
Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests - Deimorz
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
======
Deimorz
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.

~~~
empath75
Are you familiar with metafilter.com and their moderation model?

They charge a one time $5 membership to join, and it's heavily moderated, and
they don't tolerate trolls or jerks very long before banning them and
returning their money. They're a small scale site, and have a handful of
moderators, but requiring someone to lay out actual cash to post seems to
deter a lot of the behavior you see at reddit where anybody can create as many
sockpuppets as they want with no problem.

~~~
pjc50
I thought they kept the money from banned people? Surely that's the point?

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

------
zellyn
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
> 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

~~~
Deimorz
If you haven't seen yet, reddit itself is also tilting heavily towards
prioritizing funny/quick content (even more than it did before) as well. The
new desktop redesign that's in progress has infinite scroll, auto-expanded
images and auto-playing gifs/videos, and so on. They also added a new default
frontpage sort (that you can't change) that tries to hide any posts you've
seen before every time you load it, which kind of destroys the ability to have
an ongoing discussion thread.

~~~
f1nch3r
The whole redesign has been painful. At first I liked it, but some of the
things you've mentioned here as well as the lagginess of the site have really
soured me on Reddit.

------
pythonistic
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
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
>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?

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

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

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

------
Chardok
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.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
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
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in
> order to dismiss or demonize

As opposed to exactly what time in the history of humanity where this was not
the case?

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

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

~~~
dragonwriter
> Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES
> into boxes

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.

------
http-teapot
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
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.

~~~
wott
> _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
:-)

------
kodablah
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
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
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.

------
Mahn
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
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
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
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
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.

------
DC-3
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
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.

------
LeoPanthera
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.

~~~
Deimorz
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.

------
bsilvereagle
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
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-o...](https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#let-users-make-their-own-
decisions-about-what-they-want-to-see)

------
mabynogy
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)).

------
KajMagnus
> 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-...](https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-
improved-3-things). — 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?

------
zokier
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
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.

------
notatoad
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.

------
ntallen
Great to see a new alternative opening up.

------
H1Supreme
Sorry if this is due to my own ignorance, but what's the pronunciation of
this? Is it plural "~"?

~~~
evilnight
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.

------
andrewmcwatters
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
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.

