Vortices is a multipurpose social network. It fulfills functions such as:

• keeping up with friends
• finding news
• interesting discussion
• blogging
• taking notes
• saving bookmarks

Vortices is a threaded forum, meaning that you can directly reply to any message. A headline will typically link to an external site.

To post, you need to register an account. All it takes is a unique user name and a password.

You can of course add more information to your profile later.

Posting

Once you are signed in, you'll see a text input and a post button. This is for short messages. Click "Text" for longer updates. If you use the link or the text fields, then the default field becomes the headline.

Formatting

You can use HTML or Markdown to format your posts. Vortices will automatically convert URLs of images, MP3s, and YouTube videos to content after you post, but this may conflict with HTML and Markdown, in which case you should edit your post and add html as a tag, which will turn off the automatic conversion. Two line breaks are needed to make a new paragraph. Here are some examples of Markdown syntax:

*italics*
**bold**
[link text](http://example.com)

- list item 1
- list item 2
- list item 3    
    - sub-item 1
    - sub-item 2

> quoted text

    code block (indent 4 spaces)

`code snippet

# heading 1
## heading 2
(up to 6 levels)

Voting

If you've signed in, you'll notice plus and minus buttons to the left of every post and reply. These are for voting. You may undo or reverse your vote as many times as you'd like. The sum of all votes becomes the number of points that an item. Note that any post you make automatically receives your vote.

Why vote?

Votes affects how prominent a post is. When you first make a post, it will immediately appear at the top of the front page. This is due to the sorting algorithm dubbed "Hot". It is simply points squared over age. So something with nearly 0 age and one point has a near infinite "temperature" value, thus being the hottest thing around. The interesting thing about time is that it eventually evens out. While age may be a large handicap in the temperature of a day old post verses a brand new post, a week from now the now 7-day-old post will barely have an advantage over the now 8-day-old post. Then it will be their scores that really matter. While not too many older posts will be found on the front page, the Hot sorting algorithm affects reply threads and other pages as well.

Sorting

There are other ways to sort things as well. You can find them in the menu. Keep in mind that the last sorting method you selected will be used on all pages. This can have some quirky results, such as going from the 3rd Hot page to the 3rd New page.

Why did you make Vortices?

Originally, I intended to make a Facebook or MySpace clone, but I became enamored with Digg and later Reddit, so I decided that social news was a higher form. At its heart, Vortices is a Reddit clone that took me about a week and a half to program. But it only truly shone after months of tweaking. As new sites come along, I copy some of their features as well.