Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
blog.tildes.net
blog.tildes.net
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.
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.
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).
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 can create as many sockpuppets as they want with no problem.
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.
source: https://docs.tildes.net/contact
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.
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.
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 take away their ability to use them. And if they also have to build up to being able to use tags in the first place, that makes it way more difficult to keep abusing something since they can't just create a new account to immediately circumvent any punishment.
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.
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.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.
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
I'd totally forgotten how that era felt. Thanks for reminding me!
/r/popular is /r/all but with some more controversial/niche subreddits filtered out.
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.
"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.
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.)
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...
I believe they are surfing on the strength of past contributions, and very dedicated in-group contributors, not by harnessing the world.
Counter-example: 99% of my Wikipedia activity is fixing typos here and there and I never got any issue.
StackOverflow might as well just be put into read-only mode at this point. Asking new questions is more likely than not going to end up with your question locked for some reason. It's a super useful archive of questions and answers from back in the day when they still let people ask questions, but as far as I can tell no new useful content is being added. A few of the stack exchange sites are still allowing questions, but on the programming one the "ask a question" button is just a decoy.
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?
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), 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.
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?
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.
I will give a hopefully not too controversial example: tax policy.
I'd feel comfortable asserting (while standing in front of God at the entrance to the spirit world, so I must be honest) that well over 50% of people believe that <their person favorite economic policy> is(!) the "best way" to run a society, for <reasons> and <citations of "studies">. The reality though is, it is a matter of opinion, not of fact. And even if it was "objectively provable", that proof only holds under certain circumstances. The optimum policy varies based on the input parameters, which vary over time, but it also assumes we are all optimizing for the same thing!
Or in other words, the correct answer is very often: "it depends". You can see all sorts of people happily agreeing with this principle in their daily lives. How many people would get really, really angry if I said Vanilla is "the best ice cream flavor", or that "saving 25% of your net income is a wise strategy, if you can manage it". But wander into topics such as gender, sexuality, politics, etc and most of these very same people will become very emotional and illogical very, very fast.
If there was a site whose administrators were absolutely hardcore about not violating that principle (asserting that grey is white or black is not allowed, period, with penalty of a temporary or permanent ban), I think it could not only work, but if all the pieces fell together in the right way (with intelligent help and cooperation from admins/mods/users, and maybe even input from a broad spectrum of serious professional psychologists/sociologists/etc), it could change the world. I truly believe that.
EDIT: I'm kind of on the fence about whether this strict rule should be site-wide, or only in certain subforums, I could make an argument either way. I think it's fun to think about.
Also: I fully acknowledge I am one of the assholes I mention above. I'm an "asshole" because I actually believe ridiculously strongly about the importance of truth and logic (but also emotion), and that it matters more than almost anything. Literally millions of people die on a fairly regular basis because humanity can't get it's sh*t together on a handful of problems, most of which (but not all!) really aren't that complicated.
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
Do you ever talk about this in meatspace? Personally, the inability for many people to grasp this has been quite frustrating.
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
This is uncanny -- it's like I'm listening to myself speak. I'd be interested in talking to you privately if you're interested. Shoot me a message at the address in my profile.
me "at" hkmurakami.com
Apologies for my cryptic code (is that statement redundant?)
And I don't mean that in a trolling way, I mean that sincerely and literally.
Less flippantly, we may not have any special access to moral rightness; in fact if there's one important conclusion of 20th century moral philosophy it's that there's no exogenous moral truth to be found; but we definitely do know a number of things are wrong and lead to moral disaster on a colossal scale. This is why you have to ban racial supremacists. It's happening all over again with the Rohingya.
There is certainly a large band of "extremism or acceptable questioning of the status quo", but anyone running a discussion forum has to be aware that they can't disclaim all moral responsibility for hate spread on it.
The problem is, there is far from an accepted common definition (by design, I'd argue) for "racial supremacists".
> It's happening all over again with the Rohingya.
Is this related to online forums somehow or just a reference to consequences?
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.
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...
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.
As opposed to exactly what time in the history of humanity where this was not the case?
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.
Tribal identity is also not new. If there is anything new, it is the existence of a situation where identity tribes can be maintained while being geographically diffuse and intermixed with other identity tribes, which makes it less likely for conflict between identity groups to be quickly resolved to a more stable state by the losing group being excluded from a geographically region with residual members being expelled, forcibly converted or voluntarily assimilated into the locally dominant group, or killed.
Arguably, this is in many ways an improvement, though it does make ongoing inter-group invective worse.
HN distinctly attracts tech people, and Voat explicitly attracted Reddit outcasts.
Accessibility and i18n aren't mentioned which is unfortunate.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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 :-).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you plan to handle scoring? Visible up/down votes? Upvotes and flags? Time based with no scoring?
"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-o...
Maybe then you'd be interested in this project I'm doing:
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-.... — 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?
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.
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
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.
I suspect the downvotes are not because of your valid opinion, but the strong, perhaps aggressive, way you deliver it.