Daily Tildes discussion - the importance of content
This is a topic that's been discussed on and off a fair amount recently. Probably the most significant recent example was this post yesterday about whether people were "fully switching" to Tildes already. I think the really key point that came up in there is that for it to be more feasible, people have to feel like they're not "missing out" by being on Tildes. This is a difficult point to reach for a small site, and it's something that I've tried to advocate myself by doing things like having an entire section of the welcome message to encourage people to post content.
It's definitely going to be a long time before Tildes has anywhere near enough content to satisfy people looking for very specific topics (such as for a particular video game or niche genres of music), but it's important that we keep moving towards that point. The biggest thing that will get people to keep coming back to the site is if they can feel like there will always be more interesting content whenever they do.
You can see this in other sites: Hacker News is a great example. The site has extremely minimal functionality (I think Tildes already has more), and it generally only gets posts about a narrow set of subjects, yet it's quite a successful community overall. That's almost entirely because of the content—people know that there will always be good content and interesting discussions there, so they come back often and spend a lot of time there.
Here's a few of my general thoughts about how we can get there:
- I think people are feeling a bit discouraged from posting a lot of content, for a few reasons. Some users have expressed that they think posting content is "low effort" (which I disagree strongly with), and I also think that people might be worried that they'd be "spamming" too much by posting a lot. I think we need to push past that feeling, so how can we do that? One thought is that maybe we should stop subscribing people to all the groups automatically now. I think submitting feels more "spammy" because you know that your posts will be seen by almost everyone, but if we switch the groups to opt-in that should mostly go away—people shouldn't really complain about seeing posts about games when they chose to subscribe to ~games, and so on.
- When I started /r/Games on reddit, one of the things I did to seed it with content initially was create a bot that would look at every post made to /r/gaming and run it through various criteria to try to figure out if it seemed like it might be a "good post". For example, it would disregard all images, posts from certain sites, ones that weren't getting upvoted, and so on. Anything that made it through the filters would be automatically cross-posted to /r/Games. I didn't end up having to run that bot for very long (only about 3 weeks), but it was pretty useful as a way to initially get some content into the subreddit. Do you think we might want to have a similar sort of thing here?
- As mentioned in a few of the related threads, I think it would be good to try to focus on "meta" discussions a little less. I obviously enjoy them, and I still want to have the daily discussions and so on, but I think (especially for technically-minded people like a lot of us), it's very easy to spend a lot of time focused on "let's work through complicated systems and the flaws they'll have when the site is huge", when a lot of it probably won't be relevant for years. I'm not sure if we should do anything in particular to try to reduce this, but if we do decide to stop subscribing people to all the groups, just having fewer people in ~tildes might do a lot of that on its own.
Let me know what you think about all of that, and if you have any other thoughts or suggestions about how we can improve the quality and quantity of content.
For anyone who's sick of meta-discussion and wants more content they haven't seen, I encourage you to try out the sort buttons at the top. Sorting by votes has shown me several great threads I've missed, simply because they don't have a lot of comments. Go to individual groups, expand the scope to 3 days or a week, etc. In the future, click on tags.
I'm not sure why, but for the first few weeks of using this site I largely ignored these buttons. Which is silly, I really like being able to apply custom filters to vast sets of data. I used these buttons every day on reddit. Not sure why I've been ignoring them up until recently.
I'm also a fan of people being able to make the front page of the site reflect the things they want to see, so I'd like the filtering/searching/tagging system to play a bigger part in how people use the front page. Not sure how we could encourage that. Maybe just some CSS changes to make the filters more visible?
Edit2: removed previous edit: offtopic, going to post it elsewhere.
Yeah, I think people are so used to relying on reddit's /r/all and their front page to bring them fresh content every time they refresh that they don't really explore anymore. It certainly doesn't help that on reddit, older submissions are not really worth looking at or commenting on either since the only person who will likely see your comment is the OP or the person you replied to.
However with Activity sort on ~ if you find an old submission that interests you and make a comment on it, it will rise to the top of Activity sort so has the potential to bring a whole bunch of new eyes into the discussion.
So my recommendation is:
Go into the group pages that interest you
Check the various 'all time' sorts
And don't be afraid to comment on old submissions/topics
There's another option: unsubscribe from ~tildes. I did this nearly a week ago, when I noticed I kept allowing myself to be dragged into meta discussions, even though I wanted to make and participate in substantive posts more often. If these meta posts don't show up on my front page, I won't be distracted by them. And I've noticed a better experience on Tildes since doing that: I see more substantive posts of content and discussions, and less navel-gazing.
Of course, I obviously didn't block myself off from all meta discussion:
I remained subscribed to ~tildes.official, to keep up to date with how the site is changing.
I still look at ~tildes occasionally - but only when I'm specifically in the mood for meta discussions, rather allowing those discussions to distract me when I don't want to be distracted.
I've definitely been discouraged from posting after being accused of "karmawhoring" (on a site that doesn't keep scores) and "spamming" after posting one fairly significant story from each continent on our planet to ~news.
I don't really feel like putting myself in the crosshairs of people who wax lyrical for seemingly endless paragraphs at a time about what they want to see, but don't actually provide the stuff they say is appropriate or of sufficient quality.
I was one of those who expressed dislike for link posts, so here's my opinion.
I don't think we should discourage or disallow link posts, but I think Tildes should go beyond just "social bookmarking", that's reddit, that's Voat, that's Voten and many other smaller or failed attempts. What we should do is find ways to encourage discussion in link posts, Hacker News solved that problem by focusing on a single topic that encourages discussion, may cause arguments and makes people think.
I don't know what would work for Tildes as our type of discussion is more generic, for example, what would you reply to a music link? "Cool song", "I like this"? Some types of links don't encourage discussion, but sometimes an interesting discussion about them may start. We should not disallow those links, but due to the default sorting algorithm I think they are not getting enough attention and that causes them to have even less possibilities of starting a discussion. And that gives everyone of us more reasons to complain that they are useless.
Different topic now, I don't like bots, especially not when they are used to repost content, but I think the content they mirror is necessary when a website is new and people feel discouraged to participate because there's not much to talk about. If you think our posting rate is too low (I think it is), I say go for it. It should solve this catch-22 problem about people not staying because there's few content, and having few content because people leave.
Ideally, I think a good high-effort reply to a music link would include one or more of the following:
Something as basic as "I enjoy this" or "this was cool" would be better expressed through voting on it.
This
Lol, on a more serious note, yeah you can say “I like this” but there’s always a reason why you like something. And if you’re not in the mood to expand upon your thoughts voting and moving on is still a valid contribution.
This is something I have talked in another thread, I feel that the vote button is, many times, not enough to express something: https://tildes.net/~tildes/2f4/what_i_hope_is_my_last_meta_post_on_tildes#comment-qu9
I think that the feeling that posting content being spammy comes from instances when people get really low responses from a post and they watch it just slowly disappear from the front page. For one, when browsing ~games right now i’m noticing that there are always a lot of news style posts that don’t get anywhere, they get minimal votes and no comments at all before disappearing. I don’t think news link aggregation is a goal for tildes, and I think that users should be encouraged to make an actual comment along with their posts. This could promote more discussion rather than just letting these posts clog up the new feed.
What do you think about having a "submission statement" or something for link based posts? This has been brought up before, and the concern has been raised that it gives a soapbox to OP and prioritizes their viewpoint over others. On the other hand, it allows OP to flesh out why they posted it and what sort of discussion they hope it could bring.
I think having that idea of a submission statement but just displaying it like any other comment - as long as there’s maybe some kind of statement or impetus for discussion besides the link I think that’s an improvement over the current situation.
So just like a mandatory comment on link posts?
Could work. I guess though, since the comments sections are currently sorted by votes, that leads to early comments getting an "inertia" effect where if they get one vote early, they're likely to stay at the top of the thread forever.
Maybe the OP's submission statement comment would be unable to be voted on, so it'd naturally sink to the bottom of the thread? Could be an interesting way of doing it. The early commenters get an idea of why OP posted the thread, maybe it preemptively answers some common questions they might have, but then clears the way for new conversations once new voices appear?
Edit: Though, since the comment box is at the bottom, OP's submission statement would be directly above the new comment box. That's a side-effect I hadn't thought of before.
While I don't necessarily agree with requiring a submission statement for link posts, there is another way to do it than posting a comment: wrap the link in a text post, like this.
So, rather than making comments mandatory, we could simply remove the option to post a link, and force all posts to be text posts.
(Like I said, I don't agree with this policy. I just wanted to show you another way to implement it.)
That's definitely another way of doing it too. To be honest I haven't followed all the meta-conversation, and I'm sure it's already been brought up, this is how it's done on metafilter. The idea being a portion of the text body is visible on the front page, the rest of the submission is visible on the [read more] or the comment page.
There, there's a heavy emphasis on multiple links per submission. The OP is expected to write a bit of an article with multiple links backing it up or fleshing it out in order to make a submission.
I don't know how we could encourage that here. The internet is a different place than it was 20 years ago, and we don't charge five bucks for an account.
I feel like if an OP wants to have something like that, they can immediately comment on their post. I have done this on some of my posts that are more ask or survey style, containing my answer, with the text post holding the question. Highlighting the ability for a comment to be used in this way could be good, though.
I agree that:
People should feel free to post more content without feeling "spammy".
A decrease in the ratio of "meta":"content" is not a bad thing.
I disagree about using a bot to seed content, though. I've already noticed an increase in people posting content in the past few days; the problem may be solving itself. Let people choose the content they want to share. A bot will inherently be weighted towards certain posts, based on how you program it (I don't expect it'll post much Australian news, for example).
But, ultimately, I'm just prejudiced against bots in general. :) As I've said quite often, I consider them a blight on Reddit. I'd hate to see a similar culture start here - especially if you want to build a culture of quality discussion, which bots don't contribute to. Using an official bot to seed content will be an implict stamp of approval for other bots in the future; in other words, the cure may end up being worse than the problem.
Yep. We have one in one of the subreddits I moderate. It has two qualities which make it good in my eyes:
It has to be invoked by a user. Someone has to deliberately name the bot and command it to do its task.
It operates only within one subreddit.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of bots on Reddit are not like this. They're mostly just pointless clutter.
I think there's space for bot posting, but it has to be exceptional.
We have all seen the reddit co-founders talk about the days when digg was the big site and reddit was the small site.
I was a digg user at the time, and it is often a mistake people make when they say digg killed itself. Digg did not kill itself, reddit killed it, by providing a viable and better(in the minds of users) alternative during a turbulent time period the site was going through. The question is - What made reddit better in the eyes of users?
Digg users had received 6-12 months of comments on top posts that were "I saw this on reddit earlier". Reddit was getting content before Digg, and the content was being cross posted to Digg.
When this has been talked about in interviews since, the answer has been "we used bots and alts to get the content and present it as regular users, we also seeded and participated in comment discussion from time to time to bring the quality up".
Reddit had all the content digg had, sooner, and was providing a cleaner viable alternative. Users obviously had a lot of loyalty and entrenchment, so they weren't willing to move even though they had seen that reddit was supposedly better/faster in their own comment sections. However, once the turbulence of the redesigns hit all hell broke loose and the userbase went into mass-exodus mode. This was then handled poorly, with users feeling like they weren't being listened to (they weren't) - this sealed the deal.
The point is that this is something that was highly successful for reddit. We shouldn't be scared of it here.
The only caveat is that it needs to be good content.
How were they doing it? I don't know. But they were doing it and they've been fairly open about that.
It doesn't surprise me, Reddit is coded on python which is also a goto for scraping content
Reddit wasn't always written in Python though. If memory serves me correctly, it was originally written in Lisp.
Yep you're right
I think I also disagree with those users, but I have to ask how you think that doesn't come into conflict with the idea you've expressed that ~ shouldn't be trying to beat Reddit at its own game in terms of aggregating content. Or are we all going too far by associating keeping up with important news and trending information on a topic with Reddit?
Either way, I agree that the meta stuff has gone a bit overboard and we should be trying to work past it. I like the idea of ~tildes not being default but ~tildes.official remaining default. Though on the other hand, that might just make the site too slow in the immediate future.
Maybe I explained it poorly, but it's not that I don't think Tildes should try to replace Reddit at aggregating content, it's that we shouldn't try to compete with Reddit at aggregating fluff. Since reddit is willing to do things like display auto-expanded images and auto-playing gifs, it's always going to be better at that. I fully intend for Tildes to be better at aggregating things like articles though (and they'll actually have a chance if they don't have to compete with fluff).
So, ~ is a community link aggregation site with a discussion section, like reddit, and for people who enjoy interesting articles and insightful commentary, it can indeed be a reddit replacement. But, if you used reddit mostly for looking at pictures of cats, memes, gifs of funny things happening, gifs of violent or outrageous things happening, screenshots of social media where we're supposed to feel a certain way about the person posting, etc, then ~ is not going to make a good reddit replacement for you.
After spending 15 minutes on reading a great longread, more often than not my best response is simply voting on the post.
I shouldn't be making some nonsense, couple-sentence comment just to make people feel like there's engagement.
Somehow that's a feeling we have to emulate or get around: a highly voted post needs to feel successful for the contributor who shared, irrespective of the number of comments.
That's a design challenge. Not being able to solve it has lead most of the longread subreddits to die despite having loads of great reads being posted (and still being posted) just because the submitters don't feel like they're reaching anyone.
What sort of automatic feedback can OP be given to remind them that their posts are doing good even if they're not getting loads of comments (or even any)?
Maybe something tied into the tag system?
Perhaps seeing other users explicitly agree on the quality and a few related topical tags, besides the standard vote (which don't indicate much at all) would be a good motivator
I wonder if maybe you could get a notification of votes in your sidebar - Facebook and Instagram both inform you of how many likes a post got, maybe you could get a little vote count for posts you've made in the last 24 hours or something without having to look it up yourself?
"your post in ~news has 33 votes!"
I think it's high time to carry an empirical study of the "noise" on reddit everyone is talking about. (Something like take someone's upboat history, find the thread, match against its position sorted by "hot", and if top comments are not useful, then maybe it's noise?)
For me, I think it's inevitable that people find "noise" in a large site like reddit. An alternate solution is
something like a weekly digest of community, like r/tldr and r/outoftheloop combined. I'd like to offer some karma as a bounty for any volunteer editor to write a nice summary of what happened in communities I have not subscribed.
tl;dr Aggretators of aggregators.
I would suggest ~tilde.tldr, or a .tldr per group, or perhaps even something like ~tildedr for more visibility, in which meta commentary about site activity can be posted
I agree 100%. We can discuss site mechanics to death, the best way to get quality content is to ... submit quality content :)
Just make it a habit to submit the one or two best links you encountered during the day. It's easy and will help a lot.
I'd support the addition of an initial comment field on the submit page for links. It doesn't need to be mandatory, but I think just the presence of the field will encourage people to post some of their initial thoughts and get discussion started. I saw some people worrying this would give OP a 'soapbox' — to me, the OP already has a soapbox on the topic by being able to title the post as they wish. Besides, nothing is currently stopping someone intent on soapboxing from commenting on their post right away , so we may as well try to encourage better posts overall.
Also, I posted this in an earlier thread, but I figure it's relevant enough to post in this thread as well.
I think the best way to post an article is to include
This provides a good jumping off point for quality discussion, and also helps give context to anyone who clicked through to the comments but hasn't read the article yet. You probably don't need to include all of these all of the time, but really you should at least try for one.
Making the tildes opt in is fine as long as we can opt in to as many as we want. At least that would be helpful for now. Good points about bots, but I leave that to the powers that be. Good tip about the sort buttons.
Blacklisting is what I use on reddit. There are so many subreddits that are interesting that I'd never see if I didn't browse /r/all. I do have hundreds of gaming and porn subs filtered out though.
and that's what makes me excited about how the group structure will work here, since you can just block out ~games and never have to block out a new subgroup (as opposed to reddit where each time a new game got popular you'd have to block it out).
You really haven't resolved this issue with this post Deimos. There is obviously a big part of the community that desires for tildes to follow slashdot's or metafilter's shoes, only posting descriptive submissions. That post of yours also further solidifies the confusing status quo.
I've talked about this already. Basically, even if you are open to any kind of valuable link and text submissions, what is the point if the community doesn't appreciate it?
Either you clarify that what you described above counts and tags are supposed to enable people to filter out what they want to read, or you agree that the entire community has to follow a more strict set of submission guidelines, focusing on submission statements. In that case you need to get rid of the unnecessary link submission form as well.
You need to make everyone pull in the same direction.
Sorry, I don't think I understand exactly what issue you're talking about, or what clarification you're looking for (or how the post about spoiler tags you linked to is related). I have no plans to require submission statements, I think they're useless 99% of the time.
Fixed the link, it's this one.
While in this thread you state your perspective, you do that with the purpose of gathering opinions. It does not count as an explanation how everyone should be using tildes.
The disagreeing replies are evidence that it is still not clear whether what you described counts or whether that was just an inquiry.
That is the issue at hand. If you followed the comments in this or other threads, it's pretty evident that a big part of the community assumes tildes might or should require submissions statements or text only posts.
That is the vibe many people get on this forum--just read some of the replies above--even it is not consistent with the opinion you've expressed a few times.
Right, that all makes sense, thanks. I need to update the submit interface and/or the docs about it, I don't want people to need to dig through old comments or daily discussions for info about how the site should be used.
My current intention is to update the submit page so that you can fill in both link and text, and if you do so, you will end up with a link post with an initial comment. I'll also make clear on there that the text is optional while making a link post, and that you're not required to add anything to the link (but you're welcome to). Do you think that will be enough to make it clear, or is there anything else I should do?
Well, personally, I would make a post in response to this survey thread, so the already invited people get a proper update on what is. After all, it has become quite a big topic on tildes.
On a technical level, it may help if you generate filter tags to differentiate links and text/link+text submissions. Meaning, they're not visible, but users can use them as filters.
I pretty much agree with everything you posted. I'm not sure how necessary or useful a bot would be though.
If we submit a link for discussion, should it be necessary to accompany the link with a relevant discussion? One of my gripes about Reddit is that users will just put up links for controversial subjects just to generate karma, but won't bother giving context or applying context to the discussion.
I've been trying to find the most reasonable source (e.g. not a news link talking about company releasing x, but the company's own blog post announcing it), which i think already does away with some issues with the secondary/bait-y links, namely that they already put on their own interpretation. I mean if I got it through another source I usually say so.
And seeding the discussion can be good, but i've found already that discussion by others usually pull ahead fairly quickly