Topicle Beta
Thanks to everyone for joining! At the suggestion of u/ash2449, I've created a suggestions megathread. What do you want to see developed for the site in terms of new features or alterations of existing features? Please post all your suggestions for the site here.
last edited 1 week ago
21 comments
Hi there. This is a great initiative and thank you for spending your time, resources and effort getting it up and running.
Some additional security suggestions:
1) MFA - TOTP, Passkey, FIDO2...would all help with account security.
2) Email verification - Filters account creation spamming and gives some higher certainty (not much though) whether bots are at play.
3) User-centric IoCs - Some user visible security events like last logged in time and location. Gives a signal to users if their accounts have been breached.
4) Geo-location - The "Account based in..." info seems to change according to VPN status. Not sure if it that's meant to be an initial thing or updated as people change origin IPs.
Happy to discuss or told to bugger off.
Thanks, really appreciate all the detailed feedback.
Thanks for all the feedback. Definitely not a matter of bugger off, really appreciate you engaging so deeply with the material on a security front. It's one of the things I'm obsessing over because I want the site to be as impervious as possible to astroturf, bots, bad actors, anyone with ill intent and other platforms seem to have left exploitable gaps here.
Great to hear that you're on top of 1) and 2). Sorry I missed 3), what you have exceeds expectation, great stuff.
Yes 4) is a an interesting one. Happy to provide more detail and clearer workflows if needed.
Appreciate it! I pushed an update earlier today that I think handles 4). The 'Account based in' setting for user accounts now no longer updates if you're on a datacentre IP or VPN and retains your last value from when you were on non-VPN/datacentre connection. Let me know if you can reproduce the same issue now, and if so, any additional detail would be appreciated. If not, then problem solved!
Editing text is also a feature that is missing. You can still bold i guess if you remember to use * structure but i feel most of us dont remember any of that xd
Need the menu with all the options to adjust text
Yeah markdown is annoying to remember all the ins and outs of it. The toolbar that allows you to format your post is now present in the comment form.
It's also now possible to comment with an image by either using the picture button on the toolbar or by dragging and dropping the image on the comment box. Let me know if this is what you were looking for or whether it still needs tweaks.
Add optional identity verification and revocation for Australians with an associated display checkmark, to make it a little harder for foreign trolls and shills to freely do their thing.
I think a core problem modern social media face is the fact that bots are everywhere and can get around a ton of systems.
IDs mean little when a ton of id info can be found in the dark web from hacks and leaks
Paying for check marks also doesn’t mean much when they can use stolen card info and other online methods.
The most reliable check I have seen is the whole ‘use your camera to check your face while holding your id to confirm it’s you’, so a checkmark that requires this would actually mean something.
Originally I was shying away from this because of how invasive it can feel and how badly people might react, but numerous people today have actually been asking for it, so I'm going to look into adding it. If it gets a terrible backlash, perhaps it can be rethought, but something like it would be a requirement for enabling nsfw content anyway because of the eSafety laws, so perhaps it can be three birds with one stone, verifying the person is a real human, gating mature content and fighting bots.
Some people will definitely not like it, but I am more of the mind that if you are gonna have to do it, at least try to do it right.
It is probably more expensive to do a serious check but it would allow the platform to be advertised as a human only platform.
Something i feel it going to be more desired as bots take over normal social media and you cant trust you are talking to a real person anymore, plus the fact that all the interaction statistics kinda become irrelevant when inflated by bot numbers.
I'm thinking of doing voluntary verification, and you get a verified tick on your profile page and hover profile card. It doesn't scare away users that don't want to do it (fair enough, some people feel quite strongly ideologically against it), but allows you to only respond to verified real people, if you so choose. User profiles still remain anonymous, I don't personally see any of your information, that stays with the verification company and is disposed of once verification is done. I also don't want your data, every bit retained is a potential liability. I'll try and get this feature in asap.
Voluntary is great way, this would also allow nsfw topics for verified people as well.
Real question is what form of verification, i dont know the cost but the whole "Look at the camera while holding your ID" is likely the most secure one but I have only really seen it used for things like contract/credit cards that actually need to confirm its the real person using said id.
Cause you dont want another twitter, as an mmorpg player I know very well that a paywalls are not an obstacle for bots, and finding id photos or info online isnt hard either, I could find korean social security numbers as a teen 18 years ago just so I can play aion 1 beta xD
I would increase the default size of the textarea for creating a new text post. I know it can be resized but it's a confusing and cramped default. The larger, lighter-background bottom area (with the save draft / submit post buttons) draws the eye first and looks more editable than the textarea does. Screenshot attached (Chrome, Windows 11, 1920x1080 screen).
Good call, I'll add that to the todo list.
Ok, this one should now be fixed too. Thanks for the heads up.
Is there any way to control the list of communities in the top? There's lots of stuff in there that I'm not subscribed to and don't want to see. I'd rather have just my subscribed subs there, or a list of "pinned" subs I can order myself, so I can have easy access to the specific communities I want to browse.
Thanks for the feedback. A similar request was made in this thread, not quite the same (they requested a sidebar listing of subscriptions replaces the top entirely, similar to modern reddit, but still a personalized list of subscriptions). The top change is pretty easy to do though, so I'll add it to the set of stuff to look at tomorrow. It's actually a pretty obvious oversight not to personalize it, thanks for drawing attention to it.
I'm looking through site rules and have some concerns about #6 - "Do not editorialise titles"
This is a really good rule for news-oriented communities, where the reason people are subscribing to it is to get a feed of current articles worth paying attention to, without submitter hyperbole hyping it up or distorting it.
But it kind of sucks for education- and discussion-oriented communities around more niche topics, where what makes the article relevant or interesting to the community isn't always clear from a headline often written for a much broader audience. Not being able to add any context to any titles anywhere on the site feels extremely limiting for what kind of content and communities will be able to flourish here. Is there any reason this needs to be a site-wide rule, rather than something community moderators can decide on a community-by-community basis?
I agree with you, the rules are inspired by a pretty strict subreddit and another user pointed out previously how limiting this is to casual discussion and how one-size-fits-all rules don't work. So it's on the roadmap to provide rulesets that mods can pick. I didn't want to make rules a-la-carte settable by moderators, because this leads to rules accumulating to the point where users feel discouraged from posting. And one of the major complains about Reddit is how hostile it is to new users, where there are so many rules set by well-meaning moderators that users become discouraged from participating at all.
So there's a loose-standard-strict rule selector coming. Right now the site-wide rules are strict everywhere, which is stupid in retrospect and will be changed. Thanks for the really detailed feedback, you've hit upon something that is in progress.
Here's the previous discussion about this (other topics too, but rules are covered here): https://topicle.com/t/asktopicle/comments/FLrL5Zl/can_we_get_a_thread_for_suggestion_issues_/
That's unfortunate. Without community-specific rules (among other things, but the ability to set and enforce specific standards is a big one), you're really missing out on distinct communities. r/science, r/askhistorians, r/legaladvice, r/hobbydrama, r/writingprompts, r/SteamDeals... so many thriving communities on Reddit rely on custom community rules to create useful, high-quality, and purpose-driven communities. I would not create a community here (or on any platform) without the ability to set community-specific rules.
Let's be realistic, if reddit were so hostile to new users, it would not have become one of the largest, most used internet platforms in the world. Reddit obviously has problems, but if you're trying to build an alternative, you really need to consider what type of user certain complaints are coming from and why. A ton of the "Reddit censors free speech" complainers are actually just bigots whining that they can't get away with being racist / hateful / harassing there. "There's too many rules on reddit" is not a complaint the majority of users have. It's a complaint primarily from people who can't be bothered to read the rules in a community and then get pissy when their unwanted post is removed. It's a bad idea to limit the entire site based on what's desirable to the lowest common denominator.
This all ties in to some concerns I had from the vibe of the site's Moderator Guidelines as well; it seems like you're building this with an assumption that "moderators (*unpaid volunteers) exist to enforce the site's standards" instead of "the site exists to enable community builders." Fundamentally that's a recipe for failure if you're trying to build a communities-driven platform. The solution to abusive moderators isn't disempowering all moderators and limiting how communities are run into a one-size-fits-all box. It's:
a) empowering users to identify potentially abusive behavior (which your mod log hopefully does)
b) reducing switching costs between communities so that users who don't like the way a community is run (or just want to create a space more receptive to a common but minority interest) have easier ways to visibly fork it and lead other users to alternatives instead of them being locked in.
[Some kind of community forking feature -- where if a percentage of active users of an existing community support a proposal for a new, related community, the system creates that and makes the new community visible in the original community sidebar or another special section (increasingly so if the new community becomes more and more active, decreasingly so if not) -- would actually be a great way in general to support the creation of new, more specific communities out of admin-created broad-topic communities without it happening so early that none of them have any user density and all just end up being ghost towns. e.g. instead of a brand new user getting here and deciding to create a t/MathRock community with only them as the starting user and slowly trying to grow it from scratch, demonstrate that if they post in the t/Music community for a while, they can propose a t/MathRock community from there, have 7 days (or something) of visibility for the proposal and people to sign on to it, and then fork it into its own community with all the users who signed on and the option to import copies of relevant posts from the original community.]
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I also wanted to give feedback about one other rule:
#12 is weird; this encourages basically theft from paywalled sites instead of either just prohibiting paywalled links outright, or letting those submissions get naturally downvoted / limited to the audience that subscribes or makes their own decision to pirate the content.
I also hate finding that content's locked behind a paywall, but I'm not entitled to someone else's work for free just because I want it. People should make their own choices about which media is worth paying for, which they'd rather find a free source for, and which they feel ethically justified in finding ways to view without paying.
Having a platform-level endorsement of bypassing paywalls feels like an ethically bad choice, given that platforms like yours depend on external content. Publications can't pay their authors and authors can't feed themselves on "credit".
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Hope all of that's helpful feedback. You've done a good job of creating a lot of the necessary functionality, but I feel like it's lacking an understanding of the community-building incentives that makes a site like reddit work, and a user growth plan that's going to create the density needed to drive engagement loops that keep people coming back. I also really do appreciate that you've been so responsive and quick to fix the small UI stuff I've pointed out. I'll check back in a few months and see if things are evolving in a direction I'd want to support; best of luck with your own goals either way! Cheers.