a point. I have a valid concern, but repeated downvoting on HN leads to a situati…

> I have a valid concern

I suspect the downvotes are not because of your valid opinion, but the strong, perhaps aggressive, way you deliver it.

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

#66

Post by evilnight »

H1Supreme wrote: post #31

Sorry if this is due to my own ignorance, but what's the pronunciation of this? Is it plural "~"?

Technically, it's supposed to be 'till-duh-s' but we've taken to calling it 'till-dees' (rhymes with Arbys) because that's just more fun to say.

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

#67

Post by Deimorz »

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…

Sure - I won't claim that I've got it solved or that it's an easy thing to do at all. I think it's actually a very common mistake to act like it is easy, and that you should be able to write a perfectly-objective rule or draw a bright line between what's allowed and what isn't. Anyone that's done much moderation on the internet knows that it's definitely not that simple, nothing where humans are involved is ever that black-and-white.

There are certainly blatant cases that there's just no reason to allow (and if you look at Voat you'll see a lot of those), but there are also a lot of more difficult ones that will take work to try to sort through. There are a lot of very smart people that have put a lot of thought into these issues while running their own higher-quality communities, and I think we need to try to learn from them instead of shying away from doing anything because it's a "hard problem", or hoping that AI will somehow solve it.

Just as an example, here's a recent blog post by some of the mod team of /r/ChangeMyView, which is a group I respect a lot and I think have done an amazing job of creating a place to have civil discussions. This is the level of reasoning they're putting into "simple" cases like whether "that's bullshit" is too rude: https://changemyview.net/2018/03/28/thats-bullshit-rude-enou...

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

#68

Post by codetrotter »

eitland wrote: post #62
zellyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do too. But it saddens me how often the most enjoyable StackOverflow discussions also contain notices that they're closed for being offtopic, allowed to continue to exist only because grandfathered in, etc.

I found myself more and nore hesitant to use stack overflow and I think a big reason why is vecause of all the useful questions I've seen crushed there. "This could have been my question, even after reading stack overflow for years I cannot see why this is should attract flags. Better be careful." Or "If this really useful question is not productive, what will my be." Or "They'll certainly find a question about somet…

> I'm working on a concept for a q/a site for people who would enjoy answering questions and/or get answers to questions more than they like playing teacher, mod or what do I know.

Isn't that sort of what Quora is? I've only visited Quora through links from HN but the threads there that have been linked here seem to be that kind.

(The main reason I don't use Quora directly is that I dislike the way they always try to force visitors to register in order to browse the site. Same goes with Pinterest.)

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

#69

Post by Maybestring »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
empath75 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's how SomethingAwful worked as well. While money isn't an equitable solution, and it gives the forum a financial incentive to ban users, I think the idea of forcing users to somehow put some skin in the game is a great idea.

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

#70

Post by evilnight »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #10

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.

There have been several discussions about that (and about images in general). Right now the consensus is that there are far better places for porn all over the internet and it's a niche that brings in too much negative behavior. In a nutshell, it's not something they are interested in having on the site.
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