evilnight

He wrote Automoderator, SubredditSimulator, and worked on Gold too.

Indeed. Anyone interested should check out the initial announcement on the blog: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Privacy oriented, open source, user funded, focused on quality content, aiming to develop a user-centric moderation system like slashdot and stack exchange that puts moderation into the hands of the people who participate in each individual community.

If you have a reddit account, you can visit /r/tildes and leave a reply in the sticky invite thread to get an invite code within a day. Or, you can send an email to [email protected] to get one.

It's worth noting that Tildes is created and operated by Deimos, the same guy who created reddit's automoderator and subredditsimulator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want screenshots, here you go. 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.