27
votes
Once Tildes gets subgroups, where will you spend most of your time?
~movies.horror?
~life.parenting?
~creative.poetry.limericks?
~comp.dev.games.godot?
~tildes.taxonomy? ;)
The possibilities are, of course, endless. Right now, with few users, we're all still living in top-level land, but I think it would be interesting to see what everyone's more specific interests are, as well as how some people would tackle defining a hierarchy. (e.g. ~games.overwatch vs. ~games.fps.overwatch vs. ~games.multiplayer.fps.overwatch etc.).
Furthermore, what content would you like to see in your specific subgroups? What types of posts would make having them worthwhile?
I mentioned this recently in a different thread, I'd love to have a ~local.country.city and/or ~news.country.city for regional/location-specific content.
One reason is that it has a potential combined userbase of 100% of Tildes - everyone lives somewhere. We all have something happening in our neck of the woods that is relevant only to us and people who live nearby.
Another is that it's naturally 3 (or perhaps 4) levels deep -
(news|local).(country).(state_or_province)?.(city)in pseudo-regex. A lot of the other potential groups are only 2 levels deep. This is useful because it can act as a forcing function in the backend code to ensure the design works for N levels and not just "upper" and "lower", so it'd be a good trial balloon / way to beta-test the subgroup support.Super up for all of these group suggestions, especially gamedev/design. I currently do development work as a hobby and would love to see some quality content for that show up here, and I'm sure I could find tons of stuff to post myself as well.
I realize I could in all likelihood post development things to ~comp or ~games, but I feel averse to doing so because it doesn't end up feeling like the appropriate location, as the broad topic means I'm unsure if the interest would be enough to warrant the post.
I'm waiting for:
I'm not sure how to answer the question about what content will make them worthwhile. Most of them will be a mix of articles and discussions, just like the current top-level groups. It'll just be nice to have specific places to go for these subjects. For instance, I'm currently not subscribed to ~games because it's dominated by articles and discussion about computer games. When ~games.tabletop is created, I can subscribe to that and see what I want without having to sift through a lot of content that doesn't interest me.
The fact you mention you're "waiting for" these groups to be created seems to somewhat contradict your view that groups should be created as a need arises—one that I don't necessarily agree with, by the way.
What?
I believe that these sub-groups will eventually be created because I believe the need will arise for them at some point in the future. In the meantime, I'm waiting.
I don't see why that's contradictory. I believe something will happen later, so I'm waiting until that time.
Why tv.sciencefiction rather than sciencefiction.tv? I’d nest the medium under the genre myself since, I assume, people tend to identify by genres and types of stories they like before they pick a medium for consuming it.
Edit: Also that religion nesting poses an interesting question on who moderates? In theory, people might sling accusations of bias in moderation if, say, a Christian person exercises mod authority over religion.Islam.
Also, among the /r/Hinduism sub the place was so often hit with right wing political posts that they had to fork the sub into /r/political_hinduism to differentiate. That’ll be an interesting tension to negotiate.
Because ~tv exists, but ~sciencefiction doesn't, and I'm assuming this question is about future sub-groups we want to see under existing groups, rather than non-existent groups.
Everyone who has earned enough “trust” in the relevant groups - possibly scores of people, with a variety of religious and non-religious worldviews. And anyone who shows bias in their moderation would find their “trust” value decreasing until they lose their moderator powers. Remember: this isn't Reddit.
I look forward to hanging out in ~music.hiphop, it's hard to find hip hop communities that aren't overrun with stan twitter overflow, so we have a chance to build something cool there. Even as it is now, a few knowledgable people willing to keep conversation about the genre alive could make for a good little pocket. A few fights about the GOAT and a good stream of news and I think we'll have something there. If I'm honest, as much as I enjoyed my time on HHH, if that and KTT are the main things we have to be better than...I don't think we'll have a hard time :P
I imagine ~anime will stay mostly active at top level other than ~anime.manga and similar medium distinctions, just from observing how other anime communities develop. Doesn't usually get split by genre or anything like that, which does make me wonder how the "deep" communities will develop, since it'd be pretty bad to do something like ~anime.REELOTAKUONLY. I intend to be around wherever that goes, I can't wait for discussions to get more specific...for now you can't really assume there's someone familiar with and ready to talk about anything you watch, but when that opens up it'll be a good time :)
Would you rather do anime.manga or comics.manga?
I’d be interested in seeing something like /r/whowouldwin replicated here, but I’m not really sure where it would go. (Preferably a version that doesn’t get overrun with Halo fanboys if that’s possible).
My position is pretty much what I said when ~anime was being proposed. It makes more sense to group based on how the community actually organizes and identifies itself, and manga readers are undoubtedly more tied to anime watchers than they are readers of western comics.
That makes sense, but it ends up being inconsistent with how we're doing Sci-Fi then, where it's testing under ~tv, ~books, and ~movies separately even though genre fiction fans probably identify across those domains (and movie/literature nerds resent them as tawdry).
I think at this point it's impossible to say where I'll spend my time. As a horror fan, I'd love to spend my time in ~movies.horror but if there aren't any other people there, what's the point?
It's going to be interesting to see these more niche communities grow over time but I think it'll be impossible to say which ones will be a hit just yet.
As for hierarchies, I think fewer levels is better. The more you split it, the more "dead" subgroups you'll end up with. Plus, adding more levels just makes it harder for people to find the content they're looking for.
I do think a "standard" format would be good to have though. That way we don't end up with multiple different subgroups that all cover the same topic (although duplicates could probably be cleaned up manually by a moderator, it would be extra work).
You seem to be operating under a misapprehension about how and when sub-groups will be created. This page will provide some background information.
Sub-groups will not be created until there's a demonstrated demand for them: for example, ~movies.horror would be created in response to there being a lot of topics in ~movies tagged "horror". Also, sub-groups will be created by moderators of the parent group, not by users.
Under this model:
There will already be people interested in a sub-group when it's created, because they'll be the same people who posted and discussed all the tagged topics that led to the sub-group being created. Sub-groups will be a "hit" from the moment they're created.
There won't be dead sub-groups because sub-groups won't be created until there's a need for them.
There won't be multiple different sub-groups covering the same topic, because they'll all be created under the relevant hierarchy. For example, there's unlikely to be a sub-group about horror movies anywhere else other than under ~movies (it won't be under ~books or ~science or even ~tv).
Who says this is how subgroups will be created in this way? That's a wiki link, aka something curated by the community, of which, you appear to be the primary author. It's not law. Sticking to a strict almost military-esque regimen for how things should be done is going to do nothing but discourage people from wanting to participate. It seems like you've aligned these rules with your own opinions and are propagating them as gospel.
There's also credence to be assigned to a "build it and they will come" approach. I'm not saying either is correct, but life is many shades of grey and it's going to likely be necessary to have reasonable judgment calls that vary from these guidelines as necessary.
I don't want to spam
~techwith Apple-related posts, so I don't submit as many as I otherwise would. I'm waiting for~tech.appleto do that (and before anyone jumps in and tells me that wouldn't be a valid group, r/Apple is one of the biggest company-oriented communities on reddit and it does foster discussion from like-minded individuals who often otherwise have no other grouping in the tech sphere). I doubt I'm alone in this opinion.It's the "how to" guide, which @Deimos and I are working towards adding to the official Docs site. The wiki page is just a staging post for me to get it ready for Deimos to copy across.
You'll also notice that section contains many links to various threads discussing how groups will be created. This isn't my opinion, it's my summary of everyone else's opinions - particularly Deimos'.
To try to clarify for you and @emdash, in theory, I think that creating subgroups based on demand is a good plan, but if people are hesitating to post as much as they want to because they feel like they're flooding the site with a particular subject, maybe it's not really going to work very well in practice.
I'm torn about it—on the one hand, I really don't want the site to get fragmented up into a bunch of niche groups that feel deserted. On the other hand, we absolutely need more activity, and if the current approach is forcing people to hold back on posting, it's working against that.
So I don't know, maybe we should try giving some niche groups a shot? It doesn't have to be exclusively one approach or the other, we can have groups created in both "bottom up" and "top down" directions if it seems necessary. I think we'll definitely need some more work done on making it easier to choose the topics you do (and don't) want to see first though.
(Also, if you two could lay off the little offhanded snipes at each other, that would be nice)
This is a problem that will take care of itself with scale eventually. One person might hold back because they don’t want to be “that guy” but a big enough group of people will not only have several “that guys” but also lots of different folks who post articles about the same topic without necessarily feeling self-conscious about it.
You don't need to create niche groups. Just create some sub-groups slightly before the demand for them crosses the threshold to make them necessary.
You could create a dozen or so sub-groups right now, if you wanted. There's plenty of clues out there to indicate which ones might be needed.
And, sub-groups are, by their nature, less broad than their parent groups, and therefore less intimidating. This should remove some of the barriers to posting.
While someone might feel awkward posting a lot of topics about Apple products in ~tech, which covers everything from smartphones and social media to electric vehicles and rockets, they might feel less awkward posting their Apple topics in something like ~tech.smartphones because this sub-group looks like it would welcome posts about the latest iPhone upgrades and iPhone accessories.
P.S. You say I'm the primary author of the "how to" guide as if that's somehow a bad thing. I've made no secret of the fact that I've been doing this. I've been mentioning it for months, and linking to it whenever appropriate. And, as you point out, I've been doing this on a wiki page - first deing's unofficial wiki, and now the official wiki. Anyone could step in at any time and add to or edit that page - especially now that it's hosted on Tildes itself. But noone has.
A long time ago, one person expressed active interest in helping out with the "how to" guide. I told them how to get started and pointed them in the right direction. A few days later, they deleted their public comments expressing interest. I never saw them write a single word in the guide.
The fact that I'm the only author of the "how to" guide is not the result of some nefarious conspiracy. It's just that noone else seems to want to help. (EDIT: And I'm okay with that. This isn't a pity party.)
Do you jump down other people's throats when they go off and write a piece of code without involving everyone else? Or do you say "thank you" to them when Deimos announces that he's merged their new feature into the Tildes code? I'm doing exactly the same thing, but in documentation rather than code. This is my contribution to Tildes, just like other people write code for new features.
Same. Apple news/hype/coolaid/propaganda/whatever-you-call-it could easily generate enough news on some days to have more content than the top level
~techitself.Tildes suffers from a lack of content and low activity, but you and @emdash are deliberately holding back from posting more content which would trigger higher activity. You should post more! :)
Especially if you want a ~tech.apple group. Demonstrate the need for it.
If anyone doesn't want to see Apple-related news, they can filter out all topics tagged "apple".
On another point, why would you want an Apple-specific sub-group? Why not a sub-group for tablets and a sub-group for smartphones and a sub-group for smartwatches, and so on?
Often the focus with Apple products isn't about the hardware they're making. It's the ecosystem and the deftness with which these products blend together to create an experience for the platform. You won't get those discussions in ~tech.{hardware}. It's also about creating an insular community where like-minded people can visit without having to engage in flamewars constantly, which ~tech.{hardware} would inevitably have.
This is actually an interesting question; I think it's respecting ecosystem integration. Apple isn't necessarily holding back that more integrated products and services is the name of their current game. This year, we have iPadOS. Last year, we had audioOS with HomePod. It stands to reason that next year or the following, we could have someNewOS—tightly integrated in their ecosystem. Apple posts could find their way into a specific subgroup for phones and smartwatches too. But a home for posts that are already within the barriers won't have to justify the existence of the ecosystem, nor tow the line of the iOS vs. Android debate. The voices participating in that subgroup will have already made that decision, which will now allow a more nuanced discussion on some decision that apple has made, and we will really not have to care about the latest Tizen or Gear OS or what have you, unless it presents a super compelling point for the given conversation. (I will be the person that always brings up the glory of Palm's webOS in the scope of the current trajectory of iOS, though.)
By “like-minded individuals” do you mean endless flame wars with techies who have unreasonable hate-boners for all things Apple?
One thing that I hadn't thought about before relating to subgroups-based-on-tag-usage: pruning "dead" groups. If we have a popular tag fork a subgroup, like
~movies.avengers, and then eventually if the popularity dwindles very low, what would be the pros and cons of closing that subgroup and how would closing look (e.g. "archive" subgroup and new posts in main, flatten subgroup fully back into main, etc). I don't have any solid ideas for or against yet, but it might be worth thinking about for the long term health of niche topic discussion.Deimos has raised this issue before, back when he was asking for suggestions for a few new groups. The most commonly suggested approach was to move the topics from the unpopular sub-group to its parent group, with a tag for the old sub-group name. Under this approach, if ~movies.avengers had to be closed, all the topics in that sub-group would be moved to ~movies and tagged with "avengers".
Ah, good catch. Don't know how I missed that one.
Thank you for clearing up some of the confusion. Waiting to create them until after there are already a number of posts to "jump start" them seems like a good idea and would at least help them to remain popular initially.
Maybe dead wasn't the right word. I was referring to subgroups that were in the middle of a complex taxonomy, like the ~games.fps.overwatch example. If Overwatch was the only subgroup, wouldn't ~games.fps be redundant and essentially the same as the ~games.fps.overwatch subgroup in terms of content?
That's why I was advocating for a more simple taxonomy.
If I'm wrong, please correct me (again).
If all discussions in ~games.computer.fps* were about Overwatch, then there wouldn't be a need to create ~games.computer.fps.overwatch. However, if discussions about Overwatch comprised more than half of the group's traffic, with discussions about various other first-person shooter games making up the remainder, it would make sense to create ~games.computer.fps.overwatch to collect the Overwatch discussions together and separate them from the other discussions. This would make it easier to find the Overwatch discussions, and stop the Overwatch discussions overshadowing the other discussions.
* ~games includes more than just computer games. It also includes tabletop games. I expect it will be divided into ~games.computer and ~games.tabletop in the future.
What about sub-groups who just lapse in usefulness? If there was a Reddity example, memes.ragecomics would have been all the rage 8 years ago, but it would be dead today. Maybe that’s specific to a memey format, but I can think of things like music.trap or movies.superheros fading as genres lose popularity.
We’d need some way to archive, deprecate, or merge dead groups I think. But I can see it getting really political because the rump group will be full of the most die-hard fans. They won’t be able to sustain a discussion about anything but the “injustice” of being deprecated. But the discussions about that will rage for days.
Refer to my answer here.
I don't know if there are any policies here about politics, but I'd be psyched to see something like /r/breadtube get started here, some community for leftist video essays.
In addition, subgroups like science.mycology, creative.animation and music.hiphopheads would be rad!
My approach (which I've suggested before) would be to create sub-groups around political issues rather than political orientations. So, rather than ~politics.socialism or ~politics.democracy or ~politics.fourth_international_posadist, we would have ~politics.welfare ~politics.healthcare ~politics.taxation ~politics.education and so on. People could pick an issue or issues they're interested in, and discuss that issue with other people of all political backgrounds.
I agree, there are far too many topics to pick a side in my opinion and I've yet to meet an individual that agreed with all of the policies of a single party/leaning without doing so blindly.
I'm rather happy with the status quo TBH: it's not a river of content so it's not hard to see almost everything, especially once I filter out stuff I'm not really interested in (for me ~news, ~anime, and a couple others); and yet it is a rather diverse set of content where I usually do discover stuff totally new to me. I'd like the community to grow slowly but steadily, remain invite-only, and not have many subgroups or at least have a way to subscribe to the entire tree of groups (e.g. I subscribe to ~creative, then I'm subbed to all the subs it contains).
I might single out and subscribe to ~news.turkey or similar if it's ever created tho.
Anything that involves metal and linux/unix/bsds. Maybe Brazil, if it's not populated by the toxic people living here who frequent online forums and comment sections.
I'm with you on the metal.
I think the question is precocious, but what a hell: I wanna be in involved in groups related to Star Trek, print science-fiction, film (my actual major), TV, Linux and programming. I wouldn’t mind helping to create and moderate some of these.
~creative.3dprinting
~sports.football.nfl - Because I enjoy in depth conversation about the merits, performance, tactics and the like of professional football, and not the "[expletive] (team name)" fanboyisms.
~sports.motorsport
And something about DIY automotive fabrication, racing, etc. just not sure where yet, perhaps ~creative.
As I state in my user bio here,
~sports.cricket
~creative subgroups corresponding to Reddit's SFWPorn network, especially maps