Daily Tildes discussion - please help write new descriptions for the groups
Maybe not so much a "discussion" today, but this is something I've been meaning to do for a while and I think it would be good to specifically ask for some input/help. When creating new groups, I wrote quick little descriptions of each of them, but they're not very good. You can see all of the groups and their descriptions here: https://tildes.net/groups
I'd like to replace some or all of these descriptions to help clarify what types of content goes into each group, so I'd appreciate any suggested new descriptions, especially from people that have been active in those groups and have a good feeling of what does/doesn't belong in them. Even just thoughts on what needs adjusting if you don't want to write something yourself would be great. A few specific things that I know could use clarification, but I'm sure there are more:
- What's the difference between ~tech and ~comp?
- What is ~lifestyle for?
- What distinguishes ~talk compared to just having discussions in all of the other specific-subject groups?
Thanks, any input (or entirely new descriptions) would be great.
Here are some suggestions:
~news
~books
Where does theatre fall in this system: ~books because scripts are printed, or ~creative because acting is a performing art? I'm starting to wonder whether you need a group called ~arts, with subgroups for ~arts.literature, ~arts.performing, and ~arts.visual.
~science
~games
I'm not a computer gamer by any means. However, the other type of games is called "tabletop games", which are then broadly sub-divided into: role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons), board games (Catan, Monopoly), card games, and dice games. In other words, the top category for these is "tabletop games", not "board games".
EDIT TO ADD:
~talk is for talking. If you want to discuss something with your fellow tilders, come to ~talk.
~misc
If you've got the best article in the world and you're dying to share it, but it doesn't seem to fit in any group, post it in ~misc.
This really depends! There are two important pieces of information to ask:
Based on your responses to those questions:
So ~creative is only for your own created works, and not for general creative works? Interesting. That's not how I understood that group at all (as an outsider).
If you know what ~creative is about, it might be a good idea for you to write a better description for that group (like Deimos is asking).
Now that you mention it, you're right, they can be the works of others. Perhaps novelty or timeliness should matter as well? My concern is an over-prevalence of low-effort submissions of works that are already well-known. ~creative, to me at least, seems like the ideal place to celebrate the lesser known creatives, especially those among the Tildes community, which is why I like checking in there now and then.
Agree with most except a strong suggestion we don't use your edit for news
I hope we can kind of rise above the only-the-most-recent-news cycle here, and be able to discuss long-form, or even just short-but-relevant-again pieces. Or op-eds, etc.
There's nothing in my suggestion to exclude long-form articles. I also specifically mention "opinion pieces".
Short-but-relevant-again pieces probably wouldn't be good here, even the first time they were relevant. I'm not sure we want to encourage short news stubs. I'd hope that we lean towards more in-depth reporting and analyses of current events, rather than a brief write-up that "stuff just happened".
If you have a better description for ~news, though, I encourage you to post it. That gives Deimos the option to use your suggestion, or cherry-pick the bits he likes from both suggestions.
Hah, that's the reason I didn't post any, because I'm not sure. I just dislike that on other sites (i.e. reddit) if it's not posted within ~6 hours of the event happening it's "old news". I used to read this Dutch site, De Correspondent which does basically what I think you're going for—in depth looks at news, even if it's a few days later, without ever reporting direct news blurbs, preferring analysis over just stating facts.
This might not be so bad, after all. idk, I'm just scared it could end up being "stuff just happened", like you said. Maybe using the same elements you named but making sure the focus is on the discussions/analyses?
or something like that?
From my point of view, anything a person can create (including nonfiction, tech writing, horseshoes, yarncraft, and underwater basket weaving) can go in ~creative. Also anything that can inspire one to create, or discussing the creative process could go in there.
It would be nice to have subcategories for writing, painting, folk arts, etc... But I don't think the current population could keep all of those active right now.
The first thing I posted to ~creative was hoping to get a discussion started on whether there was a true difference between arts and crafts these days. I think the lines are much blurrier than before. :)
There's a bit of overlap, yes. However ~hobbies covers all pastimes. Collecting coins (or anything else), gardening, social dancing, bird watching, unicycle riding, juggling...the list goes on and on.
If someone does plastic models and self identifies as a hobby, that's fine. If they feel it's an art and post in ~creative, that's also fine. I've definitely seen plastic models that I would categorize as art.
It's not like humans are cleanly catergorizable. Overlap is okay, and will occur anyways as more people come.
Honestly I think that the descriptions for ~tech and ~comp are fine. ~comp is for programming and hacking, ~tech if for gadgets and general tech related news. Perhaps it's just that for people who aren't too involved with computers it may seem unnecessary to break up the broad category of computing into multiple groups.
Here are my suggestions. Feel free to critique :)
I'll add any more if I can think of them
Lifestyle could be changed to ~Health. I believe keeping it ~lifestyles may be too broad and open up discussions that would be best in other groups, as others have already mentioned.
~Health
"A place for discussion concerning the benefit of one's health through diet and exercise."
I've already messaged ~Deimos about this. I feel that ~health is a perfectly "catch-all" group to foster various discussions about related topics. It's certainly a broad topic, but one I feel that is incredibly necessary for the discussion and promotion of health and the well-beings of ourselves and others.
I keep seeing new, more specific group requested and then, if you check those groups ordered by activity 3 days, they seems dead (didn't check right now, checked several time in the past).
You people keep forgetting they we aren't 300k users here. We're around 3k.
Food and health can live easily into lifestyle and make it seems less empty, for the time being
What prompted the creation of ~lifestyle? I still don't really get what is supposed to go into it.
Off the top of my head: ~rockclimbing or ~keto, but the line between hobby & "lifestyle" seems more about denigrating some things as "just a hobby".
My personal opinion is that both are about an action or series of actions that one engages in for long-term personal interest or non-monetary gain, but that there are strong class connotations around the difference.
My answer last time this came up was that there are a lot of "liftstyles" that aren't hobbies, and don't fit into the other tildes. ~lgbt generally isn't really the place for furries, ~sports is likely not the place for bike commuters/utility cyclists, ~hobbies probably isn't the place for discussions about tobacco (or any other) addiction, ~food is probably not the place to discuss the ethics/morals of eating meat. Also full-time RVers, incels, preppers, et cetera, et cetera.
Ok, I'll buy that.
To me, rock climbing is a hobby (~hobbies) and keto is a diet (~food).
I'd say "dieting" is more of a ~lifestyle.
Diet is about the type of food you eat. It's directly food-related. Remove the food aspect of dieting... and you've got nothing.
I think it's one of those "it depends" things. There are a lot of discussions that involve food that... don't really belong in ~food, IMO.
"My girlfriend hates the way my man-milk tastes, what can I eat to improve the flavor?"
"Has anyone who's tried a gluten-free diet seen an improvement in their eczma?"
"I've been purging like this one Youtube video said to for fourteen days, and my tongue is now bright pink. Does this mean my colon is now free of undigested animal fat?"
"How do you count 'days' for the DODO and Military diets if you've traveled across the International Date Line?"
"My imam says no chicken can be halal. Is this true? How can there be kosher chicken, then?"
"Trying to make my own homemade grog out of grape juice. There's a weird sediment on the bottom, is this normal?"
There's also theoretically a huge amount of diet fad-specific workout stuff that really doesn't belong in ~food, and it seems far user-friendlier if, when tildoes jump on the next big fad, all the discussions happpen in one tilde (~talk? ~lifestyle?), rather than being spread between two or three.
Of course. You forgot "Which brand of canned whipped cream is better for licking off my lover's body?"
However, dieting itself is not one of those discussions. It's all about the food: what you eat, what you don't eat, when you eat, how you eat.
There are a number of Star Trek subreddits, in addition to science fiction subreddits. That doesn't mean that Star Trek isn't science fiction.
But, ultimately, it doesn't matter: I'm not subscribed to either ~food or ~lifestyle. You can all discuss whatever you want in those groups. I don't care.
Health related discussions, fitness, nutrition, etc. That was the original reason given in the daily discussion a couple of weeks back.
Well originally, it was a question posed by ~Rain, asking about a fitness group. Really not sure how furries and swingers got into the mix, but so it goes.
Really just wish we had a place on ~ to discuss fitness and nutrition. They really are some of the most important topics, considering it directly affects our health and quality of life.
Right, and I understand that. It just seems odd to me to lump health and nutrition along with niche groups like that. Although, looking at ~lifestyle right now, it seems to be a collection of random articles and posts.
Right now, I see:
an article about amazon.com
an article about the housing market
Yellowstone Park
road trips
Just seems a bit convoluted to me, and I feel that some differentiation would be helpful. As I mentioned before, the group was created due to a post about fitness, and I find it odd that such topics would be grouped together like that. Again, really wish we had a place dedicated to fitness, health and nutrition, and similar topics, because they are vastly important topics that affect our daily lives and the societies we live in.
Yeah, this was my thought, too. I can't write a description for ~lifestyle because I don't really know what it's for.
Here are some definitions i found:
wikipedia has this to say:
The whole entry is pretty interesting. Though it really doesn't sound like something that easily translates into a category of social media posts since it's such a broad concept. Like, my grandma's drinking was one element of her lifestyle, and that was an influencing factor along with my grandpa's personality on my mom's lifestyle as a child - and their negative actions toward my mom as a kid has translated into how my mom has treated me when i was a child, and how my personality was affected from that - and that's all part of my lifestyle (along with a thousand other things that affect my thoughts, personality, habits, environment, income, social life, etc. etc. etc.).
See here.
aha! so it's all @koan's fault. :P
Why not have ~comp as a subgroup of ~tech? like ~tech.comp or something?
Because ~comp is likely to have a ton of subgroups on its own, e.g. ~comp.lang.python.SQLAlchemy and the primary reasons for the hierarchy are discoverability and ease of navigation.
I talked at length about the hierarchy on /r/tildes before, if you're interested:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/8qwng4/question_about_hierarchical_groups/e0mru4y/
But here are some of the more relevant parts to answer your question in more depth:
Is there anything saying we can't break a sub out into it's own ~ later? I think it would be fine to have ~comp be part of ~tech now while the site is small and could always use more activity. Then have the expectation that ~comp would be likely to be placed on its own again when things got too busy.
There is nothing stopping that, no, in fact that's one of the strengths of the hierarchy + topic tagging system; If a group is created and winds up dying, it can simply be folded back into its parent or even ~misc with an appropriate topic tag for each submission and so none of the content will be lost that way. However ~comp and ~tech are already two of the busiest groups on the site, so what would be the point of combining them now when it's inevitable they will be separated later?
That's true, they are quite busy. I will have to agree that they should stand on their own.
That said, perhaps ~lifestyle should be folded into another group for now, since it has very little activity.
I think the problem is that nobody really knows what ~lifestyle is supposed to be. It was originally created after a user asked about a fitness group, but at the moment there are posts about all sorts of random stuff. I'm talking posts about housing markets, amazon.com, road trips, and pets. I feel that it needs to be changed to ~health, just to promote discussions about health and nutrition. After all, those are incredibly important topics that demand our attention. The term "lifestyle" is just too broad and far too open for interpretation.
I wish ~lifestyles focused more on health and nutrition, which are two incredibly important topics. At the moment, it just seems to lump together a bunch of semi-related fields. I just want a place to discuss fitness and personal development man. This stuff is important. You will live longer!
be the change, etc
Maybe make a post with what's worked for you so far? I don't sub to that group, but personal development is a good thing to have in-depth discussions about?
Until we get a ~misc or ~alt type thing, ~talk is going to be a catch all for topics that don’t fit into any existing group and some conversational stuff. I like to see it as an offtopic/casual conversation group so
‘Offtopic group for casual conversation and miscellaneous content that doesn’t fit into other groups.’
Yeah, about that...
oh wow that’s what i get for posting first thing after waking up. Strange that they seem to overlap so much then - ~misc should be the catchall and i guess ~talk is more offtopic?
I feel really dumb now ahaha.
~talk is exactly what the label says: it's for talking. If you want to discuss something with your fellow tilders, go to ~talk.
~misc is for all the posts that don't fit anywhere else. If you've got the best article in the world, but it's not news, or about books or food or science, etc... post it in ~misc.
I don’t disagree, but then we have posts like this, this and this
It seems like the two groups get a bit conflated as of now, maybe the current description doesn’t exactly set the distinction strictly enough?
~talk should be, as you say for talking with your fellow users here, so I think it needs to be clear that posts like that belong more in ~misc than in ~talk
Even with the best possible descriptions, some people will still post in the wrong place.
But, yes, we could improve the descriptions. I think I'll add something to my top-level comment here. Thanks for the prompt.