9
votes
Suggestion: Ability to tag one's own comments
Other people can tag my posts as jokes, but I can't. Is there a good reason for this to be the case? Obviously I'm not going to tag my posts as Noise, Troll, or Flame, but Joke and Offtopic aren't necessarily negative.
This is definitely coming... we just need a way to audit actions first. To this end @deimos has been working on a simple public changelog for actions. Once that is in place we can start adding other features that we want to include like title editing (by OP and others), tag editing (by OP and others), etc. which will be the foundation of the trust system.
Great. This sounds like it will fix a lot of the current rough edges in the site's mechanisms in one fell swoop. While I'm at it, I might as well throw out a couple of other thoughts regarding tags:
Comment and Topic tags are effectively completely different concepts - is it wise that they share the same name? New users might be confused. Perhaps topic tags could be renamed 'categories', or comment tags could be renamed 'marks'.
Should there be a distinction made between objectively negative comment tags, like 'Flame', and tags that simply identify a comment as being on the periphery, rather than at the core, of the discussion - like 'Joke' and 'Offtopic'.
Could we in the future have overtly positive tags? I know slashdot-esque 'Insightful' tags were regarded as redundant, since they are simply another form of upvote, but perhaps a 'solution' tag could be useful for comments which fix a posed problem (like Stack Exchange's green checkmark)?
Could we have tags which warn readers that a comment might be judged to be poorly sourced or fallacious? Logical fallacies have become a bit fetishised recently by the sort of people who own too many Richard Dawkins books, so to be clear - I'm not arguing for a 'Strawman' and a 'Whataboutism' and a 'No True Scotsman' tag. However, perhaps a tag rougly equivalent to Wikipedia's '[Citation Needed]' would be good, considering the amount of times ill-sourced or even demonstrably wrong posts have been upvoted, gilded, and splashed across the top of Reddit comment sections - particuarly in discussions of politics or historical events (/r/badhistory exists for a reason!).
To be honest we're not even really sure what to do with comment tags just yet. Some of us think we should make them manually entered like topic tags. Some think we just need to add more default choices like you mentioned, e.g.
well sourced, etc. Some think we should move the purely negative connotation ones toreportrather than tag. And some have even talked about renaming them entirely to avoid confusion with topic tags too... so yeah, this is something we are thinking about but still undecided on yet.We're open to suggestions though and it will probably wind up being a daily discussion at some point.
I dislike the idea of manually entering tags; being able to sort by tags would become virtually impossible and it would require more work on the user's part to tag something. Instead of tagging it in a custom manner, I could just leave a short comment about it as a reply.
Adding more default tags and moving the negative ones into a report option sounds like a good plan, but I can see this becoming a daily discussion rather than getting resolved reasonably quickly.
Yeah, comment tags are a bit of a contentious issue and it's likely to have many daily discussions focused on it. There already was one:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/70/daily_tildes_discussion_comment_tags_and_how_they_feel_to_use
I would tend towards having an extended, but still restricted set of choices. The more tags proliferate, the more they dilute, and the more they dilute, the less useful they are. Tilde specific tags would likely be useful however in the future - I could see them fullfilling some of the roles that flair is used for in some subreddits.
I considered this too - but I think it's nicer to keep everything under the tagging system. Report implies that someone will review (and potentially take down) the comment in question, while I think it's almost always better to leave comments viewable - albeit with the proviso that other users have considered them to be inflammatory, or trolling, or whatever. Obviously there should probably be a reporting system for hate speech, illegal content, doxxing, etc. at some point, but there's a big difference between trying to start a flame war (bad) and shouting slurs (way worse).
Fair enough. There's no pressure to rush out features or make hasty changes. Everyone understands that this is an alpha and that things aren't finalised. What matters to me is that the admins here have a strong grasp of what makes online communities tick - and everything I've seen so far implies that you most certainly do.
Yep, exactly. I agree with most of what you said but I think we just need to play it by ear and probably have some more daily discussions on the topic first before we make any final decisions.
Aw, thanks. We have spent a LOOOOONG time (well over a year now) hashing this stuff out internally, reading theories & opinions, formal studies (which thankfully there are an increasing number of related to social media and social systems), and generally trying to think of every conceivable scenario, feature option, etc. It's nice to know all that work is recognized, even at this early stage. :P
This makes sense. Although tags are like down votes with a reason, I like cracking jokes and wouldn't mind being able to tag some of my own comment as such. I considered posting "^ [self-tagged as noise]" but I can't actually tag it as a joke ;)