Daily Tildes discussion - proposals for "trial groups", round 1
This was something that we discussed a couple of weeks ago, and I want to try it out for the first time today. I'll wait about 3 days to see how this thread progresses (through the weekend), and then decide if we should try creating any of these groups, based on responses.
Overall, I think it's probably more useful to propose groups that are not currently very well-represented by posts being made on Tildes. It might be good to try adding things that feel "too specific" right now, where people might be hesitating to post topics about the subject because they feel like it's too niche to really fit into the general groups that we have.
I don't want to make this too complex initially, so let's try with a very simple method for this first round:
Proposing a group
If you want to propose an idea for a new group (either a new top-level group or a sub-group of an existing one), make a top-level comment with the following information:
- The proposed name for the group, and a short description of its purpose/subject.
- 3 examples of topics that would be appropriate to be posted in that group. These can be existing posts already on Tildes, or hypothetical new ones. Just example titles/links is sufficient, it should just give an idea of what sort of posts you're expecting the group to get.
- A "failure plan" - if the trial group doesn't work out, what should we do with the posts from it? For example, should they be moved into an existing group or groups, with a particular tag?
Supporting a proposal
To express your support for a proposal that someone else made, post a reply to it, saying something like "I would post in this group" (assuming you actually believe you will). I don't want to interpret votes on a proposal as support, and for a group to be successful it really needs people to post to it, so I think it's most important to get at least some indication that there are users that will post in the group if it's created.
Feel free to ask questions or provide other examples of content for proposals and such as well, this thread doesn't need to be only proposals and comments expressing support.
~humanities
This would collect the posts being made in ~talk and ~misc about:
ethics (these and these)
philosophy (these and these)
language/linguistics (these/these and these/these)
economics (these and these)
history (these and these)
I'm not sure if I'm doing this right. You said to suggest groups that are not currently very well-represented by posts being made on Tildes, but I think these posts demonstrate a need for a ~humanities group. Also, you've previously said that we would create groups based on demand, so I think it's important to demonstrate a demand for this group.
As for a failure plan... I suppose you could just put them all back in ~misc.
I support this. It would be nice to have a proper place for history posts, since right now there are more than two dozen scattered across ~.
I would use a history section and definitely language section.
I would definitely like this! It's not something I get to talk about a whole lot in my day to day so having a good place to get a sampler like that online is great.
Absolutely support this. A lot of really insightful stuff gets spread randomly between ~talk and ~misc, and can be hard to find because of that. Having one spot for all this would be immensely helpful.
Totally support this but I don't know if
humanitieswould be a right name.It can be my sub-optimal knowledge of english words but I would never guess that
humanitiesis a place for history, economics and even language post."Humanities" is exactly the right word for this. It means a study of human-related topics - our cultures, our literature, our history, our languages, our creativity, and our beliefs. It's the study of our humanity, of what makes us human.
I support this. Especially ethics and philosophy.
I support this, especially for economics and history.
I think this idea is simply fantastic.
I support this.
Ah, this is a controversial one. There was a really good thread early on about why political discussion is so difficult, and why maybe we shouldn't even have a dedicated space for it at all.
It's obviously being discussed a lot anyway in various places though (and it's mostly been reasonable), so maybe it's worth trying.
if it does get added I think ~news.politics would make a lot more sense than putting it mainly under ~talk
Your suggestion might fit well under @Algernon_Asimov's proposal for ~humanities.
Great point.
I'm open to the idea of trying it, but I don't think it's a matter of "try it and if it goes bad remove it". Early on before a political hivemind has the chance to form, I imagine everything will be fine. Problems won't begin to surface until there's a critical mass of users, at which point it may be too late to do anything about.
Politics is such an integral part of news, longreads/articles, discussions on hot button tech issues etc. that I think separating politics off is a bad idea.
The impetus for doing so often seems to come from people who want to be able to "just ignore politics" . It's much better to have these posts tagged politics and be posted where they belong.
Splitting off politics into a separate place is part of the reason political discussion forums are so terrible throughout the web: the "politics" section is perceived as a pulpit to preach to a presumably susceptive audience.
Specific groups of people avoid the politics section based on preconceived notions where "I don't like politics" or "I don't care about politics" which becomes a self-fulfilling policy because the politics section becomes populated by people who're already entrenched and invested in their views.
A split out politics leads to loads of duplicate posts because the people who "don't like politics" end up posting political threads in technology, privacy, news or other sections where they do care about politics or specific issues.
Political theory, or issue-related posts in the politics section get crushed by all posts where "X politician/pundit/celebrity said Y about politics just now!" So those posts are better off in the specific sections they cover anyway (Tech, health, space environment etc.) because the discussions usually end up being just as much about tech/health/space or whatever anyway.
Differentiating between world politics and world news is unintuitive and leads to large percentages of misplaced posts. Similarly, splitting national news from national politics is all but impossible.
People would find it silly to split off "news that impacts economy" from other types of news because it's just so obviously an unreasonable, unenforceable thing to do. By othering politics as something they don't want to touch, somehow the call to section off politics is something people think is practical or even preferable. Why are there no calls to split off other topics from news? Because it doesn't make sense to do so. People just say they dislike "politics" and assume that's something other people can deal with, but I don't have to or should be able to choose not to. I disagree.
In this early stage of the site, if people already give up on being able to discuss politics in a reasonable way, where we treat others as people and without intentionally creating a dump to "get rid of politics" for those who want to opt out of civics alltogether, we might as well declare the ideals behind the site as an unrealistic pipe dream, as far as I'm concerned.
In my view, it'd be giving up on this site before it's really started.
I’d support ~politics because it means that I can unsubscribe from it and be able to browse ~news and ~talk in peace.
How would we separate politics based news though? We have a ~news group. Do you see a lot of over lap happening? I agree, that if we have a ~politics group, it should be a top level group. I wonder if ~news will eventually be phased out or renamed and made to be more specific like ~worldnews. I am thinking maybe news should be more of a tag than a top level group?
Yeah. That all makes sense and is well reasoned. The cross posting seems like it would handle it all.
That would be a good way to handle it.
Posting one's sources is definitely a desirable goal and one that should be pursued in any contentious or obscure field.
Annoyingly, though, I manage to do it even on innocuous posts, see here and here, because I feel like if I was reading that sort of post, I would want a link to read more about that specific topic. Heck, I'm even mildly annoyed when people don't post links to things that they are talking about, especially recommendations. I usually give the whole thing a miss if I have to search for it myself.
Even though I'm probably one of the more ... common contributors to political threads, I'm not sure it should be its own group right now (or ever). The problem is twofold: (1) everything is (or can be) political, (2) a group dedicated exclusively to political issues without careful design would necessarily prime toward controversy and conflict rather than debate and good-faith sharing ("look at this hideous thing that people I don't like said or did today!" over "why should or shouldn't X thing be policy").
For now at least, the first problem can be addressed simply by having political oriented material tagged as such (I've tagged all of the political discussion threads I've made in ~talk as "politics" precisely so that people can find them more easily or exclude them more easily if they're not interested). That second problem is much more difficult to solve on its face, but it is at least mitigated for now by having the topic touching first the communities most directly relevant (such as ~news or ~tech), then being labeled as politics in a tag.
It would be strange to me to measure what success or failure of a community looks like. Do we take behavior that is becoming increasingly common in ~news to portray political opponents in increasingly provocative rhetoric as a failure? Or do we take the reaction to that provocative opening, calling it out, as a success? What are our objectives here?
Mine own objectives would be to promote both starting points for discussion that allow people of a wide range of political affiliations to feel comfortable contributing and healthy discussion within those threads. So from my view, I would see an example like that as a mixed bag. But other people, reasonable people, could easily see things differently.
Why not ~news.politics? I would support a subgroup for political news, but not necessarily a subgroup for political discussion.
There's room for lots of groups here - hundreds of them, thousands of them. But is there a need or a demand for them? We shouldn't create groups just for the sake of it.
Political news is a valid subset of news - and posts about political news will inevitably prompt discussion about that political news. However, not everyone is interested in reading about politics, so there's a need to be able siphon political news off into its own group: ~news.politics.
However, do we also need a group for political discussion separate from political news? I don't think we do need that. I'd also say we don't want something that controversial and inflammatory right now. We're still trying to work out what our culture is. That's going to take a lot of time. Let's get our culture in place before we open up a venue for political discussion, which is one of the most difficult topics for an internet forum to handle.
@username"intro[duction[s]]tag or removedBy “telling more about themselves” I especially mean what they are interested to post/comment on.
This sounds like a great idea as an alternative to the intermittent introductions threads. I think it would be a nice place for people to try to love-bomb newbies and reel them in to favored groups. ;P
edit: if I am being realistic about my own use of tildes, I've not posted to an introductions post except when i introduced myself. It's possible that I might be more inclined to comment if the individual introductions were more visible as on a group like this rather than hidden away in an introductions thread that I don't normally open - and it's also possible i might also not visit the group for similar reasons.
I would use this group.
I second this, and agree. If it fails, move it to ~talk with an introduction tag.
I really like this idea!
~Space
Example posts:
https://tildes.net/~tech/33x/spacex_s_pad_39a_undergoing_upgrades_for_dragon_2_crew_launches
https://tildes.net/~science/32p/dawn_spacecraft_buzzes_largest_asteroid_final_orbits
https://tildes.net/~science/30z/first_confirmed_image_of_a_newborn_planet_revealed
Failure plan: Move posts to ~Science or ~Tech as appropriate with tag "space".
Would this be a subgroup (~science.space) or a top-level group (~space)?
Well when I posted a link to SpaceX's Crew Dragon parachute test @Deimos moved it from ~science to ~tech. It doesn't matter much to me whether it is ~science.space or ~space. I just want a central place for it.
Actually, that raises an interesting point: is news about rocket testing the same as news about discovering another exoplanet? One's about technology, the other is about astronomy. I know that my personal interests lie much more towards the latter than the former. I don't want to read about the latest rockets. I do want to read about interesting discoveries in space.
So... maybe we need two subgroups?
~science.astronomy
~tech.rocketry (or ~tech.space)
I would subscribe to ~science.astronomy, but not to ~tech.rocketry.
I think this is the way to go. I think ~tech.space is a good place for all "space tech" including rockets and such. ~science.astronomy could even be ~science.space and encompass experiments being done in space and things like that which aren't astronomy but are still space science.
I like to think that the sub-groups under ~science would represent the various sciences: ~science.astronomy, ~science.biology, ~science.geology, ~science.physics, and so on.
Yeah I think having ~science.space and ~tech.space is the way to go
Actually, this is can be a very good case for a Directed Acyclic Graph: subgroups in both ~science and ~tech pointing to the same group (then, which of the two would be primary?).
However, due to the special significance of the topic of Space Exploration/Space Technology (it is going to gain real-world importance and will probably become the most important SciTech topic), I would vote for a top-level group.
Taking from comments by @Algernon_Asimov and @dredmorbius, what about ~science.astronomy and ~tech.astronautics?
A development of the ~tech category into general technological divisions would be a better direction, IMO.
I would post on a space tilde, i think. The development of the Space Force is a huge thing, and exploring and traveling through space is basically going to dominate our lives for generations.
edit: I think it would kind of suck if it were made into a subcategory of science or tech, because it's far more than a subset of those. If anything, science and technology are a component of space and our relationship with it as a species rather than the reverse.
~science.space makes most sense. I don't think it should be under ~tech. I would love a space area.
Note that space science (astronomy, cosmology, xenobiology, xenography, ...) and space technology (propulsion, materials, comms, controls, astrogation, fabrication, mitigation, ...) are distinct fields. One is a subfield of science, one of technology.
There's also, possibly: space business, law, politics, warfare, ...
True. Good point.
I support space!!
I think it's realistic to have ~anime exist and be standalone (rather than be ~tv.anime) for a few reasons. For one, the anime community is largely cut off from the larger community of people interested in TV. While anime does air on television, the culture in the English speaking world is largely disconnected from that and dips into topics that wouldn't fit alongside it. As such, it feels wrong to post anything about the topic on ~tv other than maybe "What's your favorite?" It also earns quite a bit of distaste outside of its own community, and that alone might be worth separation to save some headaches. There's also the fact that anime encompasses more than just TV. While most people into anime wouldn't split off TV anime and anime movies as if they're entirely different interests, we would have to (eventually) have both ~tv.anime and ~movies.anime eventually, and that would be a very harmful split to make. Also, we eventually might want a place to put other "weeby" media in. While it may not be correct for some pedants, ~anime.manga would make a lot more sense in how these communities work than ~books.manga. Of course, the top level could also be something like ~japanesemedia, which would clean up those problems, but I'm not sure that losing the instant recognition and understanding of ~anime would be worthwhile.
I would really like to see this here, as the internet is sorely lacking in places to talk about anime that aren't horribly low effort / engagement, simply gross (mostly in their tolerance for pedophilia), or both. I'm hoping we would be able to build something that's as solid as other areas on this website have proven to be.
Satoshi Kon: Editing Space & Time (Every Frame a Painting)
Konosuba Movie Announcement!
What anime will you pick up for Summer 2018?
I think this would be widely used. I already see a lot of posts anime related. Having it be a top level groups lets you separate things out like ~anime.manga.
Considering how much traction my thread seems to have generated I absolutely support this. I'd love to talk about weeb stuff with Tildoos!
Largely support this one, pretty much every TV vs anime point is accurate and I think that I would use this group.
I would support this.
I support this too, thanks for proposing.
I'd be interest in an anime group. Not sure how I feel about putting manga under anime, but I don't really read manga so I don't know how different/alike the communities are.
I think this is a really good idea, and I would definitely contribute to discussion here.
I think this could be a fairly popular one, I support it.
Subset of entertainment, literature, or culture.
Makes more sense for it to be a sub group like ~tildes.help in my opinion.
I'm going to have to disagree there, I think that a ~help could be a nice place to get help for everything, while ~tildes.help would be rather focused and not necessarily as active as we would like for a new group at this stage.
I was more refering to
If we are going with general help, I think a tag makes more sense. And in that case, I think the ask tag solves it. I don't see the need to have a post asking for docker help (example above) with the tags ask and help. So basically, post your help thread where it fits, and tag it to let people know you would like help.
I somehow overlooked that part. I probably shouldn't try to post so early in the morning (it was 0600 for me when the top-level was posted).
Well, let's say I don't know what Docker is, but would be interested, but I'm not subscribed to ~comp, how would I get that information?
Anyway, I am firmly of the opinion that things should be sorted based on tags, rather than based on groups, so we'd see in ~tv everything tagged with
tv, rather than just posts in ~tv. So, I think, if I want to see posts taggedhelp, I'd want to see them all in ~help and then filter down from there.I mean, I can see a use case for it, but I just feel tags are good enough. If people want a general help section all the power to them. Maybe ~misc.help
Definitely, tags are good enough for most use cases, I just would rather be able to see those things I'm interested in by default, despite where they were posted.
Maybe adding a specific tag to the front page would be more useful? So we could both filter-in and filter-out tags.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here:
A group to ask for help with Tildes itself? (~tildes.help)
A group to ask for help with anything? (~help)
You seem to be suggesting both at the same time...
I think general help could be more ~misc.help
I'm still not clear which one you're suggesting! :)
~work, ~business, or ~capitalism, or ~economics or something within that cloud of concepts surrounding money and labor. There's not currently a place to talk about one's profession (though I recognize at the moment we're too small for those sorts of specialty communities to form) or for stories talking about the economy to gather.
EDIT: This would be a place for TalesFrom..., my small AMA as a bookkeeper, and others.
I would use this. ~work or ~business most especially. My freelancing post from the other day would be great candidate for this group.
These are two very separate concepts. I've proposed a ~humanities group for various topics, including economics. Would that work for your second suggestion?
~humanities would definitely work for talking about the economy.
Humanities is more typically literature, music, art, languages, religion, mythology, etc. Frequently includes geography & history, though those are consideered social sciences by some (e.g., Turchin)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities
Social sciences are economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Hist & geog sometimes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
Some overlaps: languages vs. lingustics, mythology vs. cultural anthropology, etc.
After a discussion elsewhere, it has occurred to me that a few groups suggested in this thread - including yours - might be combined into a single group: ~personal. I've suggested this as another option.
I would absolutely use a business/financial group.
Economics within social science, capitalism within that. Work and business within commerce.
I've just realised that there's not much point creating sub-groups at the moment, because people can't really unsubscribe from them.
Using ~tildes and ~tildes.official as a test case, I have seen that unsubscribing from a sub-group does not prevent me from seeing its posts if I'm subscribed to its parent group. Every post in the sub-group is currently included in the parent group's feed, which is then included on the user's primary feed. (It does work the other way: subscribing to ~tildes.official but not ~tildes does exclude all non-official posts in ~tildes.)
If, for example, you were to create ~news.politics or ~tv.anime (just random examples for the sake of discussion) to hold news about politics or discussion about anime, it's not possible for people to stop seeing posts in these sub-groups if they remain subscribed to ~news or ~tv: every post from the sub-groups will be included in the parent groups. So, creating sub-groups won't act to quarantine posts about those topics from people, even when they're not subscribed to the sub-groups.
Some points:
The only way to filter out content from sub-groups is by tags, rather than subscriptions.
This decreases the utility of sub-groups at the moment.
It's probably best to build the proposed functionality that only the top posts from sub-groups will bubble up to parent groups before creating too many sub-groups.
Right, currently there's no way to view/subscribe to a parent group without also getting all of its sub-groups' content. If we end up picking some sub-groups to try, my plan was to make sure that it was possible before adding them.
How do you think it should work? If I subscribe to a group with sub-groups, should that effectively subscribe me to all of them, and then I can individually remove ones that I want to? It gets a bit confusing when you start considering unsubscribing from the parent after changing some sub-group subscriptions, and then re-subscribing. I'm not sure exactly how it should work in practice that won't be too cumbersome.
In line with your "let users make their own decisions about what they want to see" philosophy, and the "keep it simple, stupid" approach, I would suggest that a user has to actively subscribe to any group or sub-group to see its posts.
For example, if a user subscribes to ~tv, they should see only the posts that are made directly in ~tv, plus whatever selected posts have bubbled up from its sub-groups (as per your proposed idea for this). There are thousands of television shows out there, and a particular user is probably not interested in all of them. They might then choose to subscribe to ~tv.copshows and ~tv.historicaldramas but not ~tv.comedy. That will give them everything in those sub-groups, plus whatever selected posts bubble up from the sub-sub-groups under them. The user might then choose to subscribe to ~tv.copshows.ncis and ~tv.copshows.csi but not ~tv.copshows.bluebloods. And so on.
At every step of the way, the user has to actively hit 'subscribe' to see the posts from a group or sub-group. It's simple and it's consistent and it should be obvious.
Then, if a user hits 'unsubscribe' in any group, it unsubscribes them only from that group but not its sub-groups. The user might decide they're sick of seeing all the generic posts about television networks, but they still want to see the posts from ~tv.copshows and ~tv.historicaldramas. They should be able to unsubscribe from ~tv without losing their subscriptions to the sub-groups they're subscribed to.
EDIT: typos and phrasing.
EDIT THE SECOND: Even my edit had mistakes!
But, in my proposed model, the user had to actively subscribe to any sub-groups, one by one. Subscriptions to sub-groups wouldn't come automatically with subscribing to a parent group. So, it's not like they subscribe to ~tv.copshows and get a hundred subscriptions to all the sub-groups for all the cop shows. They're only subscribed to the ones they actively clicked 'subscribe' for. They don't have a hundred sub-groups to unsubscribe from, only the handful they actively subscribed to.
It could still be useful to have an option to unsubscribe to all sub-groups when unsubscribing from the super-group, when someone wants to swear off the entire subject. Even manually subscribing someone could collect a lot of sub-group subscriptions over time.
You can already filter posts out by tags: "You can now define topic tag filters, which will hide topics with certain tags by default in your listings"
It's in your settings. Just type in "politics", save, and - presto! - no more political posts on your front page.
However, you can't do what @Eylrid is suggesting: subscribe to a tag. There's no way to see all posts tagged "politics" across Tildes (yet).
You wouldn't. But you brought up a different feature (hiding political posts) than Eylrid did (unsubscribing from multiple groups), so I thought I'd let you know you could already do what you were suggesting.
And now that I re-read my previous comment... I have no idea what I was thinking. I was all over the place. Eylrid did not suggest subscribing to a tag. Where did I even get that from?
I stand corrected - on a technicality, m'lud! There's no way to subscribe to all posts tagged "politics" across Tildes (yet).
Thing get confusing when we have more than one conversation at once. ;)
Here's some ideas for consideration, some of which may or may not be what you're after.
Firstly, we could have each group act as an auto-tag of that specific group, so, you'd have psuedo-tags ~news, ~tech and stuff like ~tech.industry, ~tv.panelshows, you could treat it similar to subscriptions1, filtering in and out as desired. Also, they could be auto-populated with a specific tag2, so, let's say that I want to post something in ~science.space, it is tagged as ~science.space as the group filter and goes into that group, and whatever else I tag it as filters into other groups and sub-groups, i.e. Mars, SpaceX, asteroid, disaster, which could or could not be actual groups or just a small filter in or out.
Let's say that I am not subscribed to either ~science.space or ~space, but I do want to see SpaceX news, there's currently not a way to see that and a filter-in option would be a quick remedy. This filter-in option would also help in cross-posting3 as well, just by adding a secondary psuedo-filter to a group. For example, the group ~creative.cgi gets a post that is tagged
linuxthat people in ~tech.opensource may also want to see, but may not be subscribed to ~creative or ~creative.cgi, so the trusted users of ~tech.opensource add to their group a secondary filter oflinuxthat shows posts with that tag from any specific group.Now, how would this help with populating groups from sub-groups? Basically it could be used to set a threshold filter4. So, only the top X% voted get filtered up into the parent group. For example, only the top 20% of posts from ~tv.HBO.siliconValley get sent up to the parent group ~tv.HBO, then only the top 30% from there to ~tv, or whatever percentage is deemed adequate.
As for subscriptions maybe an opt-in could work5, maybe give the user an option when they subscribe to a main group to opt-in to all current (or according to specific filter-type or popularity) groups and all new sub-groups?
1Really, I think that filters could replace subscriptions entirely if you could filter-in a specific topic as well as filter-out something.
2This could solve tag standardisation issues, if a person wants more people to see a specific topic they would tag it as that topic and it would auto-populate that tildes group, to be filtered in or out as the user desires
3To promote tag standardisation and crossposting, a solution could be to add a pop-up or notice or something that tells the posting user that no groups or sub-groups have added that specific tag and the specific post may not be seen by people who may be interested but not subscribed to ~post.obscure.things
4The user could be able to set the percentage rather than an all or nothing filter
5Could also give the option of sending the user a notification when a new sub-group (of a group they are already subscribed to) is made, so they could subscribe to that, or not
Subscribing to a parent group should subscribe you to only that exact group - i.e. only posts made in the parent group the user is subscribed to show up in the user's main feed but when browsing directly to the parent group all the posts from all the sub-groups are shown there.
But then you have to consider... what should a parent group be for? Everything relating to the topic and therefore all the group's subgroups (like a multi-reddit?) or just for topics that don't fit cleanly into a sub-group? If someone posts directly in the parent group, should applying a tag to that post also add that post to / show it in the sub-group?
If someone has a general interest in a topic - using another commenter's example, ~tv - will they want to specifically decide what parts of tv they want to see posts about, or just hit one button and see them all?
It's a lot of difficult questions to answer and might be quite specific to each individual group.
I think we have enough tabletop gamers here that a ~games.tabletop might do well - specifically aimed at pen and paper games of all stripes.
I would definitely be interested in a ~games.tabletop, that topic is more interesting to me than the mixture of ~games.
Yes, please.
Support. I don't play video games (except Kentucky Route Zero once that finally gets finished) but I like tabletop stuff.
I support this. Will we want it to include card games too, like MTG?
I see ~games.tabletop as including all tabletop games, from Dungeons & Dragons to Yahtzee, from Catan to Monopoly, from Magic the Gathering to poker.
Yep, same here. It'll eventually spiral out into ~games.tabletop.rpg, .board, .card, etc over time, but I think the main distinction the group is aiming for is non-computer gaming at first. That's general enough for a second-level category and specific enough to be a good differentiation from the generic ~gaming group.
I would actually go a step further. If we create ~games.tabletop, we should also simultaneously create ~games.computer. I don't want this website to assume that "game" means "computer game" by default, with "tabletop game" being some minor off-shoot that's being tolerated. They are two top-level categories of games.
And, then there's the other types of games, like Tag/Tiggy and marbles and Four Square. And I'm sure there are other types.
I don't want "~games" to mean "computer games" by default.
~personal
As a result of my discussion with @Mumberthrax about their suggestion, it has occurred to me that there might be a use for a top-level group which focusses on people living their lives. This would also gather a few other suggestions here into one top-level group:
@balooga's suggestion of a group about family matters might start as posts tagged "family" in ~personal, and later become ~personal.family.
@mom's suggestion of a group to "discuss being an adult and how to get around in life" might start as posts tagged "career" and "finances" in ~personal, and later become ~personal.careers and ~personal.finances.
@MimicSquid's suggestion of a group "to talk about one's profession" might start as posts tagged "working" in ~personal, then become ~personal.atwork.
The failure plan would be to roll these all back to ~misc with their respective tags ("self improvement", "volunteering", "family", "career", "finances", "working").
I think that this is the right track. There's a lot of fruitful topics for discussion that would easily fall under ~personal. I'd use it.
I support ~personal's creation and I would use it.
A personal/diaries section, and ultimately, the ability to limit access to individual posts, would be useful.
That's not what I'm imagining ~personal would be about. It's not intended to be a personal blog. It's a section of a internet forum for discussing aspects of our personal lives.
In this context, "personal" doesn't mean "private". It means "relating to a person's life".
A term that better clarifies that distinction would be useful.
"Lifestyle", "living", "hobbies" come to mind.
"Hobbies" wouldn't be broad enough for the types of posts I'm imagining this group would be used for. As in my parent comment here, I see this covering topics from family and relationships to career and finances. It's about how people live their lives, not just how they spend their spare time.
The original ~lifestyle group here was problematic enough that Deimos changed it to ~health, so it might be confusing to try to resurrect that name.
~living could work. That's a nice alternative. When I was considering options, something like "living life" was one of the possibilities I considered.
Ultimately, it's up to Deimos to decide whether to create a group like this, and to decide what to call it. All we can do is make suggestions.
And there would be a brief description in the sidebar to inform people about a group's purpose. Also, people themselves will improve and refine the definition through their posts. It's not like the name alone has to carry the whole load of identifying the purpose of a group (although it is the primary identifier). I mean, look at "~comp". People somehow seem to know that it's not about competitions, or providing complimentary tickets (known as "comping").
Also, I'm not sure how you got "diaries" from my original description of this group. It takes some very creative reading of my proposal to get "diaries" out of that.
I think that's a great idea. There's a lot of potential there. Introductions could also fall under this.
I think that introductions should still go in ~talk. I'm imagining ~personal as more of a place to talk about our personal lives: where we work, how we live, dealing with relationships, managing our finances, improving ourselves, and so on.
~news.us
Any and all Trump news unless it explicitly involves a foreign leader or something, internal US matters, internal US politics. Basically any news that seems to be primarily about America.
You could possible invert this and create ~news.international or something, but I personally hate that kind of america-centric view.
Failure plan would just be to return the posts to ~news.
Could I suggest that this be called ~news.usa instead, or even ~news.unitedstates? "news.us" could be read as "news about us, the people" rather than "news about the United States of America".
And, why does the USA get special treatment? I want a ~news.australia! :P
~news.usa or ~news.unitedstates is probably better, you're right. I'm used to the unix-naming mindset where you remove as many letters as possible, haha.
I'm actually somewhat against giving the US special treatment, but pragmatically I think something should be done to allow broader sources of news to be accessible. I want more foreign news, especially foreign perspective on international issues!
If you want more foreign news, and assuming that you're American, then you should be proposing the creation of sub-groups for other countries, rather than for the USA. If you want people to post news from other places, then encourage that by creating sub-groups for those other places: ~news.australia, ~news.england, ~news.china, and so on, alongside ~news.usa. (I'm mostly being cheeky here. I understand this probably isn't practical at this early stage.)
Or maybe we could create regional sub-groups as an intermediate step: ~news.northamerica, ~news.centralamerica, ~news.southamerica, ~news.europe, ~news.middleeast, ~news.africa, ~news.asia, ~news.oceania. (We can add the country-specific sub-sub-groups to each region later.)
I like the regional sub-groups idea. Mexico and Canada's news affects the US a lot (for that matter, so does Europe, but we have to start somewhere, and it's hard to actively care about everything all at once).
"us" is an accepted, standardised, ISO-3166-1 two-letter country code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
So is "usa".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3
This isn't about designing a computer database. This is about designing a user interface, which has value to people and is usable by people. In that context, "usa" is better than "us".
I'm not arguing that there aren't other terms. I am arguing that "us" is clear, unambiguous, and established. I also see little argument for using anything longer.
Several of your objections to various proposals seem explicitly founded on an opposition to the US specifically. You've said as much yourself:
That's a thin argument and not a particularly healthy one to intruduce at this stage, in my view.
I'm hardly a mindless booster of the US myself, but there are times that standards suchs as the LoCCS, or ISO-3166-1-alpa-2, are widely and internationally adopted leading standards, and more than acceptable.
Or would you prefer to see ASCII rejected as well?
And I am arguing the opposite: "us" is also a first-person plural pronoun, whereas "usa" can not be mistaken for anything else.
In the bigger picture, I'm arguing for clarity and usability over a slavish adherence to standards and rules. This site (and software I've worked on in the past) is for people, and it should be aimed at making the experience as useful and relatable as possible for those people. And, this includes people who are not computer developers or database administrators or librarians (i.e. the majority of us).
You're twisting my words. I'm not opposed to the USA specifically, I'm opposed to giving special treatment to the USA. On this world-wide web, the USA is just one country among many.
Again: you appear to carry a specific and articulated grudge. That appearance may be based on unclear and imprecise communications, but it's sufficiently pronounced for me to make note of it.
You might seek to be clearer in how you express yourself, if that's not the impression you're trying to convey.
I do carry a grudge: I begrudge the fact that Americans seem to think they own the internet. For example, on Reddit, they created /r/WorldNews because /r/News (the default!) is all about American news. The same for /r/WorldPolitics and /r/Politics. The USA is treated as the default option: "the default is for us Americans, and everyone else is just 'rest of the world'." Then there are all the Americans who post questions on the internet and forget that they need to explain that they're asking only within an American context (legal questions are a good example of this).
Well, Americans don't own the internet. The rest of us are here as well. So, we need to cater to all participants from all countries, and not favour one country ahead of others.
That's all I'm asking: equal treatment for all countries, not preferential treatment for one country ahead of others.
Now, I can see how saying "America should be treated the same as every other country" could be misinterpreted as an attack on the USA (in the same way that some people interpret "equal rights for women" as being an attack on men), but it's not intended that way. My only goal here is to ensure that all countries get equal treatment. If there's a ~news.usa, there should also be ~news subgroups for other countries. If we're going to apply a standard, it should be a standard that treats all countries equally, and not a standard that allocates an entire category to the history of just one country.
Equal treatment. Not preferential treatment.
My read of ~news.us was that it doesn't preclude, and instead presumes, other news subgroups: .uk, .cn. .jp, .au, etc,
It's also possible that there might be larger groupings suggested. Oceania may claim the greatest land area of any human region, but it also has the smallest sustaining population (Antarctica fails that category), and, as a practical matter, less economic or political significance than Asia, Europe, the Americas, or AUNZ, considered separately. News holes for PG, TV, AS, MH, PI simply won't register on Tildes for quite some time.
For better or worse, American news dominates global news cycles. Such is the nature of hegemony.
Correct. And that was my point, way up there: "And, why does the USA get special treatment? I want a ~news.australia! :P" In other words, while we're creating a ~news sub-group for one country, let's take the opportunity to create a few ~news sub-groups for other countries where it might be useful (EDIT: Canada, China, Australia, Palestine, Israel, Russia). Equal treatment, rather than preferential treatment.
I'm still not sure why you don't like using names such as ~news.usa, ~news.unitedkingdom, ~news.china, ~news.japan, and ~news.australia. Remember that this website is being read and used by human beings, not computers. Why not use human-friendly labels?
I don't even know what you're referring to here. You started referring to regions like Oceania and Asia, but these abbreviations don't seem to match those names. They look like 2-letter abbreviations for American states, but I can't match them up with any of the (admittedly, not all!) American states I know.
That may be. And I fully concede the utility and necessity of a ~news.usa sub-group. As long as we get a few other ~news sub-groups as well.
But my original statement about fighting a US-centric orientation for this website was in the context of you suggesting a classification system which devoted a whole category just to the history of the United States of America. As much as the USA might dominate the world today, there's absolutely no case that can be made to support the assumption that the USA has more history than any other country or region. That's the "US-centric" view I was arguing against: the arrogance inherent in the idea that American history is so important that it deserves its own stand-alone category, with some preference given to a handful of European countries, but all other countries being lumped together under "General and Old World History". FTSOF. China and Egypt are amongst the oldest continuously existing countries in the world - if any countries deserve their own history categories, they do. It's that arrogance and presumption that I'm arguing against.
It's not just history, but that was the obvious stand-out example in your suggested classification.
1. Your point was poorly made.
2. I'm on a device affording abysmal text input. Tedious discussions over self-evident points fail my self-imposed cost-benefit constraint. See if you can't work it out yourself.
I shouldn't have to. Any tags and abbreviations here should be obvious and self-explanatory, as I've repeatedly said.
(Holy déjà vu, Batman! I remember having this same conversation before - and, what's worse, I remember having déjà vu that time, too. I can sympathise with your frustration at having to explain a self-evident point to people over and over and over again.)
Please no. Like @KilgoreTrout said, tags are a better fit for this. I think this would be a manifestation of US-centricness.
That's what a subgroup is though, right? Just a formalized tag.
ISO-3166-1
I feel like there isn't a real ~ for articles that are good for discussion. I don't feel like posting the links that I'm going to post below in ~misc to be honest. I'm not sure about the name, but here it goes:
~longreads or ~articles. Purpose: to share, read and comment about insightful articles, investigative journalism, etc. Note: I would like to have something here that says that we shouldn't accept everything related to US politics, but I'm not sure how to write it, since it's not a black and white thing. The idea is that it shouldn't be flooded by opinion pieces about current US politics, since this one could go to ~news or a possible ~politics in the future.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/as-merkel-s-power-drains-the-threat-to-europe-grows
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-24/the-children-of-japan-s-single-mothers-are-living-in-poverty
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-29/freaked-out-americans-desperately-seek-to-escape-the-news
Anything from here: https://longreads.com/best-of-2017/
I posted two of these links on Reddit, second link and third link, both of them on r/TrueReddit.
I feel like this is a better case for a tag than a devoted group, and personally I've been tagging those kind of articles as "long read" when I post them: https://tildes.net/?tag=long_read
This is because overall I feel like groups should be subjects, whereas tags cover both subjects as well as types of content. Ideally there would be some way to either subscribe to the "long read" tag or at least search for it across all groups, which would probably serve a similar purpose to having a group for it.
I was thinking of a group where the subgroups would be nations. Something such as ~world, where we can discuss international topics, such as relations between countries, international events (not only sports events, but things like Miss Universe)
And under it, countries such as ~world.uk, ~world.usa, ~world.france and others, based on how many users there are from each country. There, they could talk amongst themselves about their countries, current events, etc.
The only doubt I have about this is about languages. If a non francophone user subscribes to ~world, and ~world.france has lots of posts in French, it might be a bit of noise on their front page. But I hope a solution can be found
Just adding some history: there was a previous suggestion was for a ~geo top-level group. I prefer ~world for this.
I like the idea of a ~world.australia, but I'm not really clear about what I would do with it. Australian current events would go in ~news.australia. Australian sporting posts would go in ~sport.cricket or ~sport.afl. Australian television would go in ~tv.neighbours or ~tv.homeandaway. And so on. I'm not sure what I would do with ~world.australia, even though I want it.
Maybe these ~world.mycountry sub-groups could simply be aliases which collect all posts across Tildes with a "mycountry" tag. "Click on ~world.australia to see all posts tagged australia from everywhere on Tildes."
My own experience based on Reddit's /r/brasil is that we talk about everything Brazilian. Sports, News, TV, etc.
This might be a bit complicated with the sub-groups, though. Because one could argue for either a ~world.brazil.sports or a ~sports.brazil
What if you subscribed to ~world.brazil and it showed you all posts from across all of Tildes which were tagged "brazil/brasil"? These all pop up on your front page. You find one that's interesting, and you click on it. You're instantly taken to a post in ~sports.soccer, where everyone is discussing the results of the latest Campeonato Brasileiro Série A matches.
If someone wants to post about a Campeonato Brasileiro Série A match, they can't do it in ~world.brazil because that's just an alias, not an actual group. They post it in ~sports.soccer instead, and tag it "brazil" for you to find later via ~world.brazil.
I'm not trying to talk you out of your idea. I'm just "spitballing" suggestions, as the Yanks might say. This is one way to get around the problem of deciding between ~world.brazil.sports versus ~sports.brazil.
I like this idea! What about going up a step? So like ~tags.brazil would show all the posts that have a brazil tag. That way people could subscribe to tags and communities.
We can already search by tag. Just add the ability to subscribe to a tag and we would have the functionality you are talking about in a way that is clear that you are following a tag, not a group.
~family
For articles, questions, and conversations about parenting, family planning, relationships with parents/siblings/children, etc.
I haven’t seen many topics like this on Tildes yet. There is one post tagged “parenting” from a few weeks ago. Yesterday we had another family-related discussion. I think if there was a dedicated group we would see a lot more conversation happening, similar to the subreddits r/parenting, r/justnomil, r/raisedbynarcissists, and others. This could be a supportive and encouraging place for people with family concerns (and triumphs) of all kinds.
If it fails, I guess the posts could go back into ~talk or ~news as appropriate. I think once the site reaches a certain size there will be a real demand for this sort of thing, though we may not be there yet.
After a discussion elsewhere, it has occurred to me that a few groups suggested in this thread - including yours - might be combined into a single group: ~personal. I've suggested this as another option.
As a new dad, I'd like this group. As other discussions, I think ~family is a good name for it. Putting it under humanities makes it too inaccessible for people who are looking for familiar topics. No one would look under humanities for something like /r/daddit
I never imagined that ~humanities would contain discussions about people's personal lives. The humanities is one of the three major branches of academia (the other two being the natural sciences and the social sciences). It's about studying the human condition, but it's quite impersonal. It's more like /r/History and /r/Linguistics and /r/Economics and /r/Literature and /r/Philosophy combined.
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/342/daily_tildes_discussion_proposals_for_trial_groups_round_1#comment-yes
That's why I've suggested ~personal as another option as well.
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/342/daily_tildes_discussion_proposals_for_trial_groups_round_1#comment-y57
I'd also support this group. It would be great to be able to share tips, chat, and commiserate.
I support this.
The proposed ~humanities imho could cover it already. you can just use tags to specify the topic context.
Hmm, that might cover the academic side of family...
...but I don’t think it would be a sensible fit for more mundane, practical things...
I think to include these you would need to stretch the definition of “humanities” so far that almost anything would fit in it. A dedicated ~family group would be a better fit. I probably should have included some specific examples like these in my original proposal, so it would be clearer what I’m thinking of.
I agree entirely. ~humanities is an awful name for a category to contain the sort of real and emotional conversations you've described. ~family is far more relatable.
~environment
To include topics that relate to conservation, zerowaste, anticonsumption, possibility foreign environments such as "environment, resources on Mars", and politics around environmental policies. A place to discuss lifestyle changes to improve our impact, on the individual or grander scale, and to promote awareness.
Example existing posts:
Failure plan:
Yes, please.
Yes, I would like this too.
Would environment suit agriculture and gardening subgroups?
~environment.agriculture (tag with permaculture, organic, regenerative, backyard, syntropic, aquaponics to sort them).
~environment.flora (tag gardening, botany, plant id, horticulture, arboriculture, endangered)
~ environment.fauna (tag zoology, aquaculture, backyard chickens etc)
I definitely think they could.
~science.ecology ?
~science.environment ?
I support this group.
Yes please
~Games.factorio
Example posts:
Factorio Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts
Here's my 1000 science per minute mega base
Blueprints for a PID control system using the circuit network
Failure plan: Move posts to ~Games with tag "factorio".
Could there be some upside to having a more tiered approach, such as ~games.rts?
It might help people find games similar to ones they like, help people find things easier while still splitting off some discussion from the root sub
Dwarf Fortress looks confusing and hard to get into, but if we get ~games.dwarffortress I'd give it another go in the spirit of community.
I would read your guide (or one that you highly recommend for new players)
Thanks! I tried playing a while back and was completely lost. I think i may have tried the 'lazy newb' pack or something but even then was not sure what was going on. The game has always sounded cool to me, so I will try the guide this time. :)
Thanks for this. Down the
rabbitdwarf hole I go!I would be against "sub-tildes" for gaming, at least for now, because we have tags, but also because there's not a lot of discussion there. Should some specific game need a community, I'll fully support the creation of that community.
@Deimos did ask for niche groups:
I love Factorio, but I think that for now it’s better to stick to more general groups, due to the smaller userbase.
I'd really like to see a re-thinking of categories.
The present set 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. There are
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.
There are several other systems, some newer and/or more international, though less frequently encountered, with fewer catalogued works, and critically, with less infrastructure for implementing in new software projects.
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.
(Repurposed from an earlier thread)
Interesting, thanks. Definitely worth thinking about some more, but it's difficult to balance. I did some looking at classification systems from libraries, book stores, and a few other systems when I was thinking about the hierarchy. One issue I found is that really formal classification systems like the Library of Congress one are extremely nested/specific. That's helpful when you want to organize things well and the hierarchy isn't really something you need to be aware of constantly, but on Tildes it's pretty front-and-center since it's the group names.
For example, say that we wanted to have a group specifically for the Python programming language. On Tildes as it is now, this would probably just be ~comp.python, or maybe if we wanted to go closer to usenet, something like ~comp.lang.python. However, if we use the LoC hierarchy, it's something like... "Science.Mathematics.Instruments and Machines.Calculating Machines.Electronic Computers / Computer Science.Individual Languages.Python". I'm sure we could find some way to shorten/simplify it, but once you do that enough, you start to get back towards something similar to what we have now.
There's also a pretty significant difference between "topics that people write books about" and "topics that people want to talk about on the internet". Specific programming languages is a pretty good example of that too, and definitely other things like specific video games. "Video games" is probably one deep leaf node in a library/bookstore hierarchy, but it can make up a major segment of an internet community site's content so it probably deserves to be moved much higher up the tree.
LoCCS (or an alternate classification) as an internal representation, with mappings to presentation categories, is probably the pragmatic approach. I see both compressing the top-level classification and flattening the structure. A bit of an LoC-lite.
The potential for leveraging the classification itself, code libraries, and extant classification corpora for automated classification (or at least suggestions) is another thought.
If you see Tildes building out a documentation reference library, well, there's that too.
I don't know the total post count for Reddit, but Wikipedia sports 47 million articles, over 5 million in English alone. Web scale can get large.
What I'm principally gunning for is a considered rather than aad hoc classificaation, one that is compreehensive, that scales -- both up and down, and thta doesn't prove entirely unsuited in a few years.
Usenet had its Great Renaming. The history of library classsifications has similarly evolved, with a few painful restructurings.
I would encourage you to look into doing card sorts, rather than trying to follow an organizational approach. You want your users to find categories based on the labels they would be searching for rather than forcing them to conform to your way of organizing. I'm sure you have an idea of your demographic. Put a few dollars into card sorting it to see what your users decide.
You beat me to the Usenet analogy, but in many respects, this is the old (!) taxonomy vs folksonomy discussion, e.g. http://www.stephendale.com/2008/07/31/taxonomies-vs-folksonomies/
Also, Library of Congress topic classification could be condensed considerably at the top level of the hierarchy - it's based on practical organization for relative quantities of printed text (e.g. an entire top-level category for American history), rather than a structure to keep the hierarchy organized for social and cognitive relationships.
I've personally found that tag drift can make it very difficult to find things in a poorly defined taxonomy (do not ask me about SharePoint; Twitter is intentionally ephemeral, shallow, and horrible to search if you don't know a specific tag), especially as the number of posts grows.
Likewise, going more than three or four levels deep in a hierarchical taxonomy loses information of more general utility in obscure corners. Those corners can foster the growth of toxic communities; the existence of too many subgroups creates moderation problems.
The folksonomy vs. taxonomy distiction is a good one to bring up. The former is adaptive and flexible, but also idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and often fragile or nondurable. The latter largely the inverse.
Both taxonomies and folksonomies can be used to press agendas, ideology, and social control, though by different mechanisms. That's a dark side to consider.
I'm partial to a mixed system with both formal and informal tags, though with some communication between the two. Discussion sites, to a far greater extent than libraries, deal with emergent information -- talking about events or issues before they're given accepted or understood names.
I've been thinking a lot about information quantitty and what people can (and will) process. For daily consumption, top-level classification should likely be no more than about 10, perhaps fewer, and hierarchy depth about 2-3 max, with as much utility at depth 1. Directed research could go wider and deeper, though that's a different use mode. (One I frequently employ.)
There's also the general question of what the classification intent, use, and goals are.
It's interesting -- if you're interested in that sort of thing -- to look through the Librarian of Congress reports and flip to the back for acquisitions, broken out by high-level classification. Several are notably more active than others -- Zipf's law and all that. Social sciences particularly.
Here's 2007 via Hathi Trrust.
The reports date to 1866, though the catalog-classification acquisitions report only really got established in the mid 20th century IIRC.
After a discussion elsewhere, it has occurred to me that a few groups suggested in this thread - including yours - might be combined into a single group: ~personal. I've suggested this as another option.
I would use a category like that.
I support ~finance and its potential subgroups (investing, budgeting, trading, careers, etc).
Name: ~improvement, or ~betterment, or ~makingthingsbetter, or ~goodwork... (none of these seem quite perfect but any of them would be sufficient)
Description: Working to better ourselves, our communities, and the world. Self-improvement, Volunteering and Charity, Big Ideas, Collaboration, Self-directed learning, etc.
Some general content ideas:
Some links that occur to me off the top of my head:
Some existing posts which might fit, but don't necessarily define the full scope of the idea:
Generally speaking, this would be a place made specifically to try to do good things, and make ourselves, our communities, and the world better through our creative ingenuity, our own two hands, and sheer force of will. A place for collaboration, brainstorming, active learning, overcoming personal adversity with the support of a compassionate and talented community, and creating Heaven on Earth through honest work to clean up and fix whatever is within our sphere of influence as individuals and as a team.
Morale, empathy, self-discipline, optimism, collaboration, inventing, celebrating achievements, helping, etc. - these are the sorts of things I would expect to find showing up in this group.
I think the reason you can't come up with a good name for your suggested group is because it's a bit too diffuse. Improving yourself and improving the world are two different things (even if they can be connected).
I think you've got two groups here:
~selfimprovement or ~personaldevelopment to improve yourself.
~helpinghands or ~bethechange to improve the world.
You're spot on that it's pretty broad - because it's intended to be a top-level category, on par with ~news and ~creative in the breadth of content it covers. So if there ends up being too much of one kind, it could be split into subcategories.
edit: though i would say, to me it seems like separating the two loses something which is greater than sum of its parts. I don't see a clear distinction between myself and the world around me. The overlap is more than a mere connection.
In that case, maybe it's not top-level enough. Maybe the top-level category you're looking for is something like ~personal, which might collect everything related to people living their lives, from relationships to careers, from self-improvement to making the world a better place.
So, you're suggesting ~personal.selfimprovement and ~personal.bethechange. And there's another suggestion for a group about family matters which might be ~personal.family. And then there's the suggestion for a group about life advice which might be ~personal.financialadvice and ~personal.careerguidance. EDIT: Also, the suggestion for a group to talk about people's work which might be ~personal.atwork.
Maybe you should all join forces!
EDIT: I've posted a suggestion for a group called ~personal. I don't expect you to support my idea, but I thought I'd let you know because you inspired it.
I think a ~personal would be a fair enough category. It feels like part of the problem is that human experience is not cleanly sorted into a hierarchical ontology, but ~personal is broad enough that I would be happy with the content and discussions I've described above going into it or a subsection of it, and i think the ~family suggestion would also fit nicely into it. It also avoids the sort of sterile feeling of a ~humanities group name intended to contain the same stuff along with more academic content.
I never imagined that ~humanities would contain discussions about people's personal lives. The humanities is one of the three major branches of academia (the other two being the natural sciences and the social sciences). It's about studying the human condition, but it's quite impersonal.
~personal would be a different kettle of fish. It would be for people to talk about their lives, and how to live them better.
Fair enough. I saw one person suggesting ~family content would fit under ~humanities, and I think i mixed my memories up from the last time I suggested a self-improvement group where several people were suggesting it and other ideas would go under ~lifestyle without it being entirely clear what ~lifestyle would even be - so my sense was that there was a greater push for ~humanities over that sort of more personally-involved content than there actually was here. My mistake!
I'd like something for the more competitive side of gaming (I'm specifically thinking overwatch but I think it's good for all games). I'm not sure what the best way to structure it would be though. We could have something like ~esports. The only issue is that I'm not sure what would go into the main ~esports group that doesn't belong in something more specific like ~esports.csgo or ~esports.overwatch
In that case, I guess it would be better to have ~games.overwatch and ~games.overwatch.competitive. In the more general subgroup there could be things like:
and in ~games.overwatch.competitive we could have things like:
My biggest concern is splitting the competitive and non competitive sides of a game will lower the overall quality and discussion happening in the casual group.
Just out of curiosity, why wouldn't this be a sub-group under games: ~games.computer.esports?
I agree a competitive group being a subgroup of a game makes a lot of sense as competitive content of that game will bubble up to the more casual crowd who maybe uninterested minutiae but would like to know of major tournaments or meta changes.
On the other hand it would be great to have an esports group in general as while there are many esports I do not follow closely I may be interested in their respective "superbowls".
It is possible that something as big as TI might flow up from ~games~dota~competitive to just ~games but then it may be in the face of people with no interest in esports at all.
https://tildes.net/~health/275/trying_to_become_healthier
https://tildes.net/~health/28d/has_anyone_tried_the_keto_diet_if_so_would_you_recommend_it
https://tildes.net/~health/2g1/intermittent_fasting_thoughts
https://tildes.net/~health/1e3/vegetarians_vegans
I think opening a subgroup for hardware under tech would make sense.
The computing space is big enough that only hardware warrants a subgroup, and to be honest there's a lot to discuss, like:
New rumors about upcoming hardware
Buying advice
also, because the site isn't big enough yet, all of the tuning/overclocking discussions can go under the hardware subgroup.
Ah, but is this ~tech.hardware or ~comp.hardware? ;) Based on your description, I would say ~comp.hardware; "technology" isn't nearly as well-segmented into soft/hardware as computing is.
Both could work, I thought ~comp was more like programming and software side rather than hardware.
~tech.comp.hw ;-)
~science.socialscience
This would collect the posts being made in ~science about archaeology/archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and social science.
The failure plan is to just return these posts to ~science.
Do you have 3 example posts?
I provided 7 example posts. Click on the hyperlinks under the words "archaeology", etc.
Ah I misunderstood thanks.
What if instead of having groups be proposed, there is a system to take popular tags and automatically make them their own subgroup?
E.g if there’s a lot of posts in ~tv tagged “game of thrones” then eventually a ~tv.gameOfThrones would be created. You could even consider removing them if there’s not enough content being created.
This has a few advantages to me
Users won’t be penalazied for posting a popular topic to a top level tilde until after that specific sub group is created
This encourages users to be consistent in their tags, only consistent tags will get their own sub group so consistency is key if you want to encourage that kind of content. Consistent tags are good for anyone who wants to filter out a particular kind of content.
There’s no proposal process, which means less work for the admins and less likely to end up with dead subgroups
That only helps if the content is already being submitted often. The point of proposals is more to bring up content that's not being posted already, probably because people feel like it's too niche or doesn't fit anywhere existing. We'll likely do both.
See the taxonomy/folksonomy discussion and references.
I'd like to see a designated space to discuss media & communications, though I'm not sure where to put it.
~games.FPS.CSGO
OR
~games.CSGO
r/globaloffensive is huge on Reddit and the pro scene news and drama as well as the update cycle for the game don't really fit into ~games that well.
I would appreciate a ~sports.motorsport
~tech.security