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Daily Tildes discussion - minor group updates
Just a few minor updates to the groups today, mostly as a follow-up to this previous thread:
- I've renamed ~lifestyle to ~health and changed the description, as requested by a number of people. I think the purpose of ~lifestyle was pretty muddled, and I'm going to be moving the non-health-related topics out of there into ~misc or other appropriate groups in a bit.
- I've updated the "short description" of a number of groups, mostly using suggestions that people wrote in the linked thread (thanks again for doing that).
- I made a few small style changes to the list of groups page so that it's more obvious which groups you are and aren't subscribed to, since it was quite difficult to tell apart before.
Discussion-wise, let's just talk a bit more about groups (and feel free to suggest more description updates if you'd like, a lot of them could still use work). Has the switch from ~lifestyle to ~health created new gaps? Are there any topics you've wanted to post about but felt discouraged because there wasn't a group that they fit in?
I think that there isn't really a need for new groups, a lot of topics have places and there is always ~misc for other things. I think it would be good not to create any more new groups for a now, to allow more people to join so the are enough people to keep all the groups active.
In a similar vein, while the community is small, it might help to subscribe new accounts to all groups by default (again?), and let people opt-out. Otherwise the opt-in groups may die simply because people are unaware.
Or, at least provide a way to organically discover new groups without having to regularly navigate to /groups. Maybe something akin to /r/bestof on Reddit.
I agree group discovery should be improved, but I'm not sure a glorified /r/all is really the way. Deimos has also expressed concern over such a thing before. I think the best way is possibly a screen where you can select your initial groups when you register.
I like how with reddit there are so many different subs, and there can be one to cover anything and everything. But I understand that tildes is still small and growing. Doing a good job at keeping it from going out of control too quick.
Maybe for now it will work alright but I definitely think as this grows more groups will be needed to specialize in certain categories.
I think that the groups as is are pretty good.
I think that tags within groups helping us find which subgroups we need is probably still a pretty great idea - I'm not sure where that discussion ended up going. The gist is that if something is a very common tag within a group, then eventually it should probably become a subgroup.
As an extension to that idea, I think that we can use tags in ~misc to see what we're missing, and we should be encouraging people to post as much as they can in ~misc to help figure that out.
I think tags will become a very good indicator of what groups can be created over time, potentially even automating the process (or at least automating suggestions for new groups).
Adding tag suggestion autocomplete when posting new topics, aside from being necessary for effective tag filtering by users, will be necessary for suggesting groups from tags. A million variations of spelling, punctuation, conjugation, plurality, etc. make all of that a real pain in the butt to deal with in an efficient way.
And once autocomplete suggestions are in place, there can maybe actual suggestions e.g. select tag "net neutrality" and get something like "Other commonly related tags: internet, government"
I like that idea. Posts and topics can be sorted out after so many of the same are posted. Which will lead to different groups given there are enough steady topics on it.
Going to post this suggestion again, see if it gains traction now that we have a few more people.
I feel like we could use an ~anime. It targets a bit of a different audience than ~tv and I believe the two groups don’t necissarily overlap. More to the point people subscribed to ~tv might not expect or want to see weeb garbage in their feed whereas I know for a fact that there is a group of people that would only want weeb garbage in their feed. Only a matter of whether there’s a large enough anime-following community on Tildes yet. What do you guys think?
I think that people who want to post about anime should use an "anime" tag on their posts in ~tv, and people who don't want to see anime posts can filter out all posts with an "anime" tag.
Eventually, when there are enough posts tagged "anime" in ~tv, this will demonstrate a need for a ~tv.anime subgroup for these posts.
This type of crossover issue is going to happen a lot; e.g., does a healthy recipe go under ~food or ~health? There's lots of approaches, each with advantages and disadvantages. For example, one option is to have clearly outlined rules for how to class and tag (e.g., a recipe is always food). That's easy-ish on the user side but cumbersome on the creator side, especially as a demand grows for a greater number and more specific categories. If you've ever seen the Library Congress Subject Heading System or Dewey Decimal in print you know how massive that can get.
Another option is use Linnaean-like principles for the creation of subgroups where each subgroup is a more specific aspect of the broader category and only that category, like ~cats.kittens. However, this kind of approach doesn't work as well with more abstract concepts, plus there would probably need to be some restructuring of the current subjects to make it work properly (e.g., ~entertainment.media.tv, ~entertainment.media.movies, ~entertainment.genre.anime, ~entertainment.genre.scifi.startrek). And that's not ideal either because it gets really restrictive.
I like the combo of a few general groups with more specific user tags. User tags have their own benefits and challenges (pros: flexible, easy to use, easy to create. cons: synonymy, polysemy, word variation – some of which can be reduced with features like suggestions and autofill).
Obviously I'm really interested in this stuff so I'm really looking forward to see how it grows and develops and what works and what doesn't.
Exactly! Like if a group starts to get overrun by a particular tag it's probably a good indication that the topic is large enough and has enough interest to warrant its own group.
Thanks! I've been lurking for a few weeks and when I saw you posting I figured that if lots of early users are Vonnegut fans this is probably the right community for me!
~health can be broad but hard to pin down. Would fitness go there or misc? I would think fitness would be a sub group at health down the road.
From the ~health group description:
And yeah, given the popularity, size and activity levels of the fitness related subreddits I could definitely see it getting its own subgroup ~health.fitness at some point in the future.
Thanks.