Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.tildes.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

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

#81

Post by kodablah »

cfabbro wrote: post #74
kodablah wrote: post #23

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" t…

AFAIK it’s literally just a matter of not yet deciding on the license yet which is why deimorz solicited advice about it on the announcement. He already has gitlab set up and we are using it internally. Open Source is coming very soon, we promise. https://gitlab.com/tildes

Cool, it's OK to start code without a license and still let people see it. Similar to other "open" things, to be truly open you don't have to wait until things are set just right.

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

#82

Post by Deimorz »

jpfed wrote: post #71
_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…

This looks really cool! There's a lot here that I agree with. I strongly recommend avoiding the urge to prematurely automate processes involving trust (or granting people additional powers). It would allow you to grow faster, but you don't need to grow fast. Trust signals are useful when they are costly (at least, costly to fake). And if your site can be driven by an API, that changes what is considered costly. Getti…

Definitely agreed, I specifically decided to start the alpha with the site being quite minimal, instead of trying to build a bunch of complex systems up-front.

I think it's really important that this kind of stuff gets built in an evolutionary sort of way. Trying to predict how humans will use a system before they're actually using it is almost impossible, and I'd much rather do it by seeing how things are being used in practice, and making adjustments based on that (as well as discussing with people how they think the changes will affect the site).

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

#83

Post by Semaphor »

Deimorz wrote: post #36
Semaphor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sounds good, thanks for the reply :) I'm mostly a passive user so I won't be requesting an invite, but I'll be looking forward to the launch :)

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

#84

Post by Deimorz »

mistermann wrote: post #43
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…

A very big problem I see, even in "good" communities, is a pattern of well-intentioned people commonly mistaking popular opinions for facts. Of course this is inevitable to some degree when emotional beings are involved, but the part that I think is worrying is that more and more genuinely intelligent people are starting to become undisciplined and let their integrity with respect to the truth slide, because it feels…

I think /r/ChangeMyView has a really good approach to this sort of thing (I'm using them as an example a lot here, but it's because I think they really do run one of the highest-quality communities on the internet).

One of their core rules is that people posting there have to demonstrate that they're open to having their opinion changed - they can't use the post just to soapbox. There's a lot written about it here, it's been very well thought-out: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_b

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

#85

Post by Deimorz »

kodablah wrote: post #23

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" t…

As mentioned, the license is a factor, but there are a couple of other things I wanted to get done first as well. I feel that it's pretty important to have good documentation available immediately about how to get a dev version running, how things work, how to contribute, and so on. I don't want to just dump a pile of code out by itself, that's a bad experience for potential contributors.

It won't be long until it's open-sourced - a week or two at most. Before today, the site hasn't had very many users at all, and it's definitely not something I'm going to be keeping hidden/closed while I continue to develop.

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

#86

Post by archagon »

hkmurakami wrote: post #21
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.

I'm sorry, but just because two parties have equal amounts of power and vitriol towards each other does not give them any degree moral parity. This sort of "equivalence by emotion" means absolutely nothing.

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

#87

Post by hk__2 »

zellyn wrote: post #44
knowuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc. I believe they are surfing on the strength of past contributions, and very dedicated in-group contributors, not by harnessing the world.

> Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc.

Counter-example: 99% of my Wikipedia activity is fixing typos here and there and I never got any issue.

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

#88

Post by mistermann »

Deimorz wrote: post #84
mistermann wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very big problem I see, even in "good" communities, is a pattern of well-intentioned people commonly mistaking popular opinions for facts. Of course this is inevitable to some degree when emotional beings are involved, but the part that I think is worrying is that more and more genuinely intelligent people are starting to become undisciplined and let their integrity with respect to the truth slide, because it feels…

I think /r/ChangeMyView has a really good approach to this sort of thing (I'm using them as an example a lot here, but it's because I think they really do run one of the highest-quality communities on the internet). One of their core rules is that people posting there have to demonstrate that they're open to having their opinion changed - they can't use the post just to soapbox. There's a lot written about it here, i…

Thanks, I've never really gone there before, sounds like maybe I should.

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

#89

Post by mistermann »

pjc50 wrote: post #53
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?…

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

What if the extreme views may be correct?

And I don't mean that in a trolling way, I mean that sincerely and literally.

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

#90

Post by mistermann »

archagon wrote: post #86
hkmurakami wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm sorry, but just because two parties have equal amounts of power and vitriol towards each other does not give them any degree moral parity. This sort of "equivalence by emotion" means absolutely nothing.

It's interesting, he made absolutely no mention that he considered them morally equivalent, yet you refer to that notion in a very passionate manner.

Do you believe it is possible for anyone to hold partially imperfect beliefs? Do you believe it is possible for you to hold partially imperfect beliefs? Do you think it's possible that some people mistake matters of opinion (or personal preference) for matters of fact? Do you think it's possible for two people two hold differing opinions on a specific subject, with neither of them being wrong?

I appreciate that in these times these types of questions might be considered deliberately hostile, but I say them with non-hostile intent, as hard to believe as that may be. I think they are valid, and extremely relevant.

It's these sorts of questions that I hope some day can be discussed in a reasonable and respectful manner in a public forum. There was a time not so long ago that we could do so, I hope initiatives like this might help to regain that capability in the internet age.

I will link a few videos that I believe are quite thought provoking in this respect, I would be surprised if you don't as well after you've finished watching them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SOQduoLgRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMqPcVUTlD4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gZ5UD1hFM4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKIhk3zOE4k

Post reply on HN