Group updates for July 2023

Deimos
2023-07-07T19:16:00Z

As I'm sure some of you have already noticed in your sidebars, I've just added a bunch of new groups based on the discussion we had last week. That ended up being a very large discussion with a ton of suggestions, and while we can't add everything, I am adding a fairly large set of groups this time. Some of these are definitely experimental, and I expect that we'll need to make some more adjustments based on how they actually do in practice.

Before I get into the specific updates, there are a few general things I want to mention first:

Many of the discussions about groups turn into debates about how things should be organized in the hierarchy. I want to try to clarify that the hierarchy is not intended to be some kind of perfectly logical system, or that there should never be any crossover, etc. The groups are more of a social organization method, like "for people interested in X".

For example, a common suggestion is to add something like an "entertainment" top level group that could contain ~games, ~music, ~tv, etc. This makes sense from a logical perspective, but not if you're basing it on interest. Someone's interest in gaming content doesn't really have any influence on them being interested in talking about music. There are similar reasons for other cases like having ~comp outside of ~tech and ~anime outside of ~tv, even though they feel like they should fit inside. The current hierarchy certainly isn't perfect for this either (for example, ~hobbies is extremely broad), but it's the general idea.

As part of this, I also want to mention that something being a sub-group instead of top-level shouldn't be seen as being "less important" or somehow inferior. As a convenient example, ~tildes.official is one of the most important groups on the site, but it was the first sub-group (and the only one for a year). It's not significant yet while we're still subscribing everyone to all groups by default, but when we move away from doing that, it could actually be an advantage to be a sub-group, since it would give a larger audience to its content through the parent one(s).

And finally, I want to mention that expanding the groups (and having higher activity in general) makes it more pressing to improve the capabilities for controlling subscriptions, filtering out groups and tags, and so on. This is something I want to treat as a high priority as I get back into Tildes development. I know there are also some existing problems such as topics from sub-groups being shown inside the parent group even if you're unsubscribed from them, and I'm hoping to resolve that one this weekend.

Anyway, on with the changes and some brief comments on each. Note that I still need to do some administrative tasks like adding descriptions to the groups and moving old topics into them, and will be doing that over the next day or so.

Added ~comics, ~engineering, ~transport, ~travel (everyone auto-subscribed)
The subjects of these groups are currently kind of awkward to fit into the existing groups, and I think there's potential for good content and discussion in all of these.

Added ~life sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~life)

~life.home_improvement

~life.men

~life.pets

~life.style

~life.women

Whether to create groups for men and women took up a lot of the air in the suggestions topic (and was the source of some strife—please don't restart that in here). I think it's worth trying them, but it's definitely an experiment. I also think it's important to have them be sub-groups, because having a common parent group enables posting similar topics without feeling like posting in one of them is a binary choice. Much like ~lgbt, moderation will be somewhat stricter for posts in these groups (and yes, we need a way for the site itself to indicate that).

~life.pets also needs some clarification: this will not be a group full of images. There will be a weekly scheduled post for posting photos and casual chat about pets (the first one will post tomorrow), but separate topics like that will be removed. The standard content in ~life.pets should be of a similar quality level to the rest of the site, such as articles, requests for discussion/advice, and so on.

Added ~sports sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~sports)

~sports.american_football

~sports.baseball

~sports.basketball

~sports.combat

~sports.football

~sports.hockey

~sports.motorsports

This is also fairly experimental, and I don't know if we'll keep all of these sub-groups. I'd like to see if this can help encourage more posts about specific sports. I also don't like the name ~sports.american_football much at all, but I don't know what a better option is. Should we just call it ~sports.nfl? That's not quite right either.

Added ~health.mental (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~health)
A lot of the topics in ~health are about mental health, and I think having a clearer separation could be useful (including having a more clearly defined space for stricter moderation, as mentioned before).

Added ~humanities subgroups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~humanities)

~humanities.history

~humanities.languages

History topics are probably the most common subject posted in ~humanities currently, and I'm curious if these subgroups will help encourage posting both more history and more non-history.

Removed ~games.game_design (topics merged into ~games)
This group has always been quite inactive, and I don't think the few topics in it still need their own separate space from ~games right now.

That's it for this time. If there were other suggestions that you were hoping to see that weren't added this time, don't take that as an indication that we won't add them someday. But this is already a lot of new groups (likely too many), and I had to stop somewhere. Let's revisit in a month or so once these new groups and the new users have had some time to settle.

And as usual when making a ~tildes.official post, I've also topped up every current user's invites to 5: https://tildes.net/invite

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/17q7/group_updates_for_july_2023

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