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

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. Getting a clique of accounts that upvotes the same way you do is not so costly if you're just driving an API.

It may be counterintuitive, but... imagine you have some metric that you were considering using as a criterion for granting trust to a user. Let's say you've got the "TrollPercent" metric that shows the percentage of someone's content has been tagged as trolling, or the "KeynesianBeautyVoter" metric that shows how well someone's votes correlate with everyone else's. Then rather than automatically changing that account's status on the basis of these metrics, their account is merely flagged for a human to review. A human moderator can then say "oh, that person's content really is a cut above" or "wait, this person has only ever accessed the site via the API and they've somehow upvoted hundreds of posts in the last 10 minutes..."

Anyway, none of this concern is meant to detract from the essential goodness of the idea, and I hope this succeeds.

Finally a Reddit spin-off with a hierarchy! It should do marvels for discoverability, which is dreadful on flat Reddit-like sites.

In my dreams, I'd like an even more Usenet-like system:

* allow each base hierarchy to follow its own set of rules and govern its sub-groups;

* a decentralised system, where each server is free to select which hierarchies it wants to relay or not.

But anyway, even with a single server and single root system, having a hierarchy is already a big 'plus' in terms of organisation.

And if someone really disagrees with the official tildes server governance, since the code is open-sourced, he can launch his own server with his own (disconnected) root hierarchy.

PS: after writing this, I see that the decentralisation matter has a FAQ entry :-)

Here is an n-dash, an m-dash, and a hyphen. –,—,-

We expect discussions about wars to be tricky, but we don't expect discussion about the punctuation used in titles to be so hard: Read the "Mexican–American War" / "Mexican—American War" discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...

Here's several thousand words of discussion. (Closed with no consensus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...

Look at the word counts for these meta discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

Dashes and hyphens made it to Arbcom (this also has links to various Ani threads): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

One of the core systems that I've been thinking about a lot for Tildes and that we've started talking about is a sort of trust/reputation based one, there's a basic description of it here: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future

If implemented properly, this will mean that for people to build up any significant influence in particular groups in the site, they'll have to participate in them as quality members. That's very difficult to do, and is kind of like that old xkcd comic about turning spammers into constructive participants: https://xkcd.com/810/

Also, by having a decay on the trust/reputation, it makes it even more difficult for them to acquire (including by purchasing, hacking, etc.) a significant number of accounts that can push certain content.