Discussion
Kuldron is organised around topics. A topic is a name you walk into: it holds threaded posts and a live chat room, and it exists because someone wrote in it.
Topics
Nobody creates a topic and nobody owns one. t/pottery is a name that works the moment you type it, and it starts holding posts as soon as somebody writes one. There is no application, no founder, no first arrival who gets to keep the name, and no mod team that comes attached to it. Follow the ones you want; your Following feed is every post from the topics and people you follow, and All is everything.
Topics is a map rather than a directory: each topic is a bubble sized by its followers and recent viewing, coloured by how much is actually being written in it, and pulled toward the topics its followers also follow — so the clusters are real audiences rather than a category tree somebody guessed at.
Posts and comments
Posts take a title and a markdown body with links and images, written against a live preview. Posts and comments can both be voted on, replies nest eight deep, and sibling comments are ordered by how confident their votes are rather than by raw score, so a comment with two upvotes doesn’t outrank one with ninety. A post you want to bring to another topic is crossposted, which points at the original instead of copying it.
Every post has its own URL that anyone can read without an account, and every comment has a permalink that opens with the thread around it. Writing, commenting and voting need an account. A poster labels anything 18+ on the way out, and which of those labels you see is a setting on your account.
You can edit what you post, and the versions you replace are kept and readable — edit history covers why, and how to withhold a version that contained something sensitive.
Sorting and tags
Hot ranks by net upvotes while favouring newer posts, Top by net upvotes alone, and New by when it was posted. Top takes a window: the usual day, week, month and year, or any period you type, and every one of them is a rolling window counted back from now rather than a calendar boundary, so no timezone comes into it.
Anyone who has funded their wallet can put a free-form tag on a post or a comment, and a tag starts showing up once three different people have used it, so it describes something rather than being one person’s label. Click a tag to narrow a topic to it, or pick one up across every topic from what is trending.
Lenses
Moderation is something you choose rather than something the room comes with. A lens is a named group of moderators whose calls you apply by wearing it. A topic has as many as people care to run, none of them authoritative, so nobody moderates a subject by having got there first. Wearing one filters what you see and deletes nothing for anyone else; two people wearing different lenses are reading different versions of the same place. Wearing none is the default and the raw view.
You wear one per topic and switch freely, and one lens covers both the topic’s posts and its room. Anyone can create a lens; some are open to join, others are invite-only from their creator. Creating one needs an account that has funded its wallet at least once, which makes throwaway accounts an ineffective way to manufacture moderation. Reports reach the relevant lens’s moderators, and reach Kuldron when the Terms of Service are involved — which is the one thing a lens can’t opt out of.
Rooms
Every topic has a chat room as well as posts, under the same name. It is always there and its history is kept, so it is a place rather than an event. Open the topic and the room is the chat beside the posts, with a count of who is in it right now. Rooms need an account, to read as well as to send.
Stream chat is the other model: scoped to one broadcast, moderated by that channel’s owner and mods, with bans that apply there alone. See Watching.
Limits
Posting, commenting, voting, reporting and creating topics or lenses all carry per-account limits, set where ordinary use never meets them. The live numbers are on Developers.