The case for "noise"
One thing I've been recently thinking about regarding ~'s tags is how much hate "Noise" gets. I realize that it doesn't further the discussion every time, but we also need to look at the context.
I've seen a few posts here tagged as noise when a community member posts something they've made or would like feedback on. In my opinion, when someone says "that's great!" or "I agree" that's completely acceptable. I've heard the "just upvote and move on" argument, but by our own admission, per the posted rules here and on reddit, the vote button does not equal "agree." It only means that the content is of value.
I'd love to tell someone "I really love the way you phrased that" or "I didn't know other people felt that way, too!" for something I agreed with but didn't have a whole lot to add without just being repetitive.
I'm not married to this idea, just something milling about in my head since on ~, it really seems like we're trying to use the vote button not for just "agree/ disagree." I posted on ~talk rather than ~tildes because I'm curious how other people see the issue, and I don't feel the need to lodge a formal suggestion.
I agree.
And seriously, I find the same. I think it's going to be important for us as a community to not get too snobby or pretentious. Normal conversations have simple affirmations. Not all of us need to be writing essays to contribute.
Yeah, there's a difference between "don't be a peanut gallery" and "you can't contribute except at length." This gets caught up in the question of low-effort contributions.
It would be nice if the relationship between a comment and its children wasn't so linear. Maybe people could self-select and post their short comments to a special noise field deployed as needed to comments. Broadly speaking I support greater modularity in comment sections as an extension of the categorization & sorting features intended by tags.
You just said what i tried to so succinctly. I, too, am worried about too much snobbery. But it does seem that the community is good- hearted. I hope we can all work together to keep it that way. And if it pushes me to be more concerned with content than everyone's feelings... well... it's good to get out of my comfort zone once in a while. :-)
Thanks, friend.
I'm already turned off on the whole tagging system. It's just another way to anonymously bully someone that has a different opinion than you.
I think this is already the second comment I see from you about being disheartened by the tagging system.
Again, as @cfabbro, @Deimos and @Amarok explained in several comments, the tagging system is useless now as there is no auditing and accounting system in place for who abuses or misuse it.
It has been removed as of now for this exact reason I think. Once the whole system is in place, it will make much more sense. And if it doesn't work still, we can change it until it does (or find different ways) :)
Gosh I hope you're not tracking how much we all repeat ourselves! If that's the case, I'm going to be called a broken record. :'-D
I certainly don't see the harm in saying similar things on different threads.
Heh, naw. The opposite, in fact. Repetition is good in this case, since as ~ grows and more new users will probably ask more of the same questions and make more of the same suggestions over again too. So other users pointing them to documentation and previous discussions that have been had on the subjects already about those ideas/mechanics/suggestions will help a lot in bringing people up to speed faster. ;)
Ahahah, no worries mate. I just mentioned that it was already replied because I didn't want it to be attributed to me. I could have worded it a little better I realise :)
Also, @cfabbro, we really need to have those FAQ section in the documents so those kind of questions have a quick, easy to access, answer :)
I know, it's open source. I should just shut up and make a pull request about it :P
I understand you now. Thanks for clarifying!
Yeah tagging is only one part of the equation and right now ~ is lacking the second, which is accountability for actions so abuse can be punished. That will come eventually though, but for now I totally understand and support the decision to simple remove the comment tagging system until those are in place.
I know we have several mods lurking around here from reddit's /r/casualconversation - I bet they have some unique insight into this. Care to share, guys? If you had 'tagging' on reddit, how would you manage it?
A suggestion that was made recently (by @Natanael, I believe), is something like a "whisper comment", where you still post the comment, but it's automatically collapsed so that other people reading the thread won't need to see it by default.
I think this is a really interesting idea—it gives people a way to express things like you mentioned, but doesn't necessarily impact the "noise level" of the conversation. I'm not sure if just an auto-collapse is the best way to implement it, but I think it's a concept with a lot of potential.
If there's auto-collapsed comments, that means either a lot of users are going to be expanding them (a bit of a waste of energy) or they're going to be prone to abuse.
This could be fixed if whisper comments are displayed in a single line though. Like this:
There would of course be a very short character limit, at least for what can be displayed, though a small two-line version is also possible:
Quotes could be excluded from the preview to let people provide more context on expand.
What do you think of additionally having some sort of a whisper tag? A non-punitive tag saying that this comment isn't completely non-contributory, but should have been a whisper.
Yeah, I really like that. That way people won't feel like they need to expand everything out of fear of missing something useful, but it still makes the comments take up a lot less space and feel "lighter".
I also think a tag closer to "should have been a whisper" serves a function very similar to "noise" but loses a lot of the negativity.
Speaking of the negativity of tags, I've had this sort of half-formed thought about splitting the tag system into neutrally informative tags and negative warning flags, where tags don't carry any punitive action and can be self-applied (before or after posting), and flags do apply (negatively) towards the future trust system.
Tags: "joke", "off-topic", "whisper" (if the poster tags, we get the custom collapsed view, otherwise it could be a threshold or trust thing, or just a suggestion).
Flags: "troll", "flame", maybe "spam" (or "ad" and/or "excessive"), and maybe "RTA"
"Spoiler" could be either depending on if there is another way to mark >!spoilers!< (hint hint)
This would make negative tags more obviously negative, allow "joke" and "off-topic" to not feel like actually negative tags (they can also be styled differently, like "joke" could be after the comment!), and it would fix the current terminology issue where "tags" means both a topic tag (purely informative) and essentially a report/warning of a troll.
If I can slightly derail the thread: I really dislike the
>!spoiler!<syntax. It's a hack specific to reddit that every application now has to build in support for, it's not obvious what it means from the source, and anyone who does read the source is forced to see the spoiler.The established standard for spoilers on reddit has been, IIRC,
[spoiler (hover)](#s "Han shot first")(rendered as spoiler (hover)), which has the benefit of working perfectly even when there's no special support for it – the spoiler gets added as title text to the link. CSS can be used to make it prettier, but it even makes some sense when you read the source, which is basically the point of Markdown. However, you still get spoiled when reading the source, and I don't know how well it works in mobile browsers.Alternatively, since ~ is already taking inspiration from Usenet, spoilers could just be rot13'd, and special support for
rot13code blocks could be added? e.g.:and there's a button below it to un-rot13 it, or it's just displayed as a black box, or something. Then you don't get spoilered from reading the source, it's super-obvious how to read it if you want to, no extra support is needed as long as you can copy-paste the text – basically perfect. The only problem I see with this approach is that supporting any non-Latin alphabet would be hard to say the least. This may not be a problem right now, but I don't know if it would be in the future.
Finally: There's actually a way to do this in plain HTML!
It doesn't work on ~ right now, but it does on GitHub. It's not great Markdown, but it should Just Work in any modern web browser.
It's not quite so specific to reddit, it's based on stack overflow's block spoilers, which uses
>!in place of>as in a block quote. People have been petitioning commonmark to add spoiler tags since at least October 2014, with no movement on that I figure there's no reason to rely on an old CSS hack when we could just back the standard. Granted, if the url format was not a CSS hack, but actually implemented in the parser, it would be a lot better.I think the block spoiler format mostly makes sense, then you're just adding a
!to the normal blockquote syntax. It's something like:That's pretty straightforward and logical to me, but reddit made it weird by doing inline spoilers (and I think they only support inline spoilers) like
>!here's the spoiler text!<. That just looks weird and doesn't have any logic to it at all. They took something that was intended to be "add a!to a blockquote" and used it in a place completely unrelated to blockquotes.It definitely defies the norm in markdown. The bracket characters are in the wrong/reverse order, and it's the only syntax, I believe, to use two different characters surrounding inline text.
Yet
[Spoiler](#s "This is a shitty hack"), so as far as I see it the options are to adopt reddit's format, to try and help standardize it, or{make something up}(tildes season 2 spoiler).😉
Might be able to do something HTML-like too, like just
<spoiler>whatever</spoiler>or even<sp>.I'd actually like to be able to self-tag as a whisper comment. Is that the original idea? I'd love to offer support and encouragement without necessarily forcing others to read it. And a PM seems like a little overkill.
Very cool idea.
I think self-tagging is a good idea for whisper comments. We want to perpetuate a culture of inclusion and supportiveness. Being able to offer positive feedback without disrupting the conversation is a great way to do that.
self- tagged as "half- joke" "off- topic" and "noise"
Your comment made me want to cry. I think i might be ovulating.
What I really love about this whisper comment idea is its potential use for situations where, say someone mentions that it's their birthday. Instead of having to scroll through 40 replies of "Happy Birthday!" it could be condensed to something that people could really dig into if they really want to see each one specifically, but otherwise the sentiment is there without detracting from the user experience in viewing the thread. The same applies for when situations call for a flood of "Fuck cancer", "Thank you for your service", and various similar comments that people probably aren't ever going to feel comfortable tagging as "noise".
Yeah, I meant that a whisper tag would be totally supplemental to the whisper system, which would let you post as a whisper or make your comments into whispers (however it's set up).
The whisper tag could turn comments into whispers (when a threshold is met), but it could also just serve to tell people that they really should have whispered there.
I like the one-line suggestion. What if whisper comments were sorted independently from regular comments, so the default view showed the highest ranked 3-5 whispers and the rest of the comments below? This way, whispers cannot clutter the comment tree and are still easily accessible.
That could work, depending on the styling of whispers, but I would be afraid of incentivizing people whisper on comments to jump to the top. Keep in mind how big threads are going to be - find an r/askreddit post and picture every top comment having 3-5 whispers under them just giving their hot take on the post.
Alternatively, sorting whispers below actual comments might make good sense as a way to keep their use restricted.
OTOH, having visible whispers could prevent people from reposting what's already been said many times, in yet another comment.
Perhaps only show whispers on top if one gets upvoted highly like normal comments?
I think the whisper function can be implemented similar to how StackExchange allows people to make comments on the question/answer, without being part of the main content.
(If this isn't how StackExchange actually works, sorry. This is just my impression of how it does from the few times I've used it.)
I love that idea! I realize i'm just touchy-feely, but I think it's nice to tell a person when you agree with them. And also use common sense; if 3 other people have said yeah dude i agree, it's probably best not to say anything at all.
I would think "whisper comments" would need a failsafe built into it to prevent people from using it to make inflammatory/trollish comments. What would happen if people started using whisper comments for low-effort insults instead of small statements of affirmation. I don't know how big of a problem this might become, but I think it is worth considering (although a whisper tag that is mentioned in other comments may easily circumvent the problem).
Shouldn't proper moderation handle that? It might reduce visibility for the people sending reports, but whisper comments could have it's own queue to watch for mods.
I like the idea of Auto collapsed whisper comments. I wonder how that would be implemented however. Are users supposed to know to click a separate area or check a box? Would it be a separate reply link?
I'm kinda thinking having a button for "whisper" and a button for "shout". Not necessarily that term, but similar.
Alternatively, it's automatic if you self-select the whisper tag before posting.
Maybe we should have <i agree/i don't agree > and <good post/bad post> tags
This is a suggestion I've made a few times. Get rid of the Vote button and replace it with positive tags. I think the tags help get rid of noise and make users think while upvoting and downvoting are mindless "I like this" and "I don't like this" buttons.
That's interesting, too! Kind of like an Amazon "did you find this review helpful?" button which lists the number next to it once you've clicked?
My concern is that it would overshadow or confuse the "Vote" button, but you're definitely thinking outside the box!
It could either be the two types of tags like i described or two types of votes following the same ideia. The main issue with just one kind of vote is that different people use the vote in different ways. A vote can represent many thoughts, feelings. With that in mind, if we have more granularity like the suggestion I made maybe we can have a better representation of what the people are thinking when they vote/tag.
It is certainly a fine line at the moment. However, for me at least, this:
would be noisy, while this:
wouldn't, although it's cutting it close. Adding a bit more wouldn't be difficult and would help passing the blurry line (saying what part of the phrasing you loved or why or when you have felt the same way, for example).
However, I haven't used the tags so far at all, IIRC. Didn't really feel the need or didn't want to take the responsibility of tagging or somebody already tagged and thought that was enough.
The difference between the two cases you highlighted is specificity, right?
Saying "That's great!" or "I agree!" is noisier than saying "It's great that you took the time to illustrate the difference between the two games--kudos" or "I agree with your opinion about the level design of Ocarina of Time--it's the best" etc. etc.
If your response could be moved to any other post and not lose any clarity or context, it's noise. At least that's sort of how I see it.
I absolutely agree and I think that most of this "difficulties" in dealing with the tag "noise" is that we got used to reply with trivial things on other social media account just for the sake of "leaving a trace".
I don't want to go into details and it definitely doesn't apply to everyone of course, but there is an intrinsic need into every human being to leave ours footprint wherever we go. Leaving a comment with just "that's great" it's exactly that. Leaving a footprint.
We should re-learn that sometimes simply agreeing with someone else is enough. Leave a vote and just move on :)
I don't know if I'd agree with it being about "leaving a trace". Perhaps that's part of it, but I think there's more to it. Some communication is meant to evoke more of a response, or to continue the conversation, to probe. I think sometimes that doesn't always look like much.
Here's an example: https://tildes.net/~comp/11b/reverse_emulating_the_nes_to_give_it_super_powers#comment-6yd
I don't think I'm really adding any significant value to the comments, but it's my way of engaging with the community. I'd hate for the tags like "noise" to keep people from wanting to participate!
Contributing something, even if it's hardly anything, could be a way to draw something out from another user, to continue the dialogue. That's my take anyhow.
Of course there's clear cases of things like "This!" which can be thrown out, for sure.
I see and absolutely agree. Also, some comments that could be mistaken for "noise" are actually feedback for OP.
Imagine a topic linking some free software that do the same thing as an expensive one. It's quite normal that some comments will be like "OMG this is awesome, thank you so much!" as there isn't much to add to a topic like that and to be honest it's perfectly fine by me.
I suppose that, as always, it's the common sense that should prevails and that's why, imho, the tagging system need to be tuned out over time and with real use-cases.
I know that I'll just have to be patient and that the first months this feature is going to be released, it will need lots of tweaking :)
[Noise] Agreed ;)
Yes, I think that's a great definition. :)
Dang, I'm trying to find something to say that's not just noise, but I really like that definition, too!
I haven't tagged anyone yet, either, for similar reasons. And I agree with you that short, "nothing" comments are rarely ever necessary. I should have mentioned that I'm certainly not advocating for the return of "first" comments by any means. It just seems like this site, in its infancy, is almost single-mindedly focused on the discussion, and in my brain, that's not the only important thing. Fostering good, mostly positive connections and having some fun is up there, too.
Thanks for the reply.
I feel similarly. When I notice that a comment already has a similar thought to mine, no matter how simple or complicated, I just vote and move on. I haven't used the tags at all and in the few places I've seen them, they've felt "mean". Perhaps because this community is still small-ish and new, it's important to encourage a positive experience. A small contribution is still a contribution.
FYI, there's another discussion on basically the same topic here, started just a couple hours ago.
Perhaps there's something in the air? :)
Based on the responses to that post it seems that noise is in the eye of the beholder. I am coming around more and more to the idea of having the tags fade in as a function of how many people added that tag vs the activity on the thread. If one or two people out of a thousand think you are noise, maybe it shouldn't be shown. If 200 people out of 1000 think you are noise that should probably be more prominent
I could see that being abused by the very determined lol.
Yes, I did see that just after I posted this! It's slightly different subject matter, but I believe both were inspired by the same chain of events.