Daily Tildes discussion - how do we make groups feel more like "separate spaces"?
This is a topic that some of us have started to go into a bit in yesterday's daily discussion, but I think it's worth splitting out and continuing more. I think one cause of people being so sensitive about content that they think doesn't belong on Tildes is because the site currently feels like one overall shared space, instead of many individual groups that might have their own different types of acceptable content.
A lot of this is just because the site is so small right now, and will probably gradually change as it grows. Quite a bit probably also comes from the fact that new users are subscribed to all groups automatically, so to them, everything just feels like "part of the site", not really separate groups that they individually opted into.
What I'd like to discuss is if there are any ways we could help make that separation more clear—should we stop auto-subscriptions to everything soon? Could we try to display posts from different groups in a more distinguished way? Any other ideas for ways to make things feel a bit more "separated", even while the site is small and there will probably be common users across most groups?
I agree with the ending auto-subscriptions idea for sure.
I'm not sure this is something that can be solved immediately, however. Groups having their own groupings of trusted users, wikis, rules, etc. to push users into thinking of groups as their own spaces aren't reasonably possible as long as we're in one moderator mode and with a small userbase.
Until there's a significant change in the way moderation works and others can customize groups, I don't think this problem can really be fixed. In the meantime, I think the best we can do as users is post things that are more niche / try to do community building from scratch. Hopefully these can grow into more clearly defined communities, but it's going to feel like we're fighting against the grain to do that until site changes come (and I understand that it's a lot of work and difficult to implement on a small scale like this).
Do people even go to individual groups? Or does everyone stay on their front page, which collects posts from all the groups they're subscribed to? I do occasionally look at individual groups, but that's a little bit depressing because the activity in some of them is very low at this early stage. If people are just reading their front page, then there's not really any point in customising each group as an individual space.
The only idea that occurs to me is to colour-code the posts from different groups on my front page: all posts from ~news in one colour, posts from ~science in another colour, and so on, so I get the idea that they're all different. Maybe this could continue in the groups: each group page has a separate colour. It's not a big change, but it's enough to give the idea that each group is different.
I think that over-engineering the display for each separate group at this point is possibly jumping a bit too far ahead. There's more important work to be done on core functionality, before looking at aesthetics.
I think part of the issue is that people expect certain minimum standards to apply across all of Tildes, regardless of what group someone posts to. While expectations might be higher for some groups than others, there are still minimum standards that are expected to apply across the board. I'm one of these. For example, I understand that the type of content in ~talk or ~misc will be different to the type of content in ~science or ~news, but I still expect that I won't see memes or joke posts in any of them, or in any other group on Tildes.
I want to say that we should stop auto-subscriptions - but that's not practical when people can't see the content of this site before they sign up. If you show them a list of groups to subscribe to when they sign up, they're making those choices in a vacuum because they haven't yet seen a single post on Tildes. I think that, while the site is hidden from public view, we need to continue auto-subscribing people to everything, and letting them unsubscribe later.
When they can see the site before they sign up, they'll be able to make a more informed choice about what they want to subscribe to, so we can switch over to manual subscriptions when the site is publicly viewable.
Or a small icon for each group that goes next to posts from that group.
📚~books, 💻~comp, 🎨~creative, 🍅~food, 🎲~games, ❤~health, 🤷♀️~hobbies, 🏳️🌈~lgbt, ~misc, 🎬~movies, 🎶~music, 📰~news, 🔬~science, ⚽~sports, 💬~talk, 🔩~tech, 💣~test, 🦑~tildes, 📺~tv
I love how minimal Tildes is right now. If we enable icons, I hope we enable a n ability to disable them too.
That's how I feel about most feature tweaks. The ability to disable is just as important as implementing a feature in the first place.
Completely agree. Obviously, coming from reddit, I hate the fact that they want me to swallow the new reddit.
Old format is great. I have RES and it works like a charm. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Reddit is becoming more Facebook-like every day and that really sucks.
Hopefully changes here will be implemented in a more seamless fashion, and yes, for the sake of simplicity, keep this site as it is for as long as possible.
Good idea, but some of those icons/emojis aren't rendering on my desktop browser. (Chrome Version 67.0.3396.99)
https://imgur.com/a/a2wRQbE
They do render on my phone's browser - in full colour, even.
Well, I wasn't really serious about using Emoji, but it actually might not be the worst idea. We'd have to target some of the earlier/more commonly supported ones for sure.
Sounds similar to how Slashdot handles post categories.
Colour is useful, but not universally accessible -- red-green coloublindness affects 10% of the population, for example.
Colour plus a distinct icon, should work fairly well. I'm parrtial to fairly minimal line or vector art (SVG).
There aare open source and CC iconsets available, e.g., https://pixabay.com/en/blog/posts/top-5-resources-for-free-vector-icons-17/
(Just an example, I've yet to find a specific set I'd recommend.)
I navigate to individual groups a lot.
Same here. Kind of prefer it. I still scroll through the main feed, but I'll often see a bunch of stuff that doesn't particularly interested me at the moment (which varies every hour on the hour), so I'll jump into some of the ~s specifically and end up finding much more stuff that got buried.
I totally agree with this sentiment. It feels like I'm going to one place. The problem is though is this is due to a small user base, which can't be fixed short term. When someone posts something it is very easy for it to be on the front page, this makes it redundant for people to view specific tildes.
For instance on Reddit I go to a android subreddit to view android news because I wouldn't see it otherwise. Problem is with Tildes is I see all the content the site has to offer on one page. This will slowly fix itself over time as the user base increases and number tildes go up. Currently all that could be done is perhaps encourage people to post more to obscure and specific tildes to show the range of topics the site has to offer.
Radical idea: Move the subscription feed off the front page. Make the front page a traditional forum style page of links to the main groups. (Maybe show the current top three posts for each group under the link.) When there are too many top level groups to show on the front page, show a random sample. Put links to subgroups at the top of each group that has them. Make the subscription feed a separate page. Don't subscribe users to any groups by default. Make them decide what they are interested in.
If this is done I think doing a mix of the top groups + some randomly selected groups would be best. Showing just the top groups (or a paginated list ordered by sub count) would lead to large groups getting larger and small groups getting ignored. Showing a random selection of groups would mean you'd need to refresh the front page many times to see the larger groups.
Although - if there is only ever a few top-level groups this isn't an issue.
If this were done it could be broken out in lists of some kind. Like most popular this week, most popular today, random set. And there could be a list with links to things new users should read like key wiki articles or whatever else.
If users are presented with groups to subscribe to, I also think it would be good to organize the groups by category, and include a "subscribe to all" button for each category. For example:
"Entertainment" for ~books, ~games, ~movies, ~tv, ~music
"Life" for ~creative, ~health, ~hobbies, ~lgbt
"Science & Technology" for ~science, ~tech, ~comp
"Meta" for ~tildes, ~tildes.official, ~test
"Discussion" for ~talk, ~news, ~misc
edit: And to head this off, I don't think these should be ~entertainment etc because they don't make logical top-level groups and their content would not mix well together.
This will make discovery easier, and will encourage users to subscribe to more communities, which I think is a good thing in and of itself.
The same could be accomplished just by making some top levels groups unpostable.
Ehh, I think it would muddy things a bit much. I was pushing for ~soc (for social issues), until I realized that not only would no one have a reason to post directly to it, but its collection of posts would be basically random: Life advice, health, LGBTQ, maybe even politics? Hard to say there's really value in being able to visit such a community. I ended up switching from pushing for ~soc to pushing for ~lgbt, which has been quite a success I would say.
Would you ever want to visit ~entertainment, where you would see everything from competitive e-Sports, to discussions of novels, to discussions about hiphop albums? Likely either no, or you would rather just be subscribed to all of those and see them on your front page anyway.
I'd really like to see a re-thinking of categories.
These are Usenet Big-8 influenced. I'm increasingly partial to library subject classifications. Dewey Decimal is proprietary, but the Library of Congress Classification is unemcumbered.
These are: well and deeply considered, actively maintained, deep as regards specificity, and yet have a reasonable top-level grouping.
I could see further supergroups:
Giving about 9 top-level groupings.
I've also proposed an alternate set of topics at Ello:
Add to this something for local diaries or blogs, and social groups, and you've got something interesting.
Looking back over the Ello list, it lacks a philosophy category, something that's grown in sugnificance for me since.
There are four categories there for history - and the history of America gets its own category, which is only natural considering that this is a library classification by an American body. For this website's purposes, though, we only need one group for history.
I love how most of the humanities are broken out into separate categories - Political Science, Law, Education, Language and Literature (plus the aforementioned four categories just for history!) - but most sciences are rolled up under just one category: Science.
There's a single category for Geography and Anthropology and the whole of Recreation - which latter category includes movies, music, television, books, sports, games, hobbies. That category includes a lot of material!
This would be a very strange and uneven way of categorising a website's discussion topics.
There are definitely issues, and librarians could talk your ear off about them
Discussions of categories and classification go back to Francis Bacon and before. The story of encyclopaedists such ass Denis Diderot, and early library cataloguers is, at least for me, fascinating.
I'm also nothing if not inconsistent: in coming up with a classification for my G+ posts, I arrived at a markedly different set. And doing further work elsewhere, I have still others. Ontologies are interesting creatures.
The LoCCS does reflect historic and cultural biases. There are what now seem to be curiously aggrandised and diminished sections, though I suspect your suggested modifications might semnso in another centurry. Or, possibly and more relevantly here, even in a few years.
Newspapers have their own topic categories -- say, the sections of a major metro daily: News (local, rgional, national, world), opinion (largely politics), business (but rarely labour), art & entertainment, sport, and the various advertorial content: health, style, autos, real estate, etc. Features: theatre, cinema & TV listings, astrology, lottery numbers, comics, gosssip column, page 3, ... These date to the first half of the 19th century. Wortth consideration.
The NY Times, Financial Times, and The Economist all have extensive section classifications, as do newswires: Reuters, AP, FP. FT's runs to over 400 categories, many geocoded repeats of a smaller set.
Again, the real advantages of LoCCS are its being comprehensive, considered, actively developed, unencunbered, and most of all, extant. It exists. It also has a massive set of support for cataloguers, including automated and computer tools. And it fits messy texts within a very large (130 million plus items), roughly-sorted, classification.
Even if used for an internal sort, with a simplified (and in cases, elevating sub-categories), it should be robust, durable, and useful.
Unless you've a better classification to suggest?
We're not creating a library here - and especially not an American library. This is a global website and I, as a non-American, will fight tooth and nail to ensure it maintains a global orientation rather than a US-centric one. Also, at this early point of the site's development, there's not enough traffic to support some more detailed groups that we will need in the future.
There is no need for a "history" group yet, and definitely not an "American history" group.
In fact, we don't know yet what groups we'll need. I'm reminded of a story that a former colleague told me about a local university. They constructed the university buildings, but deliberately did not make any paths between the buildings - they just left the unused space open. They then monitored where people walked by looking at where the grooves in the ground developed. And then they paved those grooved sections, to make pathways that people actually needed and would use.
In that context, I'm okay with the current approach that Deimos is taking: create a few top-level groups and then create more groups and sub-groups as the demand arises.
Coincidentally, Deimos has made a daily post today asking for suggestions for new groups. I've suggested a group for social science and a group for humanities because there is a demand for these groups. I've deliberately chosen high-level catch-all groups, rather than low-level specific groups. So, rather than one group for history and another group for philosophy, I've suggested a group which includes both of those: humanities. In future, we can break out the more detailed subgroups if and when they become necessary.
It's not so much a "build it and they will come" approach as a "build it after they've shown you where they want to come" approach.
FYI:
https://www.nla.gov.au/about-us/standards
It might be worthwhile to use LoCSS as the starting point but the boundaries should be different as the topic distribution in books is, to say the least, not the same as that of social media.
For example, all recreation is classified as GV, though selected lifestyle issues are probably in GN and GT.
Then, all sports (undoubtedly a top-level group) are in GV557–GV1198.
And, most impressively, computer games, video games, and fantasy games are all in GV1469.15–GV1469.62, i.e., less than 1/2 of a subsublevel for one of the most popular social media topics.
Right now we're very feed/reddit-style, where the homepage aggregates posts from all subscribed groups. This is nice to get an overview of things going on but it doesn't make the individual groups feel any different from one another--they're sort of an afterthought to "filter" things down. Second-class citizens.
What about experimenting with a more retro forum-oriented homepage option? One that lists your subscribed groups along with the most recent several posts from that group, separated from one-another. That way you would seek out content in a more group/theme-oriented way.
Also: custom styling per group! But I know that's blocked by other factors.
I htink the discussion linked in OP mentioned something like that—as much as imageboards (e.g. 4chan) are bad examples for certain types of group behaviours, they tend to make very good per-board (in our case per-group) cultures. Even if you use one board for years going to another one for the first time feels like an entirely different website/community. If that's what is wanted I think you need to (1) not allow content to be mixed, like you're saying, and (2) make sure those groups are defined, and stay that way, it would (imo) be antithetical to subdividing groups too much, too deep, too often.
I know this is sort of off topic, but I can't help but think that colour and icons are not what's going to fix the hostility issues we've seen over the last few days.
A lot of the suggested changes will be good for visually sorting, but I wouldn't say it was difficult to read which group a post belonged to.
I've read through this post and its comments and am honestly not sure what the goal is... Are we jumping into designing a solution for the wrong problem?
I think it's less of a visual design question and more of a community design question. I get the impression that a lot of the hostility is due to unclear delineations between varying interests. I agree that a visual based solution is likely insufficient. It's a matter of trying to figure out what sort of different or novel usage practices and interfaces lead to a sense of close community (but preferably not closed off community).
I'm not sure if I'm making sense. I probably made much more sense on this topic in my post in the previous thread.
Thanks, this wording does help. I did read your comment in the other thread and definitely do agree with the community feel (or our lacking of as we're growing). I guess my hangup now is that I don't really buy that these visual changes will help, at least not right now.
Implementing the trust system (or its basic functionality), with moderation and curation features, might help to solve the hostility problem. A post could be flagged as
hostilea certain percentage of times per read and would have to be OK'd by a trusted user or sent back to the original user for modification.We're just waiting on something with similar functionality, I suppose.
A flag for both posts and comments will be really helpful. I know we did have comment flares a while back that were abused. Hopefully take two will be better.
It might be clutter, but maybe each group could have a color that appears next to the post, just like the official ones currently have. This could have the added benefit of making it easy to identify where something was posted at a glance.
Something like this (using the colors of the logo):
https://i.imgur.com/CvScNMG.png
I think it's a good idea, the site is a bit bland currently.
I really like this! Send it to Deimos maybe?
I think to give every group a unique theme, which includes more than colour (designs, text placement, font), would help. Also, as many other users have said, we need more users in order for that to happen, because not enough posts are posted in order for not everything to be viewed in a page or two on the front page.
I was just thinking of making a similar post. Theere's a group of pepple I know from eelswhere who haad, briefly, managed a good, strong, positive, discussion group. I've invited aa few here, and wouldn't mind some sort of hub within Tildes.
I've also written about warrens and plazas, back at Reddit. Vital communities need both. (The concept itself is ripped from elsewhere.)
I do like the idea of colour-coding everything, and I do like the bar on the right when we see the official posts and new posts. Maybe we can extend that to a specific coloured border around every group's topic? Here is an example (colours are slightly modified Dracula by Bauke)
Also, maybe having a different method of sorting through the front page might make it seem more group oriented. Perhaps something like group blocks?
So, you'd have the front page view where you see topics sorted by recent activity then by group.
With something like group-blocks you could set the styling of the specific block to show that it's a specific group and more weight could be applied to more active or user-interested groups.
Is it too late to switch the top-level tildes to subdomains?
It seems like splitting off the top-level tildes (~talk, ~games, ~comp, etc) to be subdomains (talk.tildes.net, games.tildes.net, comp.tildes.net respectively) would go a long ways towards making them seem like discrete communities - and would help solve the inelegant sub-tilde problem (i.e. rather than having a tildes.net/~comp/programming or ~comp.programming or ~comp/~programming...) you could just have comp.tildes.net/~programming.
Also, as I said in the other thread, moving user-generated content off the front page would also help make each tilde seem more like a discrete community. More "here's a list of communities, with the number of new threads and posts from the last n hours in each" and less "here's the most recent threads from across all the communities".
I don't really think thats a bad thing in the first place. Reddit always felt like this huge construct that you stripped from all individuality. Tildes has this feeling of a bigger theme that everyone agrees on, probably because the community is made up from the same type of (tech-oriented) people. I think once we have a broader community the sub-groups will natrurally become more distinct.
Maybe something like this?
Users who are not logged in: front page with default subs for now
Newbies: at first sign in, are given the option of choosing the default set of subs and default set of tags to filter out, or to manually select. The default tags to filter out include "meme" and "low effort" and others that people commonly filter.
This implies that Tildes will allow memes and low-effort posts in the first place. Is that what we even want?
It's not what I came here for. If I want memes, I can get memes a-plenty elsewhere on the internet.
See, that's what I don't get. How is anybody going to stop it? When there are a million users, they will post whatever they want, no matter what.
In my opinion, the best way is to filter it out if you don't want to see it. Trying to stop it in the first place is too time consuming and starts down the road of a type of filter bubble that I do not want to see this site become.
Trusted users and moderators will stop it, by removing posts and banning users if necessary. There may not be moderators now (apart from Deimos himself), but there are plans to have them in the future.
Have you read Deimos' goals for this website - in particular, the one that says "In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important"?
I have read the goals. They are great goals. And "most important" doesn't mean "only thing allowed on the site at all." My point is when there are a million users, I don't think there is enough time to stop all the low effort content. Eventually there will be an overrun.
And, how will we know if the mods and trusted users are allowing high quality content from all sides of an issue? A filter bubble can easily eschew complexity for simplicity and comfort. That's not what I want.
Go check out /r/AskHistorians on Reddit (with 750k users and 36 moderators) or /r/AskScience (with 15 million users and only 400 moderators) - then tell me it can't be done.
Do you know the false positive rate?
And those are singular communities. Not an entire site.
Edit: Also, the goal above the In-depth content you pointed me to says: "Let users make their own decisions about what they want to see"
Since it is listed beforehand, one might see that as more important. Just saying!
As someone who used to moderate /r/AskHistorians (admittedly, when it had only 250k subscribers), it's fairly low. Most moderation is done manually, not programmatically, so a human moderator is looking at every comment before they remove it.
And it's harder in those subreddits because the culture of the wider website is definitely towards low-effort content. For example, I've moderated /r/DaystromInstitute for 5 years: it's a subreddit devoted to in-depth discussion of Star Trek. Despite the fact that Reddit has continued to encourage low-effort content, we've still managed to hold on to the quality of our little island in a sea of memes and jokes. Imagine how much easier it would be to moderate a high-quality group on a website where the baseline expectation is higher than on Reddit.
This site will exist as communities. The beginnings are already there: ~science, ~news, and so on. As time goes on, there will be more groups, and subgroups, and trusted users / moderators in each of them. And it's extremely unlikely that there will ever be a ~memes here, so memes will have to be posted in one of those other groups where a moderator will act on it.
I am 100% hopeful there will be a ~memes here. And mods/trusted users have the power to retag "meme" or move submissions to that ~memes area for those who want to filter it out (in keeping with the "Let users make their own decisions about what they want to see" goal).
Same with the comment tagging. Allowing users to filter out jokes or whatnot instead of blanket banning/deleting them like /r/AskHistorians.
Then again, I don't run a social media site and I haven't studied them. So I don't know what makes one good and what makes one bad.
I see where you're coming from now. It's been nice chatting. Bye!
The context for that statement is made quite clear: this site will predictably show you what you subscribe to, and will not use machine learning or algorithms to manipulate your feeds:
It's not saying that anything goes on this website.
I see no difference from the perspective of the end user between an algorithm or a human culling a submission.
I had that idea over in ~creative.
We already start with subgroups, to build the group-construction for the future. While there is not enough content yet, the main group shows the content of all subgroups.
This way the individual subgroups can slowly build their individual spirit and the user's have still enough content.