Should we allow movie trailer posts?
EDIT: Alright, this ended up veering off in the direction that I was hoping it wouldn't. My apologies if I pushed things in the wrong direction from the outset.
I want to make very clear from the outset of this post that I am not calling anyone out for posting this type of content, and I do not want to criticize any individuals for making such posts. This is intended to be a high level discussion of what general types of content are worthwhile here, to see if we can define some of the community specific goals about relevant content. And I know this comes at the risk of being yet another meta post about tildes content (feel free to move this post elsewhere if others think it is better suited, I mainly chose to post here to work on being more community specific about our goals).
This question comes up because a quick glance at the current ~movies page shows a whole bunch of movie trailer posts. The majority of them have zero discussion. Of the ones that do have discussion, most of that is pretty low effort. So part of the question to address is: do movie trailer posts ever generate good discussion in the first place? Looking at reddit, the answer is almost always no, and the posting of movie trailers is often a race among karma farmers with little actual interest in what they are posting. Part of the problem I see there is that it primarily leads towards a discussion of the movie itself rather than the trailer. Since the movie hasn't come out yet when the trailer is posted, that discussion is entirely speculative, and leads to some sticky situations like with the Ghostbusters remake, where more outrage was generated over the female leads casting than any discussion of the film's own merits.
There are, very occasionally, trailers that are in and of themselves interesting pieces of artistic expression; so part of me says that a universal ban on trailers being posted would be overkill. But in those cases it may be beneficial to enforce that the discussion should focus on the presentation of the trailer itself. Though countering my own argument, trailers are fundamentally designed to draw attention towards the movie, so perhaps isolated discussion does not make sense. But that would again point to a desire to simply omit all trailers being posted. Possibly unless it is for a movie that has already been released, in which the trailer could serve as merely a marker to open discussion on the movie itself.
So what does everyone else think? I'm totally okay if everyone says they like seeing the movie trailers on here, but I thought it would be a good time to discuss it.
I'm going to refer to "Just... try to relax a bit" again.
Yes, someone posted a lot of trailers in a row. I sent them a message right after they did it and asked them not to submit so much so quickly, because with the current default sorting on Tildes (by activity, where new posts show up at the top) that effectively floods ~movies and even the entire site for most people.
In general, trailers are fine and belong in ~movies. They're informative about upcoming movies, and capable of being used as the starting point for discussions (which isn't the submitter's responsibility).
If you don't like trailers, you already have the option of hiding them - set up a topic tag filter on "trailer" in your sidebar.
I would have been straight up excited if somebody had posted a dozen great discussion threads. I love talking about movies, and am looking forward to this community growing so that we can have a bunch of great discussion threads. So I am absolutely more concerned about cultivating the content than I am about the behavior. Please be more careful before you assign motivations to other people.
Again, I am going to ask you politely to please stop making arguments based on assumptions you are making about me. I have my personal ideals for what I would like to see and engage in here, you have your own ideals, and so does everyone else.
As I pointed out in my original text, I'm not a fan of all of the movie trailer threads over on reddit, either, where the patterns of posting do not have the effect you are focused on here. If you like seeing the threads, great. I may be the odd one out here, in which case I can totally just ignore or filter. But I thought it might be interesting to discuss what the community as a whole feels about it.
That's kinda exactly what I was trying to do btw. I just didn't realise what effect it would have on the default sort.
Sidenote, I personally think trailers are a good point of discussion and think me posting a comment alongside them would just take away from discussing them. But, I do understand how people would disagree with that view.
Have you started or participated in discussion in any of the trailer threads you've started?
Also, in the future, this will most likely become ~movies.trailers, and people can subscribe or not as they see fit. The ~trailers group will evolve their own culture and eventually their own curators, moderators, and rules. Most people will subscribe to ~movies, but far less will sub to ~trailers, so it'll become a new-cinema styled community, for people who are trailer fanatics.
Those people will start the discussions about each trailer. Occasionally, one of the trailers will spark a good discussion that's more suited to the general ~movies community, probably on a great trailer or highly anticipated film, franchise sequel, what have you. When that happens (probably around 1 thread in 100) the curators of ~trailers can send that submission up the pipe into ~movies, where all of the people who visit ~movies will see it as if it were a new submission. I forsee a "New Trailers for the Month of August 2018" sort of round-up that happens monthly, that's something I bet ~movies would love to have.
If the curators in ~movies agree, then the exact same submission/thread basically starts over in ~movies, but it's already pre-seeded with the comments from ~trailers so there will be a lively discussion going.
Quality bubbles up. The day-to-day stuff stays local. This general concept should work for any topic. That's the hierarchy in action. Meanwhile, for people who want to sub to ~movies but don't want to see trailers, there's topic tag filtering that will allow them to make all of it disappear.
Yeah, I was doing my best to avoid triggering the link to that post :)
I probably could have started the discussion from a more neutral point than I did. I definitely don't hold any individual responsible for that pattern that emerged, and was doing my best not to criticize any particular actions, it's just that the pattern brought the more general question to my mind as a result of being somewhat forefront at the time. Apologies if I'm stirring up the hornet's nest too much.
I think that question can be answered by another question.
Do you expect this site to replace your other social media/content aggregation sites or just supplement it?
If you expect tildes to become everyone's primary source of content consumption, then I think they should be allowed. For better or worse movie trailers have become a cultural thing. People talk about trailers and movie news in pretty general groups and if you want to be up to speed you'll want to have that here.
If Tildes is only meant to be a supplementary community, then we don't really need them. Trailers get posted on facebook and reddit and you can watch/discuss them there.
I think limiting content in a group that's already one of the least active groups is asking for trouble.
I think that "news about movies" clearly seems like it should involve trailers. I think that trailers don't necessarily make for good discussion beyond "I would see that". I think not everything has to foster great discussion to be noteworthy.
Yea, me posting trailers was trying to get the group more active. I just didn't realise they were going to clump together in the way they did. I will try and spread posts out, my bad.
I definitely agree that hindering contributions can be a bad thing at this stage. It has been discussed elsewhere previously that a number of people feel disinclined to participate because of some us adding those hindrances. I am trying to make an effort to not veer towards some of that, as I very much do not want to discourage anyone's involvement, but it can also be helpful to have the community lay out their own guidelines for what they would like to see here. Perhaps I should try to phrase it more as an encouragement rather than a discouragement of what to focus on.
That said, given your comment that "I think not everything has to foster great discussion to be noteworthy", not everyone will agree with this point. As @Kijafa put in their post "If Tildes is only meant to be a supplementary community, then we don't really need them." So of course, that is part of the question right now for the goals of the site and these communities.
I won't name any names, but it seemed obnoxious when the only new posts were all movie trailers.
Maybe the responsibility should be on the OP of the trailer to start the conversation? i.e. I think X about the Y in this movie because...
I don't need to see movie trailers on tildes, but it doesn't harm me if other people want to post them. I need only ignore them.
I'd be against the idea simply because I'm for fighting monopolization of the site by various companies as much as possible. Sharing a trailer CAN be cool...but it can also be a movie studio trying to peddle their latest film. And that's the kind of stuff that i'd be worried about. Still remember they had that return to oz movie coming out and random info about jamie franko was being peddled on reddit.
I'm of the opinion that any post should be allowed so long as the user explains why they're choosing to share that content and maybe pose an open ended, discussion-based question because that tends to get people contributing which prevents the problem of multiple low-effort, commentless posts.
Yea, my bad. I didn't realise they would clump together like they did. Still getting used to the algorithm here, when posting on reddit you can "dump" posts and let whatever one people choose to be relevant reach the frontpage. I will spread out posts to prevent that from happening again, I wasn't intending on spamming. I was just on a movie trailer watching binge and wanted to help spread content in the group.
EDIT: Also, to answer the question OP asked, I think having the latest movie trailers posted as they come out is a pretty important part of having a ~Movies group. I don't really think posting text trying to start a discussion would be necessary because the new trailer, being presented to the ~Movies community, would be the discussion point.
I hope my point can still stand that I don't want you to feel personally called out too much here. You are definitely not the only one to have posted movie trailers in to the group, and plenty of people do expect this group to have trailers posted. Personally I tend to skip over them, even on reddit, as I have other methods to keep track of new trailers coming out. So part of my point with this post is to discuss whether others get some advantage from it, maybe even see if we can cultivate them in a way that could garner worthwhile discussion. I don't think that's at all impossible, we just all need to figure out what that looks like together.
This is similar to when people post single songs or music videos in ~music. They seldom generate much discussion, and of those discussions, the best you can usually hope for is people sharing similar artists, which doesn't happen all that often. It's typically fifty variations on "I saw these guys live and they rule!" combined with pedantic arguing about what genre of music it is (which on Tildes, will turn into edit wars over which genre tags should be applied, I guarantee it).
When some people want a place to be about topic X, and the rest want topic Y, that's your cue that it's time to bubble off a new community. ~movies.trailers and ~music.streams for example.
The value of ~streams and ~trailers is very hard to see on a day to day basis. It looks like just a mish-mash of unrelated content. From a quality discussion standpoint, it's typically abysmal. Given the goals of Tildes, how can something like that ever possibly be on topic or relevant to this website?
The devil is in the details. Individual posts have little merit, but when you take them all together in the aggregate they can provide stunning value. It just takes a little work on the part of the curators of the community to put together something more substantial in a digest format.
I'll give you an example I'm far too familiar with. If you visit /r/listentothis on reddit you'll see the very definition of low effort content, for the most part. Nothing but around 150 music streaming tracks per day, mostly from new artists and unknown bands that all too often are crummy music. That's simply what grows in those fields. It's the wheat, not the bread.
If you pay attention to that content and put in a little work you can extract this sort of value from it and put the community's collective laziness to good use. In a better world, all 800 of reddit's music subs would be automatically generating, weekly, monthly, and yearly music charts sortable by genre, artist popularity, and a host of other metrics.
I pitched that idea to reddit a dozen times and it was like talking to a brick wall - they have the finest music discovery engine ever seen, powered by pure human recommendations, not algorithms, and they refuse to utilize it. Oh well, reddit's loss will be Tildes gain, both the content and the mechanism to make it easier. ;)
The same thing can be done for movie trailers or I'll wager anything else. Rather than saying "Does this content belong on Tildes" say instead "What can Tildes do to help make this content better and more interesting?" The default answer to that is probably 'push them down the hierarchy into their own new home and let them sort it out, and send their best content back up the chain.'
This is a really interesting idea. I definitely want to put some personal thought towards if there is a way to generate value out of these in the aggregate. Was not an angle I had considered originally, but I could see some possibilities of ways to build value in this way. Obviously a lot of ways this could shake itself out, but I am much more excited about possibilities with this kind of thinking. So thank you for bringing it up.
What's worrying me about it is that there's clearly a gap between when content starts to bother the host group, and the time when that content has enough submissions and interested users to survive and thrive as a spinoff sub-group of its own. It's a classic catch-22 problem - if you disincentivise the content, it'll die off and fail to attract more like-minded people, never hitting that critical mass. If you leave the content, it's going to annoy another group of users. If you spin it off too early, it's just a 'dead group' and people will only check in once, see that it's dead, and leave. So what can we do?
The tag filtering does let the users clear it out for themselves, but consider what that's going to look like a couple years down the road. Thousands of users with massive filters that they set up one time and forgot about, forever blinding them to the mere existence of the content, even if that content has improved or something about the site has changed. Any given user's filters are going to become less relevant over time, and most people will never bother going back to change them.
I think what's needed is a simple navigation element to help us control the views of any given group with a single click. Something that makes it nearly effortless to turn on and off subsets of any group's content. I've been managing this sort of low-effort content on reddit for 8+ years and I think I have a workable solution.
We've seen many subreddits use flair hacks to provide 'views' of their content. /r/listentothis has the music genre navigation bar (for those who aren't on mobile and have styles enabled, aka 1% of the userbase). Askscience has a nav panel in their sidebar that changes the view based on area of scientific inquiry. These do work to sort the content, but reddit does everything it can to make sure most users aren't aware these things even exist.
I think here, I'd slap a simple tag cloud as a ribbon across the top of all of the large groups. If a user clicks on the tag, it turns that tag off and hides all submissions with those tags. It'd also be nice to click on a tag there and see just that content (like a fledgling view of the future sub-group it'll become). Most people don't want movie trailers in their feed every single day, but they might pop over to that view once a week or month or when they decide they want to see a movie that weekend.
This keeps things more organic, rather than stale, forgotten user filters. It lets people subscribe to a subset of a group's content, and the nav element makes them aware they are doing it.
Eventually, once a tag reaches a critical mass of interested users and active content, it can spin down into a sub-group. At that point, I think we need to change the model, because instead of seeing all of [topic] in the parent group, now you're only seeing the best of [topic] that bubbles up. I'd simply reset all the user's tag preferences when a new group for [topic] is created like that - or perhaps there are other better ways to do it.
I just don't want to see this place self-destruct as a wasteland of users trying to tag-filter out everything on the site. That's where I think we're headed unless we solve this little fledgling-group problem. Making this nav element work would require search and some other under-the-hood code we don't have yet, so it's not coming anytime soon. I doubt we'll be feeling a strong need for it until we hit 100k user territory.
There's always a solution. We can just try, try, try until we find one that actually works in practice.
Love your ideas, but for this I'd give a fair warning to the user—maybe they blocked the tag because even the best of the best of it is terrible to them. (like someone who enjoys music but absolutely despises any and all folk)
Yeah, that's why I'm not sure a wholesale 'clear' is the best approach. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, by then we'll know the shape of the trust, tagging, and search systems.
Maybe we could have ~movies.trailers where trailers can be dumped with no expectation of OP starting a discussion.