10 ms·

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

116 points by Deimorz 8y ago

ntallen 8y ago
Great to see a new alternative opening up.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bsilvereagle 8y ago
For those hunting for a sign up link, it appears to be an invite only alpha. How do you plan to handle scoring? Visible up/down votes? Upvotes and flags? Time based with no scoring?
- Deimorz 8y ago
  There's some information about the current voting mechanics on this page: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics "Upvotes and flags" would be the closest, though the "flags" aren't necessarily a bad thing, for example you can flag things as a joke. I'm also trying to make sure that there are good time-based sortings so that people have predictable feeds - at the moment, there's both a "newest" sort that's just chronological, as well as an "activity" one that works like a forum, where active threads keep coming back up to the top. There's a bit more info about my feelings about that here, as well: https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-own-decisions-about-what-they-want-to-see https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-o...
Deimorz 8y ago
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 at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), but you're definitely welcome to invites. Since HN doesn't have private messaging (Tildes does!) please send me an email if you're interested in an invite, and feel free to ask questions here.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- se7entime 8y ago
  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 https://docs.tildes.net/contact
  - pacmansyyu 8y ago
    I am sorry, I usually don't do this but I guess the person you're replying to is the creator of Tildes.
- m0meni 8y ago
  What's the tech stack?
  - azban 8y ago
    from the docs: Here's some of the main technology being used on Tildes: Python 3.6 with the Pyramid web framework PostgreSQL 10 Redis 4 intercooler.js and jQuery.
  - http-teapot 8y ago
    https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#use-modern-versions-of-simple-reliable-boring-technology https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#use-modern-versions-...
- iooi 8y ago
  > imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects How do you compare the site to Reddit? Curious since you're pretty much branding it as an alternative to Reddit by disclosing your previous job there.
  - Deimorz 8y ago
    It's going to have a lot of similarities to reddit - reddit does a lot of things right. However, there are also quite a few mechanics on reddit that are too ingrained now for them to ever be able to change, and some of those really hurt the site's ability to have high-quality content. So I'm hoping to try and address a lot of those issues with different or adjusted mechanics - finding a voting/ranking system that isn't biased towards "quick entertainment", moderation systems that don't result in communities needing to relocate to new subreddits all the time, and so on.
pythonistic 8y ago
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? Is strict moderation the only way to keep groups, or entire sites, from becoming friendly to only one point of view?
- Deimorz 8y ago
  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/ChangeMyView and /r/AskHistorians. In terms of pure mechanisms, there are a few things. Tildes doesn't have any downvoting, so that alone takes a lot of the "conflict" out of interactions. Also, for the foreseeable future, new groups won't be user-created, so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies. We've also been talking a lot about a sort of trust/reputation system (https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future), which will make it so that if people get banned for being an asshole, they can't just create a new account and immediately carry on doing the same thing.
  - annabellish 8y ago
    >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?
LeoPanthera 8y ago
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.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  > This has some interesting possibilities—someone filtering out all nsfw posts would also not see anything tagged nsfw.gore, but someone else could choose to filter only nsfw.gore and still see posts with other tags like nsfw.nudity or plain nsfw. That section from "Mechanics" [0] makes it sound like there will be no adult content ban. There is more that makes me think that, but this makes it pretty clear. [0]: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics
- Deimorz 8y ago
  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.
- evilnight 8y ago
  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.
Mahn 8y ago
I'm intrigued, but I think it could use some sort of a demo or something to get an idea of what to expect. As it stands I don't know if I really want an invite, because other than the ideology, which is great, I don't know what is there. (I get that it's a Reddit derivative, but still, I like to play with things before committing to them).
- syrrim 8y ago
  I find it strange. They openly advertise it being open source, yet have no way as of yet to access the source code. Even if they don't want people playing with their instance yet, it would be nice if I could host an instance myself (or at least glance at the code). This is especially egregious as one would hope open source to mean not just availability of source, but an open development model (involving the community in important decisions), which this sets a bad tone for. The ideology itself seems to be a series of blind nuances, without commitment. They profess to want to balance allowing free speech and having a safe space, yet they don't say where they fall on the spectrum, what criteria they use to determine something being over the line, etc. It's very easy to say you care about these sorts of things, much harder to do so in practice.
  - el_cid 8y ago
    Imo one approach is not going to work for all communities. A project like this which wants to satisfy the entire spectrum on various criterias should cede control to its users. Let the communities decide on every parameter that affects them. Decentralization.
notheguyouthink 8y ago
Is this project trying to do anything to solve/improve manipulation / disinformation by large entities? That's my largest concern in the modern era - information is very difficult to ingest not due to discovery, but trust. One finds it difficult to ingest information from a non-educated domain. Disinformation has made this problem infinitely worse. Thoughts?
- evilnight 8y ago
  We don't have a 'how to' for solving that problem, but yes, everyone wants to stick to fact-based discussions and informed opinions as much as possible. The site will remain invite-only for a very long time, possibly forever. Tildes tracks who invites whom, and the behavior of the people you invite will reflect on you. If a group of spammers (or stormfront etc) gain a foothold, their entire invite chain can be excised, and they'll be looking for invites again. Bans matter. Everything on tildes must be earned through the trust system on a per-community basis. Young accounts will not have access to a lot of the site's features, and will only gain access by participating in good faith and getting good feedback (in the form of votes and other metrics) from other users. If the account is banned, they have to re-earn all of that trust. One of the benefits of not being focused on 'growth at all costs' to please investors is the ability to be more decisive about what users you allow to use the website. The only guideline for that is simple - remain civil. People who behave in a civil manner won't have problems. People who don't, won't be users for long. This should make it a hell of a lot harder for spammers, trolls, and shills to game the site. Figuring out how to do all this is one of the most active areas of discussion on the site.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  This is a really difficult problem because those large entities often have a ton of resources and can be very persistent about circumventing any ways you try to stop them - it's often literally their job. 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 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/ 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.
http-teapot 8y ago
I find the Technical Goals page particularly interesting and debatable: https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals Accessibility and i18n aren't mentioned which is unfortunate.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  A lot of the docs pages are still very scattered and incomplete, but those are definitely things that I should add. Accessibility is definitely important to me, and luckily a lot of it comes naturally because I'm doing things in a very "old school" way like... actually using semantic, hand-written HTML instead of building it as an SPA that outputs unaccessible div-soup. I've done at least some checking to make sure it's decently accessible, but I know there's a lot more that I can do. I'm hoping to get some people involved that are more familiar with screen-readers and other assistive tech to help me figure out things I need to change. And of course, once it's open-sourced (should be in the next couple of weeks), if people want to help contribute accessibility improvements that would be hugely appreciated. As for i18n, it's not something I'm planning in the immediate future. Since one of the main goals on the site is keeping up quality, it's necessary for me to be able to understand what's going on in all the groups. However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy.
  - http-teapot 8y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to write this insightful answer. I really like your approach to this problem. I like the old-school and open not-for-profit approach. You are in for a tough ride and I look forward to hear more about it.
  - wott 8y ago
    > However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy. 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 :-)
zellyn 8y ago
It'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 structure, but StackOverflow has economic incentives to solve the problem, so I follow them with interest. Reddit seems to remain vibrant, albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit… Add Tildes to the list of projects I'm watching with keen interest. I believe the question of how to keep a massive online community healthy is actually a key problem of our times.
- trendia 8y ago
  > 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 the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong
  - petsagouris 8y ago
    > 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. I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!
  - macNchz 8y ago
    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.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
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 situation where I'm afraid to comment on anything and never provides me the ability to downvote comments myself. Edit: Hah, what irony https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of-downvoting https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of-downvoting
- evilnight 8y ago
  If you want screenshots, here you go. https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk 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.
- DanBC 8y ago
  > 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.
kodablah 8y ago
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" the other direction. That I can contribute without putting restrictions on the recipient. I think in our current times, preventing commercial and closed source use has little value as people just go elsewhere. I don't want this to devolve into a pros/cons of copy-left discussion, but in general the fewer adoption restrictions the better I'd say for projects like these. I will say I agree with almost all of your other goals (except some of the stack :-).
- cfabbro 8y ago
  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 https://gitlab.com/tildes
  - kodablah 8y ago
    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.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  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.
Chardok 8y ago
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 the inflammatory responses that usually accompany them.
- rc_bhg 8y ago
  I feel like this will be addressed when it happens. But its not an issue until its an issue.
  - andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    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.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  I don't know if this is a sentiment others share, but I feel like at some point from 2003-2015 (thinking in terms of 4chan's history) the Internet went from having people who said really crazy shit just being weird people from the Internet to people who said really crazy shit distinctly being far-right and far-left people. Or, they were labeled as such, when in the past, they wouldn't have been.
  - SheepSlapper 8y ago
    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 curious game... the only winning move is not to play.
H1Supreme 8y ago
Sorry if this is due to my own ignorance, but what's the pronunciation of this? Is it plural "~"?
- evilnight 8y ago
  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.
deleted 8y ago
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mabynogy 8y ago
We're trying to do that too with IRC for a community of people interested by programming (http://dailyprog.org/chat http://dailyprog.org/chat).
zokier 8y ago
I 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.
- evilnight 8y ago
  There's been some pie-in-the-sky chatter about that. When the tildes identity system (with the trust and reputation and karma decay) is fully cooked, it might be possible to extend that by setting up a mastodon instance. That's not going to happen for a long time, though. The site itself has to come first.
DC-3 8y ago
In a strange event of serendipity, my frustration with the reddit redesign boiled over today and I paid a visit - as I do once every few months - to /r/RedditAlternatives. Not two hours previously, this site had been posted - and from my initial skim-reading of its ethos page onwards I have been blown away by how well engineered it is. I've spent three years building up a mental model of the perfect community site, and it's just turned up out of the blue as tildes.net.
- evilnight 8y ago
  Tildes is, in a way, built by /r/theoryofreddit and some awareness of past social media and forum history. The ideas aren't new, not really. We've been on reddit bitching about reddit for 10 years. All tildes is came out of those bitch-fests about what reddit and other sites lack, how they should operate, why can't we have nice things, etc etc etc. Since reddit refuses to evolve, here we are.
notatoad 8y ago
This looks interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical of the revenue model. I have a hard time believing a general purpose discussion site can survive on donations. Especially one with a moderation policy. If you see any success, you're going to end up at a point where you need paid moderators - volunteer moderators who are only motivated by the tiny bit of power they have been granted are a big part of the problem with toxic discussion sites like reddit. If you have no revenue, you have no guarantee of trusted community management. And thats assuming that you can somehow collect enough donations to cover hosting, which also seems unlikely.
KajMagnus 8y ago
> The site's still very minimal at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), Maybe then you'd be interested in this project I'm doing: https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io It has features from Reddit, & Reddit like sub communities, groups & permissions, ... + Slack like chat, StackOverflow Q&A. There are improvements over HN: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-.... — I'm wondering if it is further ahead than what Tilde is currently, and maybe can time be saved if using it? Then you & I could add features to Talkyard that Tilde needs ... (open source) ... Or maybe, since you've been coding for half a year? you've come a long way already ... and it's too late to consider using something else?

116 points by Deimorz 8y ago

ntallen 8y ago

Great to see a new alternative opening up.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bsilvereagle 8y ago

For those hunting for a sign up link, it appears to be an invite only alpha. How do you plan to handle scoring? Visible up/down votes? Upvotes and flags? Time based with no scoring?

Deimorz 8y ago
There's some information about the current voting mechanics on this page: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics "Upvotes and flags" would be the closest, though the "flags" aren't necessarily a bad thing, for example you can flag things as a joke. I'm also trying to make sure that there are good time-based sortings so that people have predictable feeds - at the moment, there's both a "newest" sort that's just chronological, as well as an "activity" one that works like a forum, where active threads keep coming back up to the top. There's a bit more info about my feelings about that here, as well: https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-own-decisions-about-what-they-want-to-see https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-o...

Deimorz 8y ago

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 at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), but you're definitely welcome to invites. Since HN doesn't have private messaging (Tildes does!) please send me an email if you're interested in an invite, and feel free to ask questions here.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
se7entime 8y ago
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 https://docs.tildes.net/contact
- pacmansyyu 8y ago
  I am sorry, I usually don't do this but I guess the person you're replying to is the creator of Tildes.
m0meni 8y ago
What's the tech stack?
- azban 8y ago
  from the docs: Here's some of the main technology being used on Tildes: Python 3.6 with the Pyramid web framework PostgreSQL 10 Redis 4 intercooler.js and jQuery.
- http-teapot 8y ago
  https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#use-modern-versions-of-simple-reliable-boring-technology https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#use-modern-versions-...
iooi 8y ago
> imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects How do you compare the site to Reddit? Curious since you're pretty much branding it as an alternative to Reddit by disclosing your previous job there.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  It's going to have a lot of similarities to reddit - reddit does a lot of things right. However, there are also quite a few mechanics on reddit that are too ingrained now for them to ever be able to change, and some of those really hurt the site's ability to have high-quality content. So I'm hoping to try and address a lot of those issues with different or adjusted mechanics - finding a voting/ranking system that isn't biased towards "quick entertainment", moderation systems that don't result in communities needing to relocate to new subreddits all the time, and so on.

pythonistic 8y ago

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? Is strict moderation the only way to keep groups, or entire sites, from becoming friendly to only one point of view?

Deimorz 8y ago
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/ChangeMyView and /r/AskHistorians. In terms of pure mechanisms, there are a few things. Tildes doesn't have any downvoting, so that alone takes a lot of the "conflict" out of interactions. Also, for the foreseeable future, new groups won't be user-created, so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies. We've also been talking a lot about a sort of trust/reputation system (https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future), which will make it so that if people get banned for being an asshole, they can't just create a new account and immediately carry on doing the same thing.
- annabellish 8y ago
  >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?

LeoPanthera 8y ago

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.

Semaphor 8y ago
> This has some interesting possibilities—someone filtering out all nsfw posts would also not see anything tagged nsfw.gore, but someone else could choose to filter only nsfw.gore and still see posts with other tags like nsfw.nudity or plain nsfw. That section from "Mechanics" [0] makes it sound like there will be no adult content ban. There is more that makes me think that, but this makes it pretty clear. [0]: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics
Deimorz 8y ago
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.
evilnight 8y ago
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.

Mahn 8y ago

I'm intrigued, but I think it could use some sort of a demo or something to get an idea of what to expect. As it stands I don't know if I really want an invite, because other than the ideology, which is great, I don't know what is there. (I get that it's a Reddit derivative, but still, I like to play with things before committing to them).

syrrim 8y ago
I find it strange. They openly advertise it being open source, yet have no way as of yet to access the source code. Even if they don't want people playing with their instance yet, it would be nice if I could host an instance myself (or at least glance at the code). This is especially egregious as one would hope open source to mean not just availability of source, but an open development model (involving the community in important decisions), which this sets a bad tone for. The ideology itself seems to be a series of blind nuances, without commitment. They profess to want to balance allowing free speech and having a safe space, yet they don't say where they fall on the spectrum, what criteria they use to determine something being over the line, etc. It's very easy to say you care about these sorts of things, much harder to do so in practice.
- el_cid 8y ago
  Imo one approach is not going to work for all communities. A project like this which wants to satisfy the entire spectrum on various criterias should cede control to its users. Let the communities decide on every parameter that affects them. Decentralization.

notheguyouthink 8y ago

Is this project trying to do anything to solve/improve manipulation / disinformation by large entities? That's my largest concern in the modern era - information is very difficult to ingest not due to discovery, but trust. One finds it difficult to ingest information from a non-educated domain. Disinformation has made this problem infinitely worse. Thoughts?

evilnight 8y ago
We don't have a 'how to' for solving that problem, but yes, everyone wants to stick to fact-based discussions and informed opinions as much as possible. The site will remain invite-only for a very long time, possibly forever. Tildes tracks who invites whom, and the behavior of the people you invite will reflect on you. If a group of spammers (or stormfront etc) gain a foothold, their entire invite chain can be excised, and they'll be looking for invites again. Bans matter. Everything on tildes must be earned through the trust system on a per-community basis. Young accounts will not have access to a lot of the site's features, and will only gain access by participating in good faith and getting good feedback (in the form of votes and other metrics) from other users. If the account is banned, they have to re-earn all of that trust. One of the benefits of not being focused on 'growth at all costs' to please investors is the ability to be more decisive about what users you allow to use the website. The only guideline for that is simple - remain civil. People who behave in a civil manner won't have problems. People who don't, won't be users for long. This should make it a hell of a lot harder for spammers, trolls, and shills to game the site. Figuring out how to do all this is one of the most active areas of discussion on the site.
Deimorz 8y ago
This is a really difficult problem because those large entities often have a ton of resources and can be very persistent about circumventing any ways you try to stop them - it's often literally their job. 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 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/ 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.

http-teapot 8y ago

I find the Technical Goals page particularly interesting and debatable: https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals Accessibility and i18n aren't mentioned which is unfortunate.

Deimorz 8y ago
A lot of the docs pages are still very scattered and incomplete, but those are definitely things that I should add. Accessibility is definitely important to me, and luckily a lot of it comes naturally because I'm doing things in a very "old school" way like... actually using semantic, hand-written HTML instead of building it as an SPA that outputs unaccessible div-soup. I've done at least some checking to make sure it's decently accessible, but I know there's a lot more that I can do. I'm hoping to get some people involved that are more familiar with screen-readers and other assistive tech to help me figure out things I need to change. And of course, once it's open-sourced (should be in the next couple of weeks), if people want to help contribute accessibility improvements that would be hugely appreciated. As for i18n, it's not something I'm planning in the immediate future. Since one of the main goals on the site is keeping up quality, it's necessary for me to be able to understand what's going on in all the groups. However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy.
- http-teapot 8y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to write this insightful answer. I really like your approach to this problem. I like the old-school and open not-for-profit approach. You are in for a tough ride and I look forward to hear more about it.
- wott 8y ago
  > However, it's definitely a possibility in the future, and the organization of the groups into a hierarchy some some interesting possibilities for it, where different languages could have their own separate group hierarchy. 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 :-)

zellyn 8y ago

It'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 structure, but StackOverflow has economic incentives to solve the problem, so I follow them with interest. Reddit seems to remain vibrant, albeit often a wretched hive of scum and villainy depending on subreddit… Add Tildes to the list of projects I'm watching with keen interest. I believe the question of how to keep a massive online community healthy is actually a key problem of our times.

trendia 8y ago
> 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 the useful content often falls victim to Gell-Mann amnesia, giving votes to anyone who sounds like an expert. It's hard to identify when someone is really an expert or whether they're merely writing like one... The worst I saw was an explanation of laminar and turbulent flow that was 100% wrong, but highly upvoted until a few hours later people pointed out why it was wrong
- petsagouris 8y ago
  > 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. I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!
- macNchz 8y ago
  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.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

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 situation where I'm afraid to comment on anything and never provides me the ability to downvote comments myself. Edit: Hah, what irony https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of-downvoting https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#lack-of-downvoting

evilnight 8y ago
If you want screenshots, here you go. https://imgur.com/a/qit6zPk 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.
DanBC 8y ago
> 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.

kodablah 8y ago

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" the other direction. That I can contribute without putting restrictions on the recipient. I think in our current times, preventing commercial and closed source use has little value as people just go elsewhere. I don't want this to devolve into a pros/cons of copy-left discussion, but in general the fewer adoption restrictions the better I'd say for projects like these. I will say I agree with almost all of your other goals (except some of the stack :-).

cfabbro 8y ago
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 https://gitlab.com/tildes
- kodablah 8y ago
  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.
Deimorz 8y ago
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.

Chardok 8y ago

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 the inflammatory responses that usually accompany them.

rc_bhg 8y ago
I feel like this will be addressed when it happens. But its not an issue until its an issue.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  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.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
I don't know if this is a sentiment others share, but I feel like at some point from 2003-2015 (thinking in terms of 4chan's history) the Internet went from having people who said really crazy shit just being weird people from the Internet to people who said really crazy shit distinctly being far-right and far-left people. Or, they were labeled as such, when in the past, they wouldn't have been.
- SheepSlapper 8y ago
  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 curious game... the only winning move is not to play.

H1Supreme 8y ago

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

evilnight 8y ago
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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mabynogy 8y ago

We're trying to do that too with IRC for a community of people interested by programming (http://dailyprog.org/chat http://dailyprog.org/chat).

zokier 8y ago

I 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.

evilnight 8y ago
There's been some pie-in-the-sky chatter about that. When the tildes identity system (with the trust and reputation and karma decay) is fully cooked, it might be possible to extend that by setting up a mastodon instance. That's not going to happen for a long time, though. The site itself has to come first.

DC-3 8y ago

In a strange event of serendipity, my frustration with the reddit redesign boiled over today and I paid a visit - as I do once every few months - to /r/RedditAlternatives. Not two hours previously, this site had been posted - and from my initial skim-reading of its ethos page onwards I have been blown away by how well engineered it is. I've spent three years building up a mental model of the perfect community site, and it's just turned up out of the blue as tildes.net.

evilnight 8y ago
Tildes is, in a way, built by /r/theoryofreddit and some awareness of past social media and forum history. The ideas aren't new, not really. We've been on reddit bitching about reddit for 10 years. All tildes is came out of those bitch-fests about what reddit and other sites lack, how they should operate, why can't we have nice things, etc etc etc. Since reddit refuses to evolve, here we are.

notatoad 8y ago

This looks interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical of the revenue model. I have a hard time believing a general purpose discussion site can survive on donations. Especially one with a moderation policy. If you see any success, you're going to end up at a point where you need paid moderators - volunteer moderators who are only motivated by the tiny bit of power they have been granted are a big part of the problem with toxic discussion sites like reddit. If you have no revenue, you have no guarantee of trusted community management. And thats assuming that you can somehow collect enough donations to cover hosting, which also seems unlikely.

KajMagnus 8y ago

> The site's still very minimal at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), Maybe then you'd be interested in this project I'm doing: https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io It has features from Reddit, & Reddit like sub communities, groups & permissions, ... + Slack like chat, StackOverflow Q&A. There are improvements over HN: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-.... — I'm wondering if it is further ahead than what Tilde is currently, and maybe can time be saved if using it? Then you & I could add features to Talkyard that Tilde needs ... (open source) ... Or maybe, since you've been coding for half a year? you've come a long way already ... and it's too late to consider using something else?