Creating a ~talk.casual (and/or ~talk.ask) and ~talk.serious could also help with this issues as well, so those of us not interested in the casual chitchat can just subscribe to ~talk.serious.

I think ~talk is already potentially active enough to justify subgroups and while filtering is nice (letting us ignore casual chichat topics in other groups), I think casual and serious each having their own ~talk subgroup might encourage more serious discussions from being created since they wont be competing as directly with the casual ones anymore.

Not a reddit replacement

This is a great distinction to be made, and should be made aware before the community sees it's first actual major influx of users.

I think marking all those topics with [ask] makes sense. They're not un-important topics, per se, but they're just less involved. It's good to have on the site, but would be a tag/topic that I would choose to check out, vs having show up on front page.

Thank you for emphasising the "not a reddit replacement" aspect.

I was starting to get a bit annoyed by the number of ideas and suggestions I keep seeing to duplicate/mimic reddit things.

Part of this may be the size of the userbase. We're still new, and still figuring out how to talk to each other. The culture has not yet developed.

However, that means that now is the time for an ounce of prevention. Tagging and tag-filtering may be a good solution for this, but without trust does that mean moderators for the time being?

I think it's a good thing that we're having these sorts of discussions early on. While I'm figuring out where I fall on the [fluff] issue, something came up for me this morning while browsing reddit.

As you pointed out, the topics that you used as an example are very much casual conversation. In a lot of fandom subreddits, especially during off-seasons if it's a TV show, you'll see more of this casual conversation or posts like, "[x character] appreciation thread." While these sorts of threads in and of themselves aren't necessarily fluff, they sometimes end up criticized as "low-effort content."

What I want to talk about is how we as a community react to these sorts of topics.

Because again, while these topics aren't necessarily in-depth discussion within the body text or ask, they have the potential to spur in-depth discussion. The thread I was looking at this morning led to a discussion of how fathers tend to be portrayed in a lot of media (dumb, aloof, or even straight up toxic) because we were celebrating the portrayal of a really well-done and well-meaning father figure.

Unfortunately, sometimes this leads to reactions like... well, I'll just quote it:

"Can we all just take a moment" posts are almost always the worst ones on this sub. Like people who come to this sub haven't seen the show or something so they need to be reminded every. Fucking. Day. Of something that is obvious. And why? Because posting something with thought and effort is too hard so you guys will just be karma whores knowing this sub can give less than a shit about what they re reading on a hiatus. It's pathetic.

We've come here because we want to have meaningful discussions. But I don't think that this kind of comment leads to that—and is in fact antithetical to some of these core values of "treat others how you want to be treated." This sort of reaction serves as a distraction from meaningful conversation.

So how can we, as a community culture, encourage each other to still have meaningful discussions in what may seem to be low-effort content respectfully? And have it serve as an example of the kind of content that's encouraged on here so that folks can follow that example?

To start, I guess something that I see very much plays into that last question: Rather than complain about low-effort content, be the creator of that content you want to see. Ask questions within topics that probe further.

I wouldn't necessarily consider casual discussion and high quality content to be mutually exclusive. A lot of those threads are pretty broad, but have some great discussion going on inside about some of the answers.

I like the idea of filters+tags, though. Giving the user more control over what they do and don't see is never a bad thing.

I feel like the only one confused... what would be ideal things to post then?

This is a topic that is fundamental to my love for the site and community, and I have been working rather consistently to try to keep injecting some meaningful discussion into an otherwise survey-dominated ~talk.

Just some examples for those who haven't noticed or may have joined since seeing most of these:

• Nuclear Energy policy
• Obesity health policy
• United States' dominance in world affairs
• Investigating Russia's involvement in the US election, and the Trump campaign investigation specifically
• Are Trade Wars good
• When is Abortion morally acceptable

And my one, sole "survey" question:

• Books would Kafka be proud of

Let it not ever be said that I have not tried to make this place the hub for in-depth discussion I wanted to see. This is despite being told that politics discussions must always devolve into discord, madness or drama, among other disheartening threads discouraging political discussion content.

I'm going to spend some time talking about behavioral science theory now, especially concepts of choice architecture and nudging people toward making the decisions you want them to make.

All Structures Encourage Some Reaction Over Another

No matter what we choose, we will be encouraging one type of behavior over another. So let's discard from the get-go the comfortable idea that we should not be making a choice of some sort that encourages people to dive deep into threads. Some run-downs on the biases we're likely to see with each of the currently available default styles of sorting:

• Activity - This sorting method sorts for controversy, as some others have noted in other discussions (though sorry to have forgotten who and where). Threads that are more recently active will self-sort higher in the order. This will encourage users--as we are seeing--to frame discussions and threads in the way that will seem to get the largest reaction, even if that might not ultimately be the most rewarding way to frame debate. There is always a steady stream of content in this order, and you will always know what is most recently getting the views, but the bias is toward broadly applicable, generalized controversy.
• Most Votes - This sorting method sorts for what lurkers most highly value (which is quick, compelling solely from a title that is often vague clickbait, and often emotionally resonant). I think that demographics survey pretty well established that we are all roughly familiar with Reddit's failings. This method, with no other tools available, will lend itself toward encouraging fluff.
• Most Comments - This sorting method is like Activity on steroids. Instead of sorting for the most recently commented on, this method would sort for the largest discussion chains. That may give you more reading material if the comments are all long, but it's basically just a numbers game.
• Newest - This sorting method is like most votes, but on steroids. That is because you don't ever get to see (except in the rarest, usually low-traffic circumstances) a fully formed debate about anything. This sorting method is all about the drive to be the newest and to have your few seconds of fame before falling into the unknowable dustbin of several pages deep of pre-paginated, unsearchable horror. At scale, to survive with any lasting impact on the minds of users, you have to compel them to immediately respond and engage in the content, which is an even heavier drive toward fluff than votes alone would be.

So it's clear that none of the currently available sorting methods are sufficient for anything getting close to the behavior we want to encourage. We need some structural change to get closer. But what sort of structural change might get us there?

1. Users Need To Be Able To Hide Uninteresting Content

This is something you've already touched on, @Deimos, with filtering by tags, but this needs to be possible at every meaningful level. That means both the ability to hide content at the submission and comment level too. You will need some way to tell the user how many threads are hidden on a given page (a little notice at the top or bottom perhaps would do saying "there are X threads hidden on this page"), especially because that gives the user a meaningful opportunity to unhide a thread or to see what trash they're ignoring right now. (edit: It would also be important to give a summary of how many comments are hidden in a particular comment chain, and maybe even whether there are any new comments in that chain). That lets the user audit for themselves how effective their choice architecture is at getting them closer to the tildes experience they want to have.

2. Users Need To Be Able To Save Interesting Content

This is surprisingly NOT something I see being touched on prominently, even though it is the other side of the same coin. Suppose you have a thread, maybe one of those that I linked earlier. Let's say that thread about Trade Wars. This thread promises to be very interesting, but there's no discussion in it right now and you don't really have anything to add to it. It might have a fairly slow pace of discussion, and so you as a user want to keep appraised of discussion developments in that thread. Well, why not follow it! Right now there is no tool available to follow threads that interest a user.

This in a lot of ways would allow users to treat a thread as if they themselves were the OP (without actually being the OP). Maybe all top-level comments would go to a following user's inbox. Maybe a little notice would pop up saying "A thread you're following has new replies!" Boy, that would be exciting!

This would let users have an opportunity (again) to curate their own experience to the type they most want to have. Users who are looking for in-depth conversations about wonky shit might have a highly curated inbox telling them of all sorts of fun discussions happening that users who are looking for more casual conversation don't get. That's okay. The point is to let users have the experience that most matches their own interests.

The whole point about none of these default sorting methods being great is all about the discovery process for finding good content and what that discovery process encourages. An option to save interesting content once you've found it lets users remember more of the good discussions they found most meaningful.

3. Users Need To Be Able To Learn From Other People's Choices

Okay, so now we have tools that let users hide content and save content. BUT, what about that whole discovery process? What about a sorting method that is based on how many people have saved/followed a particular thread?

Now, this is another way of saying "most votes," but its crucial distinction is that these are threads that users are actively following and getting messages on. So this isn't the one-and-done style of most-votes where people follow and forget about it. These are conversations that people are STILL finding to be valuable enough to follow. And for the sake of simplicity, we can keep the default to "most followed threads in the past 24 hours" or something. This should give a meaningful chance for in-depth discussions to be discoverable by people who are interested in finding that material.

It should also have the side effect of allowing for there to be centralized survey threads, as those who are most interested in following the original introduction thread will help other people discover its existence, thus reducing some of the drive to keep making new threads when the old ones will still do fine.

And maybe there's other ways to structure things to encourage meaningful discussion. This is all just a prototype that is intended to predate the bigger trust system we've all been sold on before joining. It should be easier to implement (because good lord, the mechanics involved for rep intimidate me still). And if I'm right about anything when it comes to choice architecture, it should be a more rewarding experience for users who opt into it.

I feel that a clarification on what you mean by "high quality content" could be beneficial. To echo some of the other sentiments I've seen here, a lot of the issue is that the community's culture is still developing, and a lot of different people have different things tugging at them (desire for fluff, anti-fluff, what people consider in-depth discussion, etc). I see a lot of those favorites threads as a way of people trying to start a discussion, and with that comes the potential for the in-depth qualities that people want in ~.

I think a tag system is great. The "ask" tag sounds like it could be a perfect solution, imo.

I think maybe people are more open to posting these broad, open-ended questions because the group categories are still fairly broad at the moment. It's possible people don't want to post a specific discussion about how to optimally play a hero in Heroes of the Storm out of fear that nobody else here plays HOTS (to give an uncomfortably specific example <.< ). It's easier to just ask "hey what games does everyone play" to receive feedback about the type of audience you might have for future posts.

I think an "asktildes" tag would work for those types of threads. It's an outgrowth of the AskReddit types because they're text but easy and easily digestible. To me they're nice, but the in-depth discussion version of cake. Tasty, but not nutritious.

I'm really glad to see this message here - I was one of those concerned netizens.

One point that came up in that thread was that HN's culture only works because its growth has not been anywhere near as fast as Reddit's, despite them being very close in age. What are your plans for the rate of Tildes' growth as we go on?

The other big takeaway from that thread, for me, was that tagging can be an incredibly powerful system for tackling this problem. Hopefully we can see this soon (along with search, open sourcing, pagination, and all the other "high priority" issues :P)

Not a reddit replacement

Wow. This section reads almost exactly like the announcements that kraetos & us other founding moderators of /r/DaystromInstitute used to write when we were promoting our new subreddit as a break-away from /r/StarTrek. I feel ya, bro. (ew - did I just write that? haha) I understand exactly what you mean.

Implement filtering for topic tags

I'm absolutely in favour of this. As I said yesterday, there's very little point having tags if they don't provide some functionality. Using them as filters is a good move.

I'll start editing tags on other people's posts and/or giving other users the ability to do this.

Yep. This is a good step.

Primarily, all "what's your favorite?" type topics should have a common tag so that they can all be filtered easily.

Absolutely!

Allow users to set their default sorting method for the home page and individual groups, and then probably change the default away from "activity".

You gotta do what you gotta do. I have previously said I kind of like the "activity" sorting, but I've since observed that discussion posts are overshadowing link posts that don't prompt discussion. ~news is chock-full of interesting reading that rarely makes the front page because it's reading material that doesn't necessarily prompt people to post comments in the same way as "your favourite X" posts.

I always feel sort of useless in these daily issue threads, because all of this is so new to me. @BuckeyeSundae typically throws me in the deep end anyways, so here goes.

~creative.lite vs ~creative.heavy looks a little different to me than other areas.

Critiques sometimes seem like .lite content, because you get few responses. Part of it is how the request is written. The critique meta posts are finding that open ended context information attracts more critiquers. Too much context/closed presentations also gets few responses. Do FAQs work to educate new posters of successful conversation techniques? What about senpai/mentor relationships?

Links to funky stuff like this seem like fluff. But it's also a needed part of creative growth to people. We get excited by seeing new things. Like books, it's hard to say what will move or inspire people. Do we need a corral like ~creative.inspiration to keep people from being annoyed if they're tired of too much funky stuff?

Activity threads are also unpredictable. They depend heavily on time and emotional health for many posters. Sometimes one will fail simply because it's a holiday period or the population is too small yet. But activity threads like speedart, poetry jams, writing prompt contests and the like build a community faster than anything else in an artistic population.

I think that in ~creative at least, it would be nice to have concrete category tags instead of subjective value tags. Then it would still be sortable to peoples' tastes each day without difficult judgement calls. The five I'd like in the beginning are Activity, For Critique, Inspiration, Socialising, and Theory/History (The curation, science, and societal impact portion.)

Hopefully this makes sense. -_-

I'm not sure how exactly to solve this problem, but I'd like it if talk threads were in ~talk instead of being inside the related group. E.g., instead of "What's your favorite movie?" being in ~movies, it would be in ~talk.

If possible I think there should be a way for the site to "suggest" tags on the submit topic page. Maybe certain popular ones for certain ~'s. Talk can have suggested tags like; ask, fun, fluff etc. That way topics can be tagged correctly and in the future tags won't overlap other tags as much. Like one topic can be tagged as "ask" another as "survey" but they are essentially the same type of topic.

But I never really used tags or hashtags before so idk really how they work.

I came here for more serious discussion and less fluff. I've been wanting to participate less because of all the fluff that's being posted it honestly feels like we ARE back on Reddit and it's starting to become suffocating.

I think quality will always be a challenge especially as the site grows. In the future, I can see where people might have not bothered to read through the entire thread before commenting just due to the sheer number of people who have commented previously. I've felt that siren's call myself. I don't know if there's a balance to having people be heard vs possibly having replies that tackle the same idea crop up multiple times.

In my opinion, we should be able to tag submissions just like we can tag comments.

I also think the addition of a "fluff" tag would be helpful as well.

I personally do enjoy the kind of survey styles posts - though I think the problem is when they become far too prominent, as you mentioned. I think that the most affecting part of this problem is that these threads keep getting bumped back to the top. So the more comments get posted to the thead the more it stays as the most visible type of content on the site, thus establishing as a norm for potential thread posters. Solving this problem should lower the frequency and the prevalence of this kind of thread in the future.

Hey, have you thought about making the default comment sort something other than just "most votes"? This isn't a really big problem for me, but it's a little annoying seeing the top comments stay at the top most of the time and get the most votes and activity and take up so much space. I guess what I'd really want personally is a feature that auto collapses 2nd or 3rd level comments, but still, is the current default comments sorting algorithm ok in the long term?

Very nice initiative :)

It wasn't clear to me how to vote on this post until I clicked the number of votes. That's different from voting on a comment. Maybe that could be clearer in the design?

Like I've said elsewhere here, having sub-groups within groups is a very smart move that hearkens back to the days of newsgroups it seems! I think you have made a number of decisions that gives Tildes its own valid reasons for being, unlike other websites that try to be Reddit clones.

I'm going to explore a bit further. I'm liking it so far!

Edit: I do wonder how you're going to mod all those comment tags, lol.

If it's a problem, we can delete the "Where are you from?" post, since that's probably contributing to the clogged-ness. I often feel bad when I want to reply to someone, but that bumps it up to the top again.

I'd like to see some sort of autocomplete feature for tags-- if we're implementing tag filtering, what happens when someone accidentally tags their post with desktop computer instead of desktop machine? Sure, new tags can be used if wanted/needed at will, but there should be some sort of autocomplete that suggests tags that are already in use as they're being typed.

It seems (I have no data to back this up) that the quality here was better when there were <1400ish people here.

I started a couple of threads that I’m concerned may fall under the low-quality content bar, at least as I read it from this post.

1. Desert Island Beer - I like beer and I like to try beer that other beer drinkers like. The desert island game felt like a good way to rope folks into my plot to find new beer.
2. Musicians, what do you play / what do you do? - I really want to identify the musicians of tildes -who want to be identified- so we can discuss being creative or discuss the business or whatever. Posting that thread under that title seemed like a great way to start that process.

Clearly these have lots of value to me, but would these be considered low quality?

I think that making a “low effort”, “shitpost,” or “fluff” tag would go a long way. So long as there’s filtering, and users religiously enforce tagging, that should take care of things.

As a side suggestion, the ability to filter out posts I've already viewed saves a lot of time. As with the RES filter functions.