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Comment tags have been re-enabled to experiment with, input wanted on plans
This has been a long time coming, but the comment tags have now been re-enabled. I want to treat this as experimental, and potentially make a number of changes to them quickly based on seeing how they get used. A few notes about how they're set up now and what I'm planning to do with them, followed by some questions that I'd like input on:
- The main change I want to experiment with is turning the comment tags (mostly) into a system where they're invisible, but cause effects. That is, instead of having the actual tags show up on each comment like they were before, they'll now be something that's "in the background", but can have different effects on comments that get tagged.
- Currently, tags will only have an effect if multiple users apply the tag. This may change eventually if we start granting more weight to certain users that have a consistent history of tagging, but for now it means that a single user tagging a comment won't do anything unless other user(s) also apply the same tag.
- As of the time I'm making this post, you can apply tags, but they don't have any effects yet. This will change very soon (probably even later today), but I wanted to get input on potential effects and get a baseline idea of how they start getting used before I turned any effects on.
- Currently, anyone whose account is at least 7 days old will have access to comment tagging. This is to try to make sure that people have at least a bit of experience on the site before they start using the tags.
Now, questions that I want input on:
- What effects do you think might work well for the different tags? I don't want to bias the ideas by explaining a bunch of my own ones up-front, but an example of the sort of things that I'm thinking about is making it more difficult to reply to comments tagged "troll", such as by requiring the user to click through a dialog box like "Other users have tagged this comment as a possible troll, are you sure you want to reply to it and feed the troll?"
- Is the current set of tags (joke, noise, offtopic, troll, flame) reasonable, or should we consider adding or removing some of them?
- Now that the comment tags aren't being shown, should we consider changing them to more detailed descriptions? It was somewhat important to have shorter, "snappier" names for them before to keep them compact, but if they're not going to be shown often that may not be necessary at all. For example, "noise" could be changed to something more like "doesn't contribute to discussion".
Let me know what you think—the comment tags are definitely one of the important aspects of the site, so I'm excited to start experimenting with them again and am confident that we can figure out a system for them that will work really well and help encourage quality discussions.
How about a "spoiler" tag, since there's an issue for that open in GitLab? It could be useful in ~anime, ~books, ~games, ~movies, and ~tv.
Another alternative is spoiler Markdown tags (I really like StackOverflow’s implementation). This lets comments provide some context as to what they’re spoiling, which I think is important. If what it’s spoiling can be implied, the topic would likely already be tagged spoiler, in which case you assume that the comments also contain spoilers.
I'll second StackOverflow's implementation of spoiler tags. It's so good it should be markdown common convention.
Edit: Examples of how it works on StackOverflow.
Thanks for linking this, this is a perfect example! For the people viewing on desktop, on mobile, the spoiler just gets replaced with a box that days “Click to show spoiler”, and after tapping it, the spoiler is revealed. It works really well on both platforms.
For the record, it does not work for my in hermit. It works just fine in chrome mobile though.
I just looked into this because of your comment. That's a pretty neat little bit of syntax. Beautifully simple.
I kinda like that idea but I'd prefer a way to mark a spoiler inline, without the whole rest of the comment getting the flag. If for no other reason than so the commenter can indicate what they are spoiling, so I can make an informed decision about whether to read it. If the whole comment gets flagged you lose that metadata. Also often spoilers are only a single sentence thrown in to support a paragraphs-long comment about something only tangentially related. I'd like the spoiler to be hidden, but not the rest of the comment.
Having both an inline spoiler markup and a spoiler tag is really the key IMO, that way a conscientious user can mark spoilers as appropriate, but we also don't need to depend on 'moderators' being online to avoid everyone having to read Star Wars spoilers. Also, maybe I'll be able to see a Star Wars movie without knowing the ending for once :P
Ah, yes... I can definitely see the value of both. An inline marker for thoughtful commenters to use themselves, and a whole-comment tag other users can apply to not-so-thoughtful comments. A "WOAH! SPOILERS!" mechanism, if you will.
I think there should be a tag for spoiler, but only if the commenter forgot to add a tag (maybe if multiple users tag it, it sends a message to the poster asking them to address it? Maybe hide the post and put "Potential unmarked spoiler content. Click to reveal.")
Seconding this, I really like the way TV tropes handles their spoilers (all inline), see this page for example, although I dislike that it requries js to work, but i'm not sure it's possible without
All the tags could be abused if once you start tying effects to them, the trick is to build a system that punishes said abuse. Tag something as a spoiler (that verifiably isn't) too many times, and before long you won't have tagging privileges
Yeah, I think that definitely a concern. But in the past /u/Deimos has granted some user the ability to edit submission tags (and even fewer users the ability to change titles iirc?). This might be a situation where adding permissions to review / edit other users' use of tags might be warranted?
It should also immediately trigger if the commenter tags their own comment.
Alternatively, we could add something to the comment or post formatting syntax for marking sections as spoilers? Something like
[this is a spoiler](/spoiler).Rather than making a user write code to hide their spoilers, I think it's nicer to provide them with a button to push which does the hiding for them.
That's not code. Whatsoever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language
It may not be "code" from a computer developer's point of view, but...
It's not common English.
It's not standard punctuation.
It is instructions to a computer to perform a task (format text a certain way).
It's just like an editor's marks on a paper, though. Marking up a document's not considered code, so it's not considered code from anyone with a literary background's point of view, either.
There's even a cheat sheet with the "Formatting help" button.
Semantics are pretty important, I'd think we'd both agree, which is why I pointed that out. I more or less agree, though, that there should be an option in settings to enable formatting buttons.
An editors shorthand on papers is more like a code though, right? I thought you were agreeing with Algerson that it's code for a second. esp with your reference to a cheat sheet, too.
Imo, if you need a cheat sheet to begin using it; it's basically code.
I was referring to markup as "computer code", which is what @Eva was correcting me on - not that it's a code like a cipher.
Like a Dictionary? :)
I think this would be a larger issue related to building some kind of visual editor for all possible Markdown, not just spoiler Markdown.
Yes and no. Some markdown is easier than than others. It's easy to type two asterisks around some text to italicise it; it's also relatively easy to remember. It's harder to type
"[this is a spoiler](/spoiler)"- and, more importantly, it's more difficult to remember the necessary syntax. So, it's easier to make a case for a visual editor for spoiler markdown than italics, for instance.That said, I've already pointed out elsewhere in this thread that a WYSIWYG editor was one of the few positive changes that Reddit made in its recent redesign. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that here, further down the track.
Hate to point this out, but the (/spoiler) bit is a hack and not really intended usage of markdown in the first place.Honestly if you remove half of the hacks that redditors/GHers invented solely so they could add functionality to their subreddits/READMEs Markdown's fairly simple.That may be true, but having syntax for marking only sections of your comment as spoilers is still incredibly useful, as discussed elsewhere in this thread.
I still think that could be handled by a button: highlight the spoiler text, click on "spoiler", and - voilà - hidden spoiler text!
Or, as a second best, it would be nice if it could be handled like italics or bold or strikethrough, where the user just types an appropriate character at the start and end of the spoiler text to hide it.
Tidles uses markdown, based on a modified version of the commonmark standard, which unfortunately doesn't have any sort of spoiler syntax. Others using markdown have their own though, so if Tidles is going to add them, it should probably use one with current use to try to establish a standard.
>! Spoiler,>!Spoiler!<[spoiler](/s)or[spoiler](#s)[spoiler](/s "Season 3").The reddit implementation is probably the best to use, but it is pretty strange by commonmark standards. There's also using HTML (well, XML), which @deimos has mentioned in the past:
<spoiler>spoiler</spoiler>I mean, at that point, you might as well add buttons for other simple formatting, too, like bold, italics, strikethrough, links, etc. You still need a formatting syntax for it.
With regard to using a single character, do you have one in mind? Perhaps
!, e.g.!This is a spoiler!?Yep. That did go through my mind while writing that comment! While I strongly dislike many aspects of Reddit's redesign, the addition of a WYSIWYG comment editor with text formatting buttons was one minor improvement in an otherwise disastrous revamp.
I'm not really fussed about which character gets used. I assume that there are some characters which can't be used because they have other formatting uses, or are reserved for system purposes, or such things, but I'm not aware of all those restrictions. I'm therefore happy to leave that particular decision to people with more expertise in this area.
If all the spoiler tag does is impose an overlay, then all somebody needs to do to see an unpopular opinion is click past it, right? I don't see the problem there.
Or "humour". :P
Should pleasantries and similar conversations be tagged as noise? If an exchange goes
Should those two be tagged as noise? I feel like there are quite a few of these and similar brief threads that aren't strictly on-topic. I would imagine these be tagged as noise, but I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this correctly. I don't even think these comments shouldn't be made, just maybe pushed down below more meaningful comments.
I personally consider those noise, yes. An effect like having them collapsed by default isn't really harmful (the people they were relevant to have already seen them), and it makes the thread easier to read for new people coming in that don't need to read them.
So we should move away from thinking of them as "reports with a reason" like it seemed to be before, then?
I'm not sure that harmless pleasantries getting a tag to point out their irrelevance to the thread is going to have a positive effect, but maybe if the "joke" and "noise" tags were somehow clearly indicated to be just neutral descriptors, it could move that way.
Yes, tags aren't reports. They're more like categorizing a comment. In some cases this might be similar to a report (for example if something gets a lot of "flame" tags, maybe I should be notified about it), but not always.
I disagree:
Tags won't be displayed.
They'll result in actions being taken on the relevant comments.
That looks like a reporting feature to me, rather than a tagging feature.
They don't report anything. Deimos said maybe it could notify him, for some of the tags, if sent in large amounts.
A report would always notify an admin or moderator-like figure, even if only one was sent.
Well, they certainly don't tag them. Deimos has explicitly said a few times in this thread that tags would not be visible. What's the point of a tag that I, as a reader, can't see? A tag should be visible.
Therefore, these are not tags.
However, they will lead to certain moderation-type actions being taken. If a comment is identified often enough as "noise", it might be hidden. So, clicking on "noise" reports the comment as potential noise to the system. If enough people report a comment as noise, the system will act on those reports accordingly.
It's a reporting system. It provides moderation actions, whether those actions are done automatically by the system or manually by a human.
Really you're just arguing the semantics of "tag" here I think?
They're a categorizing feature for the Tildes reputation & moderation system. They provide information to that system which in some cases could in aggregate trigger a report. To me calling something a report suggests it's reporting to a human. Is an upvote a report because the vote sorting system is notified?
Yes, because words matter. They influence people's expectations and behaviour.
If I tell you that I have a book, you immediately build a picture in your mind of what I have: it has pages made of paper, on which are printed words, and they're all enclosed in a cover made of leather and cardboard. Now, what if I describe my book? It has a glass screen, and a QWERTY keyboard made of plastic, and it's in a hinged case made of aluminium - and inside the aluminium case is a collection of silicon chips and metal wires. You tell me my device is called a "laptop", but I say "No, it's a book! See - it displays words just like a book does!" But my so-called "book" does a whole lot of different things than what you imagine when you hear the word "book". You have a mental picture of what a "book" is and what it isn't. That word has influenced how you think about what I have.
It's the same here. We all know what "tags" are: they are visible labels attached to a post which display information about that post to readers. But, this system that Deimos is describing does none of those things: primarily, it doesn't display any information to readers. If you tell users "apply a tag to a comment", they will have expectations about what that means: primarily, they'll expect to see tags on comment that display information to them as they read threads on Tildes.
Maybe "reporting system" isn't the right phrase for what Deimos is describing, but nor is "tag".
Mods will see the tags at some point. That's kinda the idea - they remain invisible to the users so they don't trigger annoying social effects, but they tell the moderators what the people doing the reporting think about the comments getting tagged.
Some might not be invisible to the users either, depending on what ideas people come up with. That's also kinda the point - these don't have to behave similarly at all. We can decide on a tag by tag basis what's visible, when, to whom, and what effects they all have. Ideally we'd even let mod teams create and define their own tags for their own purposes that act just within their groups.
The trick is making sure the tags themselves have minimal disruption on the conversation. Tags which create social network effects that distort the conversation will probably end up hidden to most people in most groups just to prevent that from happening.
There are two different things here and combining them could end up with a system that doesn't do either very well. One is reporting and moderation and the other is categorizing content so users can decide what they want to see.
Tags are useful for searching and filtering content, which falls into the latter system. The topic tags are exactly what tags should be. They are open ended, visible, and users can choose what tags to search for or filter out.
There is a desperate need for a system to report both topics and comments. Having a limited set of things to choose from, with an optional comment for further explanation, makes sense for reporting. And reports should not be user visible.
Having separate "tag" and "report" buttons would make it more clear to the user what the intended effect is. "Report" says "This should be removed or less visible for everyone". "Tag" says "This should be more visible for those who like this and less visible for those who dislike it."
Very well put. Another consideration is that tags may to some extent be considered personal preference (although some convergence in their use should be encouraged), while a reporting system will require consensus on the meaning and effect of each type of report from the offset.
But not non-mods. To me, if I add a tag to a post or a comment, I'm doing it to add a visible and/or searchable bit of data for other users to read and/or use. If clicking on 'flame' is sending some information to the system or to the moderators, that's not tagging the post, that's reporting it.
A tag is visible. If it's not visible, it's not a tag.
"I tried adding a 'flame' tag to a comment, but it's not showing up. How come?"
Then we'll call it something else. I really don't care about the semantics. :P
I do, because, like I said up-thread, "words matter. They influence people's expectations and behaviour." I don't believe this is merely semantics. I believe correct and relevant names make a system more usable for people.
Perhaps "flagging" is more appropriate?
This is a reporting feature. Why not just call a spade a spade?
There's also been discussion in this topic about adding positive tags as well, which feels much less like reporting and more like flagging. If we decide that positive tags should be applied differently than negative tags, I'd agree with calling it reporting.
Well, we can be pretty sure that positive tags won't lead to negative consequences. :) Comments aren't going to be hidden and people aren't going to be banned as a result of positive tags.
Also, in my experience, people are more likely to talk about flagging something as a problem than flagging it as a good thing. "Flag" has a slight negative connotation.
Maybe, instead of "tag" or "flag" or "report", it's "feedback".
I'm having trouble identifying "noise" comments. I see comments which are off-topic or which are jokes, but I'm not seeing any which are noise and not off-topic or jokes. To me, "noise" is a superset of "jokes" and "offtopic", and everything that might be noise falls into one of those two sub-categories.
For instance, the examples you're describing as "noise" here look more like "offtopic" to me: they're comments which aren't on-topic for the discussion.
I'm a little confused.
"Noise" is basically "the presence of this comment makes no difference to the discussion". For example, say that someone posts a news article, and someone just replies, "Finally!". That's noise. It's on-topic because it's reacting to the story, but it has no value to the discussion and none of the readers are going to care if that comment is there or not.
Off-topic or joke comments can still have value (even if it's just entertainment value), but noise is more an expression of "this doesn't add anything and might as well not be here".
I don't think so. I feel like "noise" should be used for comment like "Upvoted".
Those should also die a quick death due to lack of votes.
I'm forever hopeful that votes will hold the ultimate weight of "quality discussion in good faith," over any tagging system. It's likely that few people will tag, but many will vote.
Tagging them as noise and having it negatively impact future comments of users seems like a perverse incentive. We want people to be civil here. Punishing civility - like helping each other and saying thank you - runs counter to that.
I think it can't be punished until whisper comments are in, after they're in then sure it gets a light punishing because you should've posted it as a whisper in the 1st place. Whispers can't be noise I guess?
Forgive my ignorance, but do you have a link to an explanation of these 'whisper' comments?
here you go
Thanks!
I'd like one as well. I've read the Docs as linked at the bottom of the site and don't remember reading about those.
I wouldn't consider them noise personally, if anything I think these exchanges are good once in a while as a reminder that there are actual people behind comments.
I think it's hard or impossible to keep them limited to a once in a while experience when they only ever get positive feedback.
A suggestion that's been made has been something like a "whisper comment" option, that posts the comment but puts it in a pre-collapsed state. That way it takes up almost no space and can easily be skipped over by others. I think this will work well now that the collapsed comments show the first part of their text, since a lot of the comments of this type ("Thanks!" and similar) will be fully shown in that single line.
I've seen something like this on some modern variants of phpbb and vbulletin systems. A user will make a reply and then under their reply but not as a new comment, there will be a line like this...
37 users gave kudos for this comment, mark and lisa and rick said 'thanks'It's like you're collapsing all the chattery few-word comments into a single line summary that's subtly displayed as if it were part of the original comment. Perhaps we could look into that once space is more of a premium. Collapsing is fine now, but if you have 200 collapsed comments it's going to get messy. Collapsing them even further might be better then. I've even seen ones where the 'mark lisa rick' bit changes on refresh to scroll through the kudos.
Ironically, when I suggested that I was talking about whisper comments :)
I went to tag a recent joke I posted, and discovered you apparently can't tag your own comments. Which, now that I'm looking at what all the tags are, makes a certain amount of sense as the others are all negative. If I have the awareness that my comment is noise, off-topic, trolling, or flaming, I just shouldn't post it in the first place. I'm not convinced that jokes belong in the same category. Not saying I want Tildes to be overrun with low-effort zingers and pun threads, but I don't think it's right to treat all jokes as negative by default, either. I have two possible solutions for that:
Just remove the Joke tag. Frankly I think the comedy graveyard content we're afraid of can neatly fall into the "noise" bucket.
Introduce other positive tags. I take @Deimos' point from the docs about the "interesting" and "insightful" tags lacking any semantic value. However, I think there might still be value to be found in tags like "advice", "recommendation", "explanation", and so on. Using nouns to classify the type of comment rather than adjectives to describe its subjective qualities. I also wonder if a "controversial opinion" tag (or something to that effect) might make for a softer "troll" tag where the poster's ideas are assumed to be in good faith, though unpopular. This might make for a reasonable substitute for downvotes, provided a count is not displayed of how many people tagged the comment.
I think jokes and noise are quite different, and combining them into the same tag wouldn't be right. I agree that it should probably be possible to tag your own comments as jokes though, and probably also as off-topic.
I'm not opposed to adding other positive tags either, I think there could be some interesting possibilities there.
This is probably the perfect place to bring up my idea of "tags and flags" again.
Basically, make "joke", "noise", and "off topic" tags - they're neutral but can result in certain actions given adequate thresholds, like sufficiently "noise"y comments being automatically whispered, and maybe sufficiently "joke"y comments could be whispered or even removed if the post is itself tagged as "serious"?
Users would be able to apply tags to their comment when they make it, but maybe indirectly. Like instead of tagging their comment as "noise", they tag is as "whisper", which simply whispers the comment and doesn't actually act as a tag.
Tags could even be visible to everyone, or just the OP, without flags being visible to anyone, which avoids the toxic effects.
Flags would be negative, like "troll", "flame", "spam", and would explicitly work as simple reports. They could have automatic actions applied, but I think they would require a substantial number of them compared to the votes to do anything. That's not to say 100 votes requires 100 "troll" tags, but rather that maybe it requires 20, whereas 10 votes requires 3, and zero votes also requires 3, or something like that.
And as for an action for negative-tags/flags, maybe another kind of auto-collapse?:
With hover text of something like "A large number of users have tagged this comment as Flame"
Then maybe when you uncollapse the comment, you have the option to vote for or against flame:
This also brings up that collapsed comments really shouldn't include block quotes :)
Thanks, interesting suggestions. I'm not sure about splitting it into two separate types vs. just giving users the ability to apply only certain tags to their own comments, but it's definitely worth thinking more about.
Agreed, that had the potential to be very confusing. I just updated the way that it generates the "excerpt" to show in collapsed comments so that it doesn't include quoted text any more, which should be a lot better. Thanks.
Another tag that's been mentioned in this thread that one might want to apply to one's own comment is "spoiler."
I think we should have spoiler markdown that will only hide a portion of the comment. Spoiler tagging should be for comments that fail to apply their own markdown spoilers.
and nsfw, and maybe commendation tags like "friendly" or 'helpful"
I’m not sure about those. What’s the use case for “friendly” and “helpful” tags? I like that they’re positive, but would anyone actually filter for those? As for NSFW, I think that’s a useful tag for posts but not for comments. The only use I can think of is similar to the spoiler tag conversation elsewhere in this discussion: If a user is going to link to NSFW content they have a responsibility for labeling it as such inline in their comment. If they fail to do so, a “contains NSFW link” tag could be applied by other users.
This is a pretty specific case though, that I don’t think is conveyed by just calling the tag “NSFW.”
I agree that we should have some positive tags like you say. And maybe they should also be publicly shown. One of the features of the Slashdot comment system that I really missed was having those descriptors so I could ignore the 'funny' ones when I knew it would be a tired old joke.
Something that I'm not sure if anyone else's commented on, but:
What if things labelled as say, a Joke, by a few users have any trust score changes made null for them?
E.g. when the trust system gets released and someone responds with something like "Wow, I thought it'd never happen!!" and gets +74, the joke tag would stop that from making them more trusted by the system.
Not sure if it falls into how trust is currently planned to be implemented (or if we even have any plan for it yet,) though.
An anti- trust-farming method? Sounds interesting!
I think it'd help keep the trust system from being broken, at least for a little while, if/when mainstream reddit gets invited/joins.
On that note, though—@deimos, maybe we should have a few positive tags?
I like the idea of some tags nullifying the 'karmic generation' aspect of the trust system. We'd talked about some tags like [ama] applying vote multiplier effects, this seems like a natural extension of that idea with certain comment tags also applying multipliers to the vote weight, the trust generated, etc.
I like this idea.
I'd like to suggest a "hateful" tag, specifically for comments that are racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc. It feels separate to me from "flame," "troll," or even "inflammatory."
Maybe if there's a tag like "hateful," it could trigger an automatic review by trusted users once it reaches a threshhold. It might take a while to implement fully, since it relies on the trust system being in place, but getting quick eyes on comments that are actively harmful would be good.
Yeah, I probably should have specified it, but that's what I was thinking. Additionally, if it's tagged enough, it could be automatically collapsed.
I like this idea, and I think it should apply to other negative tags like "troll" and "flame" too, but with different thresholds. "hateful" would probably have the smallest threshold. To avoid people using "hateful" because of the small threshold, users who consistently tag comments that then clear review should lose trust. They could lose some trust if the comment they marked as "hateful" was actually just "flame" (as in, angry but not bigoted), but lose the most trust if they mark a comment hateful when it's then completely cleared.
I'd suggest "hate speech" instead of "hateful".
That's a useful distinction - hateful could potentially include both flaming and hate speech, and we already have a 'flame' tag, so narrowing "hateful" to "hate speech" makes it more specific.
It just seemed obvious to me: when you refer to "comments that are racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc", you're practically defining hate speech!
Also, "hate speech" has a recognised definition, while "hateful" is in the eye of the beholder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
Late to the discussion, as usual, but I wanted to suggest a tagging simplification for consideration.
I've gone through the thread, and there's a little confusion about what tags will do to improve users' experience of the site as a whole, and what tags will do to change the behavior of the reading threads.
It seems to me that the point isn't to obsessively label everything, to ensure that no speck of discussion goes uncategorized. It's simply to create behavior guardrails that encourage people to think about both what they're doing and how the community perceives their activity.
In terms of improving the site experience (minimizing tolerance of users who make the site worse), instead of fine-grained category tags like "flame", "troll", "hate speech", a single "malice" tag might be worthwhile?
We've seen a few (now banned) users who made a widely-known practice of posting seemingly bland "I'm just being intellectually honest" comments, which, taken together, had the apparent intent of inciting conflict, invoking hate, or otherwise acting maliciously.
There's the problem of users who persistently (and possibly deliberately) fail reading comprehension in order to construe that they're under attack all the time, thus excusing whatever bad behavior ensues.
In other cases, there was a single uncharacteristically intemperate comment from an otherwise well-behaved participant.
If the intent of the system is to minimize behavior that's toxic to the community as a whole, we can tag "malice" when a comment is made in bad faith, when it is part of a pattern of troll activity on the user's part even if not specifically objectionable, or when the intent seems to be to injure or demean other participants.
"Malice" does not mean "I vehemently disagree", "this is a dumb argument", or "you're being mean to me by proving me incorrect".
Sufficiently high values of the "malice" tag assignment would function as a flag for prompt moderation, as a negative trust value indicator, and as a comment hide/collapse indicator.
As part of how tags change the behavior of the reading threads, "noise", "off-topic" and "joke" are filter categories, and shouldn't necessarily invoke automatic changes to whether comments are visible or not.
Again, there are malicious behaviors that involve excessive use of noise, topic diversion, or hostile jokes, which should be tagged as such. But sometimes "noisy" agreement or jokes have positive social value for the participants and encourage people to start deeper posts where they wouldn't otherwise. "Off-topic" comments can bring in relevant peripheral material for the conversation at hand.
I've seen jokes used to illustrate a point of discussion that wasn't apparent from the prior thread content, and they can be useful rhetorical or pedagogical tools. Or they can indicate when a topic is basically spent and people should look elsewhere.
I like this simplification. I'd be game for trying out 'malice' in this manner. It'd be interesting to see how it gets applied. Seems just different enough from the usual tags to give people a little pause. Maybe that can tease out better behavior than these other tags have done in the past on other sites.
What about having the flags be visible only to the poster of the comment? That way you’d get feedback about your comment, but you wouldn’t necesaarily have the “dog pile” effect that you can sometimes get where if a user sees a comment they don’t like has a negative flag, they’re more likely to add an additional flag.
Personally, I think hiding them from the comment author is one of the most important things. If people see that their comment is getting tagged negatively, it's extremely likely to trigger the same sort of "wtf why is this getting downvoted?!" reactions that you see on reddit, HN, and elsewhere. And it'll be even weirder if other people can't see the tags and don't even know what they're complaining about.
If anything, I'd kind of like to see it tell the user about their tags in a less-specific way. For example, maybe if someone gets multiple of their comments tagged "noise", they get a message later that says something like "some of your comments lately have been getting marked as noise, please try to ensure that you're contributing to the conversation when you post".
That's exactly what my concern was too. Your alternative with a private message alerting the user about their recent habits is a really good addition to the approach, on top of hiding the tags to the author.
This doesn't sit well with me. Essentially people are passing judgment without having to justify it and without any consequences for themselves if they abuse it. Ganging up is still possible as some users speak to each other outside of Tildes through Discord or whatever.
The person who is affected will never know exactly which comments were judged, if they ever find out in the first place. It's not a good mechanism to change behavior because it is not clear which behavior exactly is causing people to tag their comments.
You're implementing something that can have negative effects without giving a person the option to explain or defend themselves. They cannot appeal either. It makes me really uncomfortable.
It seems like you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about how everything will work. For example, there certainly will be consequences if people abuse the system. There are definitely concerns with it, but that's why it has to be implemented carefully. That's exactly why I'm starting with it doing absolutely nothing right now and asking for input, so we can figure it out and make sure we address those dangerous aspects.
I appreciate that you're taking care with implementing it and that you're asking us for feedback in such an early stage. I don't think I've made too many assumptions, but I was basing my comment on yours, in which you included a few 'maybes' which I tried to counter.
I'll try to formulate it in a more constructive manner:
Ideally the author of the comment should be informed of what is happening, especially if tagging has any consequences. Being made aware will allow them to explain themselves better, improve the quality of the comment, etc. It would also allow them to signal staff when they suspect abuse. And finally, it would allow them to appeal if they feel they've been judged unfairly by other people, and - if a system with consequences is ever built - that system.
If a tag does absolutely nothing, why would I click on it?
In order to provide the site with data on how tags are being used, so that we can better tune thresholds and automatic actions?
I suppose...
However, given that part of this thread is discussion about what tags should exist, and what types of content each tag should identify, I don't have a big incentive to start using them. Until I know exactly what tags exist, and what they mean, I'm not really inclined to use them.
That's just me, though. Maybe other people like clicking on tags that do nothing and which may not even exist tomorrow. :)
I prefer this approach as well. I've gone as far as hiding karma across all of reddit to try and reduce the circlejerk effect. It lets me worry less about personally sharing the "wrong opinion", and it makes it easier to judge other comments without letting votes influence my opinion.
I think this effect would be lessened, though maybe not eliminated completely with the flags system.
My only concern over tags is I feel they're all currently negative. Utility flags like the "spoiler" flag mentioned above are a good idea. Though maybe "unmarked spoiler" is more appropriate.
This isn't really any different from what we have ~now~ previously - if someone disagrees, they have to post a comment explaining why.
I take it you've never been downvoted without knowing why? It's a seriously frustrating experience (for some people, others don't care), like being slapped by a string of strangers on the street with covered faces without knowing why and no one will explain or talk to you.
I'm not sure about "the vast majority of times". I generally don't post racist or inflammatory things, and I still get downvoted. Of course, sometimes I know why: I'm going against the hivemind. However, there have been other times where I just can not work out what I said to make people downvote me!
You do know reddit doesn't show you real numbers anymore, right? After a few minutes pass all the scores are always changing by a few points. If you get 1-2 upvotes and 1-2 downvotes, your score is going to jump around from -3 to +3 on every page refresh. I don't know why reddit decided quantum uncertainty in vote scores was a good idea, but there we are. /shrug
As a long-term moderator on Reddit, including a couple of years moderating /r/Help, I am somewhat aware of how Reddit works. :P
However, when your comment goes to -2 within 6 hours and stays there (this happened to me only this week), it's fairly clear what's going on. Fuzzing generally won't turn a negative into a positive, or vice versa. Also, in my observation, comment scores don't jump around nearly as much as you're describing.
When you're browsing HN with show dead on and it's 50:50 on whether the dead comment is either something positive and happy or "WE SHOULD KILL $ETHNICGROUP UPMOD IF YOU AGREE edit: why the fuck am i flagged and downvoted you humourless slurs."
Been waiting for this. Moderation is in your hands, people. It's the only way this is ever going to work.
Use it wisely - and think about the tags like the human-powered version of automoderator. Each tag is a 'function' that executes an 'effect' on the content, and the site is counting the number of times something is tagged, so a single tag could have multiple effects if it counts up past larger and larger thresholds.
While you're using the site, think about what kinds of effects you'd like to be able to apply to the content on Tildes. Simple things, like getting five 'offtopic' tags on a comment auto-collapses it and the chain, or ten 'troll' tags triggering a warning on reply, or five 'hate speech' tags triggering a flag message to the site admins. Don't worry about things that are 'hard' to implement, worry about inventing good ways of keeping discussions well-gardened. ;)
By virtue of reading something, you're responsible for moderating it. Let's make that the goal.
I think that's a bit naive, frankly. Tildes will get bigger, new users will come in and won't care to read any reddiquette-equivalent on how to use tags. And with any sufficient amount of people, there will always be plenty of bad apples that abuse systems like this. Any reddit moderator has experienced the absurd reports people make just because something has itched them the wrong way, and of course downvotes have changed their meaning completely from "this is low-quality content that doesn't contribute to discussion" to "I don't care how much effort the author put into this, I disagree with it and so it should have negative points!"
So we have to be extremely careful with any negative tags that have automatic effects. I think ideally the tagging system should be mainly a "horizontal" one, i.e. just a way of categorising comments to make it easier for users to tailor their experience (i.e. with or without pun threads, with or without things tagged as "tw.rape", etc.), and actual negative tags should be approved by moderators, which also gives them the option to remove a comment right away when warranted.
One thing @Amarok didn't mention is that all moderation abilities on Tildes will be tied to a proposed trust/reputation system.
Moderation abilities will be given only to users who have earned an amount of reputation from good behaviour: good posting earns low-level reputation, which gives a user a low-level moderation ability like editing tags; good editing of tags earns a slightly higher reputation, which gives a user a slightly higher level of moderation ability like moving topics between groups; good moving of topics earns a slightly higher reputation, which gives a user a slightly higher level of moderation ability like maybe tagging/reporting comments.
So, total newbies will not be able to tag/report comments. This ability will come only after someone has been on Tildes for a while, and has shown good behaviour, and has demonstrated that they can use low-level moderation abilities responsibly.
Also, people can lose reputation for abusing moderation abilities. If someone is found to be abusing the tag/report feature (they keep tagging/reporting comments but those tags/reports are not confirmed by other users), their reputation will decrease and they will lose the tagging/reporting ability.
Oh, I had no idea. Thanks for clarifying! That definitely makes self-moderation a lot more viable.
I posted a little more about that in this reply a moment ago. The key to making these systems work is building them like an onion, each layer providing feedback from the users up towards the mods and the mods back down towards the users. The mods use what the users tell them as a benchmark for how they handle their moderation duties. When the mods provide feedback to the users such as by validating or invalidating that user's use of tags, they are subtly altering that user's 'trust' ratings which gate access to these systems.
The idea here is that the users only 'level up' if they show a good track record of using the tools as judged by those who are already at that next level of access. They can also lose what access they have because of that feedback, so that their future bad information isn't still polluting the system.
This lets you help the userbase self-select the best moderators. There's some work selecting the 'first' moderators by hand to seed the system, but after that's done it should become self-sustaining as well, even when large number of users join in on the conversation.
That's what the plan is, yes.
I do not like the addition of "troll" and "flame" tags for multiple reasons:
None of the tags in Deimos' post are actually positive. In this context, even "joke" is intended to be a negative tag.
However, if there were positive tags, I think it's a good thing that people may strive to earn them. If people are striving to earn tags that say "Good job!" and "Insightful", then they'll be more likely to write good comments. Positive feedback can lead to good outcomes.
Teachers are taught to provide students feedback in a 4:1 ratio of 4 positive comments for every 1 negative one. There is ample research backing up that this leads to greater improvement of student behaviors and performance (the ratio varies depending on research but is consistent in some higher number of positives for every negative.)
We are not students here. But I would predict the impact would carry across contexts. It would be nice to design features such as tags off of an existing body of research. Especially features designed to shape people's behavior. This is all to say I support adding more positive tags.
I'm struggling to think of a good effect for the
Joketag.I'm sure there are some who might prefer for jokes or comedic comments to be less visible, but over the past few months I've seen a few folks get shot down pretty hard for making light-hearted, fun comments. Less-so recently compared to the earlier Summer, but I'm not sure an effect that has the potential to kill the fun aspect of human interaction would be ideal.
I'm not doing a great job of avoiding explaining my own ideas for effects, but I think that one's definitely going to be linked far more to user preferences and not necessarily an automatic, always-in-effect change. For example, maybe a "collapse/hide all joke comments" button, or a user preference to do it by default. Then we're not eliminating jokes, but making them easier to avoid for people that don't want to see them so much.
Eventually we might be able to add a filter and let people ignore jokes in the comments? Just spitballing
I've just been reading through and one point has come up in a couple of conversations is the "joke" tag. It seems that many people think of it as positive, and so different from the other tags. My understanding is that all these tags are intended to indicate a comment as not really contributing to productive conversation.
I see two problems with "joke" here. First, new users will continue to misunderstand the "Joke" tag.
Second, a positive comment can use humour to help make its point in a friendly way so it should also be clear that "Joke" is only intended to mark a comment which shows inappropriate use of humour.
A quick synonym search suggested to me that "Flippant" might be a better choice to capture more clearly the sense of this tag. It's generally understood as a negative quality, and the dictionary definition of it as meaning "not showing a serious or respectful attitude" seems to fit the bill. Thoughts?
That does make sense, and I would say the descriptions are actually spot on if the context was very clearly “flag this comment for review by mods (or automatic action) because of this issue”.
I'd argue that what is or isn't appropriately placed humour is completely subjective and therefore a "joke" tag is perfectly adequate for what tags are meant to do: give readers a choice about what comments they want to see. There's no value judgement in it, it's just: "this is a joke; filter it out if you're interested in serious replies only."
This comes back to the point that all the other tags are a value judgement, in effect saying “this content isn’t what tildes is for”. They are intended to (gently) penalise such posts, either algorithmically or by bringing them to the attention of a mod who will then have to apply an action on behalf of the community.
You seem to be arguing for a different sort of tagging system, where “joke” would describe the content in a way that each user would need to decide for themself if they wanted to see it, so maybe in the same way that NSFW, Explicit, Trigger Warning, etc could work. That might be a better way of handling it. It might seem weird to treat “Joke” like “NSFW” but it does make me wonder if there are other “mild” tags that would fit into such a system, eg Offtopic, Verbose...
I don't think it's a different system at all, I think it's exactly what they have in mind with Tildes. Have you read this? Quote:
Everyone here seems to be focusing on the "downvote with a reason" aspect, but forgetting that that's only one aspect of comment tags.
The other tags also aren't necessarily value judgements, e.g. others have pointed out that the "noise" tag would be used for helpful and good-faith corrections that are simply no longer relevant for a new reader once the original post has been edited.
I think I've been forgetting that bit about how a tag can be combined with a vote, and that makes me feel that it might not be as negative as I'd initially feared. Thanks for bringing in that quote.
Being able to express that a comment is good and place a tag is a bit richer system than I'd been thinking, and it helps me understand why there's not any purely positive tags yet (Interesting/Informative/etc), since the upvote is filling that role.
I guess my concern is that it feels like tags are trying to do three things:
Each of these uses would have different effects within the system, so should be clearly understood and presented as such.
Of course I could be overthinking this and Deimos and co will work out a simpler and more helpful solution, so I’m not going to keep gnawing on this bone. Thanks for the discussion though, it’s helped me be clearer to myself at least.
Comment sorting is currently by 1 of 3 sort options, but if a comment is receiving tags, I'd want to see it lower than it would normally be, as it's not likely to promote good discussion for the topic it's a part of.
If the individual tags could have different functionality, jokes would have the least amount of "weight" to being pushed to the bottom, followed by either noise or offtopic (kinda the same?), then troll, and flame. At some threshold, comments with a bunch of flame tags should be collapsed by default, optimally.
Agreed, I think I should probably add a new comment sort for that though, so that "most voted" and such still do exactly what they say.
Is “tag” really the right term now, if they’re no longer going to be visible? We’re no longer tagging comments so that other people can see those tags when reading threads. Effectively, we’re reporting comments as possibly requiring some action by the system or by a moderator. I would therefore rebadge this as a reporting feature, rather than a tagging feature. Tags are visible, like on topics. If these options are invisible, they’re not tags.
To me, “offtopic” and “joke” are two types of “noise”: they’re all things that don’t contribute to discussion, that even distract from discussion, and that therefore should be hidden. “Noise” itself is a bit vague, but “offtopic” & “joke” are more specific.
However, “offtopic” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just because a topic about Asian geopolitics segues into a discussion about cultural mores in Japan, that doesn’t necessarily mean this off-topic conversation needs to be hidden or otherwise acted on.
I might:
I’m not sure about “troll”. Too many people define “troll” as “I disagree with this”. I saw this way too many times in political subreddits especially: anyone who posted an opinion that didn’t match the hivemind was labelled a “troll”. I know you want to “trust users and punish abusers”, but I really think “troll” has the most potential to be abused. Maybe there’s a case to be made for adding a “disagree” button as well as as a “troll” button, so people who merely want to express disagreement can see that this is separate to labelling someone as a troll.
“Flame”, to me, is even more vague than all the others. Am I right to assume that it’s something like a personal attack – where someone is inflaming the discussion by attacking another person? Why not just call it what it is: “personal attack”? As you say, you don’t need snappy labels if they’re invisible.
I’d recommend various actions based on the comment reports:
I’d like to see time-outs imposed on people who post personal attacks. If a comment is reported 3 times as “personal attack”, the system would hide the reported comment, lock it so noone can reply to it (preventing any escalation), and would automatically impose a 24-hour time-out on the user (they can’t post anywhere on Tildes for 1 whole day). After a user returns from a time-out, if a second comment of theirs is reported as a personal attack, their next time-out is longer than the first one. If they make a third personal attack after that, their next time-out is even longer. And so on: each subsequent personal attack imposes a longer time-out. Maybe it’s a linear progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days); maybe it’s geometric (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 days); maybe it’s triangular (1, 3, 6, 10, 15 days); maybe it’s Fibonacci (1, 1, 2, 3, 5 days); the important thing is that each subsequent time-out is longer than the previous time-out. Eventually, someone who keeps indulging in personal attacks will find themself facing time-outs of weeks, or even months.
Given that these report features can actually hide comments, and prevent people from posting on Tildes, I think they should be available to a more restricted group of users than people who’ve been on Tildes for 1 week. They should be available to fewer people than the features for editing tags and moving topics. I’m not sure what the selection criterion should be, but it should absolutely be more selective than just being here for 7 days. Maybe, until there’s an actual trust system, you should hand-pick the people who can report comments. You did that for editing tags, and moving topics, which have less serious impacts than reporting comments.
Thanks, really good input. I think the combination of your suggestion and what @patience_limited wrote in their comment feels like it might be the best way to go. Having just one "this comment is unacceptable" type of tag should really be sufficient (and the terms like "troll" have become a bit loaded), and I definitely think adding a positive one could work well.
If I didn't already think you were building a reporting system, this would convince me! This is nothing more nor less than a "report" button. :)
I'm hoping for a little more subtlety than a "report" button provides; that "malice" calls on the community to review not just the exact content of a singular comment, but intent based on the known pattern of the poster's behavior.
Well, for starters, Deimos is planning to have a few different buttons, to allow people to report comments for different reasons. And, if a human moderator gets involved in the process, they're very likely to check a poster's previous behaviour (I know I do when I'm having to moderate a post or comment).
It's weird how you're really hot on how important semantics are. Yet you keep miss-naming the feature.
Let's look at what tags do on other websites. These various tag systems all have a few features in common.
The tags are visible to users. A user can see a tag like "politics" and therefore know that an item is about politics.
The tags are searchable by users. A user can search for all items with a "politics" tag if they're interested in political news and discussions.
The tags are filterable by users. A user can filter out all items with a "politics" tag if they're not interested in political news and discussions.
Tags are fields applied to an item by users for other users to use.
What does this proposed comment-marking feature on Tildes do?
The fields will not be visible to users.
The fields will not be searchable by users.
The fields will not be filterable by users.
If it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't swim like a duck, and doesn't quack like a duck, why on earth would you call it a duck?
The etymology of tag is for literally attaching a note to something, which is what tildes is doing when you tag it. But I'm not arguing that you should use "tag" I'm arguing that you shouldn't use "report".
The features doesn't report to anyone. A report button that generates reports that no one sees seems even more incorrect to me than "tag". What I'm really commenting on is we already had this discussion, you claim to be super serious about correct semantics. But you're continuing to use report, I don't understand why.
Do I really need to explain the etymological fallacy to you? :)
And now I understand your objection to "report": you assume that a report has to go to a person, rather than to a system. Okay. What word would you use for a feature that identifies problems to a computer system for investigation and/or possible action? Like, if you were scrolling through a list of bank transactions, and you had to identify the ones that looked abnormal, so a computer system could compare them to other records? Or if you were reading posts on social media and wanted to highlight them to an algorithm's attention? What word do you believe we should use for that action by a user?
Also, I'm not married to "report". As I pointed out elsewhere, it could be something like "feedback".
It's not like "tag" is out of use as "stick a label on it" you have dog tags, gang tags, price tags. I don't think it's a great use in this case because Tildes already has topic tags which behave like other website tags so it'd break expectations to have two things with the same name.
I think: "classify", "label", "designate" work without a negative connotation.
I think: "flag" is ideal if the intention is for a negative connotation.
If we give users the option to mark their own comment as a whisper, joke or NSFW then I think we could make these things all be negative connotations since the user has screwed up not categorizing their own comment... I'd probably post a lot more stuff if I could mark it joke and hide it from people who want to be super serious...
One thing that all those tags have in common is that they are visible, unlike the comment "tag" system being proposed here.
Agreed.
So you'll be happy if I use "flag" instead of "report"?
That's not the point of a "joke" flag. It's to flag comments which are not up to Tildes' standards because they're jokes. If you have a strong desire to post joke comments, I recommend Reddit - they love jokes over there! (In most subreddits.)
If you can mark your own comment as whisper / joke and only people who want to see irrelevant friendly interactions & jokes see em. What's the harm?
Deimos explicitly did not state "the point" of flags in this Topic in order to get brainstorming. Perhaps I missed the announcement where that changed?
It sets up a culture which not only turns a blind eye to shallow content, but actively encourages it by providing people with a mechanism to post it without feeling like they're dragging the tone down.
When comment tags worked previously, they were used by other users to tag your comments. Even now, you can't tag your own comments. He even says in this post that "tags will only have an effect if multiple users apply the tag" [original emphasis]. I'd say that's a very strong implication that they're not there for you to use to hide your own comments - they're there for other users to flag your comments.
The other tags included in the current implemenation - noise, offtopic, troll, flame - are all negative. Given that "joke" is included in this list without any differentiation, it seems like "joke" is also intended to be negative.
These two things combined - other users apply tags, and only for negative comments - mean that tags are there to flag sub-standard comments.
See Deimos' comment above: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/63s/comment_tags_have_been_re_enabled_to_experiment_with_input_wanted_on_plans#comment-1qzs
I don't think self whispering would work via the same mechanism as other users pressing the "Noise" button.
Hell two days ago Deimos said:
To which you replied that you disagree, and yea cool story... It really feels like you're just agitating for Tildes to be what you want it to be by assuming more authority than you actually have. A bunch of conjecture based upon how disabled or experimental features work now or worked in the past do not a definitive specification make.
I can't really be bothered wasting more time on this so best of luck with your quest.
I think the disconnect here is that some people are conflating the idea of a 'malice' tag with the reporting feature. They aren't the same thing at all.
Tagging a comment 'malice' is like the kiddie-training-wheels version of that report system. Everyone gets access to 'malice' fairly early on, before they get to the real reporting system. How well they use the malice tag will probably factor into earning access somehow.
For example, every time a comment gets hit with a 'malice' tag, the color of the comment could shift more and more red - but only the comment mods could see that color change. Most users wouldn't see it since they aren't trusted to moderate that thread.
That lets the comment mods skim through a massive comment section and have the potentially problematic bits highlighted already. It's like adding heat to a temperature gauge. Simple, basic, effective, and if someone's spamming a ton of inaccurate 'malice' tags, they aren't actually causing any real harm, since only the mods know that, the author and most readers remain oblivious to it. You can't hit someone with 'malice' just to piss them off like you can with downvotes, because they can't see that tag.
The comment mods can come along and validate the 'malice' and those users earn trust for tagging it correctly. If the comment mods invalidate it, those users would lose it instead, for using the tag inappropriately.
Earn enough trust and eventually you get the full reporting system instead of just the malice tag, and now you're the one seeing the color changing and validating the tags. Lose enough by misusing it, and you don't get to use it anymore so that your noise isn't making a mess for the people who do use it well.
The purpose of the comment tags here is simply to take the temperature of something. They can also take 'actions' on their own after a temperature threshold is reached.
Some tags will have gated access. Some will be sitewide common (which is what we should be focusing on today I think). In the future mods will probably be able to create/define their own. Some will be invisible to the users, some will be very visible - such as the positive reward-style tags.
They can all operate differently through the same basic interface (click tag - click on the tags you want to apply) and still all do their jobs independently, whatever those jobs are.
I think we've a good case in this thread for a 'malice' tag to replace all other hostile tags, and for some kind of 'kudos' tag that's basically the opposite, thanking the user for an excellent comment above and beyond what a simple 'vote' does. We can try out 'off-topic' as an auto-collapse and see if that works out or if it turns into a censorship tool. We could also try out 'amusing' as a tag and see how that goes. It's a starting point.
That still feels like a reporting system to me, rather than a tagging system (which is why super_james is arguing with me). Just sayin'. :)
I think of a reporting system as something more formal, like a traffic ticket, something more 'official' than just taking the general user's temperature. If there's a report issued it should mean there's an action pending rather than just letting it get lost in the noise like on reddit.
But it's not just taking users' temperature, and actions will be pending. If a few users apply the label "troll" to a comment, an action will be taken on either that comment or the commenter or both. Whether the action is performed algorithmically by the system or performed manually by a person, it will still be performed.
This so-called "tagging" system isn't like the post tagging system, where users can read the tags and use them to filter what they see. These so-called "tags" will be invisible to general users, and can result in an action being performed.
Looks like my "this feature is disabled" doc addition needs to be removed now. :)
Yep, I'll change it to mention the account-age restriction and that they're being experimented with.
Great, thanks!
I would push joke, noise, offtopic, to the bottom of the comment subtree they are in. Noise should be lowest, jokes second lowest, and offtopic third lowest. So, like this:
For troll and flame, I would display a warning when a user tries to comment. I would have flame take precedence over troll. I like your warning for troll, so for flame I would echo it:
For certain tags like noise, it might be interesting to go a step further than simply pushing them lower or collapsing them. What if they didn't show up as new comments if you have that feature turned on? (Presumably they'd still notify the person being directly replied to.)
There have been a few times that I've seen new comments in a thread I've been following, clicked through, and found they're off-topic or a polite (but irrelevant to me) exchange. It's not a major issue, but it's a bit disappointing when I'm expecting something I can dive into or reply to. This could even be an optional setting under "Toggle marking new comments."
Yeah, that definitely could be an interesting thing to do. It might be a bit tricky to implement, but maybe not too bad. I'll have to think about that some more, thanks.
Cool! This may also tie into whispered comments, which I had forgotten about but just saw mentioned again. Allowing folks to self-tag to a certain extent or mark as a whisper would be interesting.
I think this is a good first step but it's still going to be susceptible to brigading. If five trolls gang up to tag a comment incorrectly, a response of five non-trolls should have equal power to un-apply the tag. Then at least there's some democratic method of moderating against tag abuse. So, whatever UI there's going to be to show currently applied tags should have a "remove tag" option next to each one. This would effectively remove the tag for the user that clicked it, and function as an "untag vote" for other users.
Yes, I think that will probably be important. It's a bit difficult though, since you can't really have both "tags are invisible" and "users need a way to counter improper tags". There are some other interesting potential ways to do it as well though. For example, Slashdot did (maybe still does?) a thing called "meta-moderation", where you'd occasionally be sent a comment and it would ask you something like "this comment was marked as flamebait, do you agree?"
Keep in mind also that people brigading tags will likely result in them having their tag weight reduced heavily, losing access to tagging, or even being banned from the site entirely. Everyone's accustomed to worrying about how mechanics will be abused because so many site admins aren't willing to punish people for abusing things, but that's not the way it needs to be here.
This is only tangentially related, but I appreciate that the approach here is to promote trust and punish abuse. It's always disappointing when "one bad apple spoils the whole bunch" policies are the default because they punish everyone.
Even if in the end you find that the trust-first system doesn't really work, I like that you're taking a chance with it :)
I believe you hit the nail on the head here when you talk about brigading being able to be punished effectively through this method.
For brigading to occur one must have influence over many accounts, whether it be controlled by bots or simply having a mob who will follow your instructions. If one were to use that control to brigade and it was overridden by a moderator it would affect a large number of accounts reducing the effectiveness of those accounts to brigade in the future. Once they've used a set of accounts to bridgade, those accounts get demoted and no longer can have a big effect on the site again negating the main pathway through which brigading occurs. Trying to game the system would result in greater and greater effort for less and less reward.
Building trust requires participation, too. If you have an army of 50 alt accounts, you now have to participate 50x as much as you would on your main account if you expect those alts to ever have any real power to do anything. Just leaving them idle will result in their powers decaying progressively faster and faster until they are back to 'new user' status.
This also helps prevent one person from being a mod of twenty groups. Participating enough to earn access in one or two groups is already going to take most of one's time, so there shouldn't be a practical way to earn mod access over a large number of groups. We may have a 'hierarchy' moderator level where people can mod up and down one major hierarchy such as ~sports and ~sports.nfl.packers and ~sports.nba.warriors. That's as close to a 'power mod' as we're likely to get, and the hierarchy moderation activities will probably be focused on curation, promotion, and arbitration between adjacent mod teams rather than abuse mitigation.
Ideally it also takes a significant amount of work for them to reach the point where they have those tools in the first place too, making it so that the punishment really hurts when they have to start over. If you haven't read it yet, this idea is written up generally here: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future
This is a great development. I’m happy to be experimented upon.
As far as expected utility, I like your ideas for things like “don’t feed the troll” warnings on troll flagged comments. I also really like the kinder, gentler, scalable, and automated feedback/moderation with things like a message about your contribution quality if you have have been getting flagged a bunch. This is great.
As far as other utility I was going to say everything that @dubteetub said, except for the super upvote. The upvotes already exist for that in my book.
Maybe noisy comments could be auto collapsed?
I am all for longer text descriptions. The easier to understand the better. It should keep misapplication to a minimum.
Maybe another conversation all together:
I bet you have thought about this, but in the same vein of scalable moderation tools, would some set of more grave flags help you identify and moderate comments as the site grows in volume? I mean things like abuse, doxing, personal attack, etc. just to spread the load around a bit. I know you look at each thread now, but for the future this might help? Maybe threads with a high count of these flags could jump to the top of your moderation queue?
Maybe people with something like 30 days or more would have this grave flagging ability, and you could revoke it if it was abused?
Maybe it could even be proactive, like if 10 people thought a comment was abusive, it could be redacted like a spoiler until human moderation was available?
Really nice execution. I like that the tags are hidden.
For me, it would be handy if parent comments had more weight when tagging direct child comments.
For parent troll and flame, it'd be nice if they were collapsed and sorted to the bottom of the thread -- much like the
deadcomments on HN.I think having a possible tag like that is open to grounds of similar issues and the reasoning why we aren't using a downvote button here on Tildes. I believe it would be open to abuse, and if users just tag a comment with a 'Possible Troll' it would dissuade people from commenting to a user who might genuinely be participating in a healthy conversation but with a differing opinion from others.
For the reasons above I think troll and noise should be removed, the rest seem reasonable for now. I have no thoughts on more for now.
With the current tags in place, I think they are self-explanatory. Should we add more tags, then I think this should be reconsidered!
Overall, I think you're probably still a bit stuck in the mindset of being on other sites that never do anything about people abusing mechanics. If someone repeatedly abuses the tags, we take away their ability to use them, not just shrug and let them keep doing it.
That's true, I am thinking longer-term with these feature announcements. Harder to adjust a userbase to changes that were there from mostly the start when features get removed. I think when Tildes eventually gets bigger, it would be more of a struggle to keep up with moderation on tag abuse. However if this won't be a problem then you're right on that regard.
I'm gonna need to create a new account so I can tag my own comments
I don't think this was mentioned yet, I'd like to see a NSFW tag on comments if the topic isn't marked NSFW. It could function similarly to a spoiler tag but with a warning.
seems like there's a small-ish bug when a comment has been auto-collapsed, presumably due to being tagged something, and you un-collapse, hit tag, and re-collapse, the tag buttons are still there (i.e. the options, not the actual 'tag' thing). does that make sense? it's a small bother but might be worth pointing out
Yeah it makes sense, although it's not just occuring for auto-collapsed comments, but any comment you collapse after opening the comment tag menu. Thanks for pointing it out... added a Gitlab issue for it.
Perfect! Thanks for that, I only have a gitlab account associated with my irl name, hence not filing the issue.
No worries, all of us "reporters" on Tildes Gitlab are generally on the look out for people bringing up problems with the site and will handle the Gitlab issue creation when we spot them. Feel free to PM us (here or there) and let us know about any issues you mention that we might have missed though.
Thanks a bunch, I'll keep that in mind!
What is the "noise" tag supposed to denote?
Offtopic, Troll, and Joke I get.
Flame seems a bit redundant with Troll.
From the mechanics page
These should get handled by the 'whisper' comment mechanism - like a private reply that only the person being replied to can see. That goes for stuff we see on reddit like '!remindme' as well.
Has that idea been discussed elsewhere on Tildes? It's the first time I've come across it (here or anywhere else).
Are you describing an alternate reply action? That looks like the "reply to this comment" form, maybe styled differently to set it apart, that DMs the user instead of posting visibly? I like that idea. Would it use the standard DM system, or would the whisper message actually be attached to the parent comment but only visible to the two users?
It's been talked about a few different times. I'm not sure if it's ever really been an "official" thing, it's just been brought up and seems to be generally thought of as a good idea. The issue related to it on GitLab is from June 21: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/141
Oh, thanks for that. So it posts a normal comment that is publicly visible, except collapsed by default? That could be useful. I would probably call it an "aside" and not a "whisper," since whispering connotes a private conversation, to me.
Can anyone reply to one of these collapsed whisper comments? Will those replies necessarily also be whispers, or can they have normal visibility?
I do wonder if there would be value in replying to comments with in-thread comments that are only visible to yourself and the person you're replying to. Maybe there's a way to make it work, but the more I think about it the more I see its potential for harassing other users in ways that are invisible to everyone else.
I like the "aside" term, that would probably be better. "Whisper" is used for "private message" in various games, so I agree that's probably not the best name for it.
I think other than being collapsed, they'd just be completely normal comments. Maybe when someone replies it defaults to posting as an aside, but they can choose to post it as a "normal" comment if it's going to be something more significant? Kind of the opposite of the usual process.
I agree that in-thread private conversations is probably not a good idea and could end up with some really weird dynamics that are hard to even recognize as happening.
If you ever visit really busy reddit threads, like half the comments are that sort of one-word low-effort stuff. It'd be really nice to find a way not to have all of that slog present in the big thread view, so we end up with cleaner, more relevant discussions where two-person offtopic tangents, long back-and-forth arguments, and simple joke/kudos comments aren't front-and-center in the threads. Even if we just have tags like 'lol' or 'this' it's helping stop those from being comments - perhaps the most common short-form comments ought to have representation as tags.
Someone suggested classifying these as 'whisper' comments that are only visible to the people they are directly addressing, and it seemed like a clever idea. That's about as much exploration of the idea as we've discussed so far, though. It's just a concept, might evolve into something else over time. It's almost like a 'sidebar' discussion/comment mechanism, so two people can chat without overcrowding and derailing the main discussion thread.
In fact maybe that's what we should call it going forward - a sidebar discussion mechanism.
Ah didn't see that.
Why should we tag this? Shouldn't this just be moderated?
Noise is for things that don't contribute anything to the conversation. For example, if someone replies to a news article with something like "finally!", that's noise. It's not conversation, it doesn't have any ability to start a discussion, and it basically just takes up space.
Is the goal of this tag to allow self-policing without the need of moderators? Otherwise why shouldn't moderators just be removing these for being low effort?
Ah, you're still thinking in the centralized moderation model. Tagging it as noise is moderating it, and if it gets tagged heavily as noise it can be collapsed or even removed.
I'm all for this, just wasn't sure how it was going to be implemented.
If the goal is for it to auto-collapse upon enough people (or the right people) tagging it, then noise is a good tag.
The chief challenge of moderation is finding enough well-intentioned people to do it, and spreading massive workload around - a workload that scales much worse than linearly when the discussions grow.
In any moderation system, we're going to be looking at a pyramid for both access and available amount of labor. At the bottom of the pyramid are things like comment tags that almost everyone will have access to rather quickly after joining the site (think like a month or two tops). Above that you'd have topic title/tag editing, above that some form of report system for removal of bad content, and above that some form of user-abuse handling for muting and reforming and banning users. Those top levels might even take years to access, and have that access limited only to the places where that user is highly active and maintains a good track record of using those tools.
Each step up that pyramid comes with greater power and greater responsibility, and also an accompanying reduction of the number of people who have earned access to that level of feature. If you've got 10,000 people at the bottom level tagging comments, you're going to have 100 people at the next level with topic editing, perhaps 20 above that with reports, and at the top single digits of site admins.
The lesson here is that for moderation tools to be effective, they need to do most of the 'work' of moderation at the bottom of the pyramid. Push too much work up the pyramid too far, and you end up overworking and burning out the people working at that level.
The less potential for abuse a tool has, the more people who can use it, the closer to the bottom of the pyramid you can get it to operate, the better that mod tool is in the long run.
I think that troll comments are almost always inflammatory, but not all inflammatory comments are trolling. I think having both is useful
Inflammatory is a better tag than "flame" then. I know it's a bit long, but it's not obvious what "flame" is supposed to be to me.
Maybe I'm giving away how much time I've spent online, but I've always thought flame was self-evident. Things like flaming, or flame wars were ubiquitous among the spaces I hung out.
Yes but flaming can be different from an inflammatory post, and that's what is throwing me off about the tag
We may be doing ourselves a disservice by copying the names of tags that have traditionally existed on other sites. That's really the only reason the tags that exist now are here - they are common 'traditional' tags from places like Slashdot. That doesn't mean they are right for Tildes. We can experiment quite a lot now that the system is back online.
It denotes when I'm on my bullshit. :)
I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused with "noise" tags. For me, jokes, off-topic, trolls, and flamers add usually little to a discussion (but for example I enjoy some jokes). Does that mean I should tag those as noise as well? It feels bad collapsing a whole thread, but on the other hand, it really isn't very useful to people reading the topic, but then again that is essentially just my opinion and everybody should be able to form theirs, no? Should "noise" be limited to +1/yeah/thanks kind of posts?
From the mechanics doc: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics
yep, I read that, but the definition was a bit unclear to me. Should I interpret it as something like "short comments that don't add anything to the discussion and are written as a formality"?
Yes, I think that perfectly defines noise.
Can I tag my own comments as joke now? I'll use this one as a test. Edit: nope, not yet.
The point is that these tags are negative; someone posting a joke comment in a thread is a bad thing. If you already know your own comment is bad... why would you post it?
I thought that joke could be considered positive, but offtopic/noise. Some people may find it funny in the context it is posted, but I want to make sure they know I'm joking and not trying to be taken seriously. Others who don't want to see jokes maybe be able to filter it out (if that feature is ever added). It just never occurred to me that this tag was negative, thanks for the clarification.
Then write your comment more clearly. Or, if not, you could do what some people do, and write things like "/s" or "jk" if you're not sure your intention is clear enough.
But, remember that Tildes' goals include high-quality discussion. Writing jokes in discussion threads doesn't really count as high-quality discussion.
I think users should be able to tag their own comments. For example someone helps me with something, and I want to thank him. It's clearly noise, but I want to post it, publicly. In that case, I should be able to say 'Hey, Tildes, I want to post this comment. But I know it's noise, so it should be collapsed by default'.
Take a look at my comment. It's not high-quality comment and it's something between Joke and Noise. I want it to stay there, but I know it is low effort comment and I'd like to tag it as one.
I guess some reddit habits die hard, I try to post high-quality comments, but sometimes I forget.
Here's a comment for you all to spam a whole bunch of tags on, because I know you want to.
Clicking every available button sure was satisfying.
I'll be back in 6 days just to spam tags, just you wait
Eliza Doolittle, is that you?
Oh shucks, I'm just a day too young. 😂
I don't know why, but there's just something pleasant about seeing all of those colors lit up :)
I added all the tags
I wanna try!
EDIT: oh wait mobile users
I don't think your account is old enough for that
You can tag on mobile if your account is old enough.
Well RIP your comment, but. It was very satisfying indeed :D
Do try not to abuse the comment tagging system, please.
It's hardly abuse when comment tags don't actually do anything!
All done!
What would be fun, and I freely admit quickly Tilding at work has contributed to me putting zero thought into possible negative ramifications of this, is if users had a limited amount of, I dunno, "hot damn!" tags to be applied to particularly notable posts, with a corresponding group that pulled in posts that had gotten (> x) amount of hot damns (or, I mean... y'know, placeholder terminology). Sort of a more organic "best of".
That'd be a fun way to prompt discoverability as the site grew larger than can be reasonably consumed in a sitting -- I don't really feel the need to tag something as high effort, since I'd rather upvote it and say thanks, but it'd be great to stumble upon awesome stuff from communities I'd never think to join and go "hot damn!".
We've talked about this as the 'exemplary upvote' mechanism for highlighting groovy submissions. I don't see why it couldn't also work out as a way of highlighting the very best of the comments, though I imagine the mechanisms and implementation and effects might be different. For example we'd want a lot more of these exemplary comment tokens around since there are more comments than submissions.
I'd really like a way to have 'facts verified' or something like that to help combat the fake news / uninformed opinion effects. I have no idea how to do that, though. :P
I like the idea, but the only way I see it being possible is if the reader tagging it is required to provide alternative sources, thus bolstering the OP's original sources, but that requires human intervention to check the sources. Or a
Reliably Sourcedtag, but that's easily abused without a human checking, unless there was a master whitelist of vetted "reliable" sources.Perhaps the model to
stealborrow here is scientific peer review? People can get a per-group fact-checker reputation high enough that they're able to review things? (with random requests made to review so you don't get to review things you want to signal boost?) Maybe this is only turned on in specific groups where factual accuracy matters??Actually whilst I'm theorizing wildly when I should be busy with a screw driver... Could some tildes be private until the moderation & meta-moderation is shaken out? So highly controversial & slow discussions of say economic policy would look more like a weekly/fortnightly journal than a sub-reddit?
>edit It could still be a constant stream, just everything delayed by a week whilst it goes through high-reputation user review before public release...
I definitely like this idea, and perhaps each user gets a limited number of these a week or whatever to avoid vote-gaming. I know that the idea of a 'super-upvote' being allocated to trusted users has been discussed in the past, this seems like a nice-organic way to start introducing the concept.
I like the idea of a positive tag, but I'm not a fan of the "super upvote" effect. That just seems like a good way to promote echo chambers. Perhaps it could feed into the trust system instead?
I'll also have to disagree with the disclaimer text, unless it's only shown to the commenter. If the point of hiding tags is to avoid bandwagonning, that would defeat the purpose. Letting the user know privately that people considered their comment insightful might be good, though! Something like "Your comment has been tagged by several people as insightful! Keep up the good work."
It's positive feedback loops vs negative feedback loops.
We all know where the negative ones eventually go.
That might be the flaw in this system - if tags are negative, people will use them as downvotes, it's just how we've all been trained to behave, and asking nicely isn't going to get people to snap out of that pattern of behavior. Hiding them will certainly help a bit, preventing the bandwagon at least.
If the tags are all positive, though, we're using them to reward good behavior and reinforce it instead. I don't know what a positive-tag moderation system looks like, as far as I know that's never even been attempted, possibly never even been discussed before (I've never seen it). I think I'd like to try out positive tags and see what happens. I have a hunch they'll be more reliably applied, people like to reward good comments more than they like to clean up bad ones. It's applause vs picking up litter.
Perhaps the negativity should be part of the report system instead of the tagging system. We could have some tags feed into the report mechanisms. Seems like the main advantage of this is that we can give people access to the positive and negative aspects of moderation independently of one another - and if we give them the positive stuff first, with access to the punishment aspects only coming much later, I think that might help get people into a better moderation mindset long-term.
I think you nailed it here, this is a great idea
I've already pointed out a couple of times in this thread that what Deimos is proposing here is a reporting system for comments, rather than a tagging system.
For starters, the tags won't even be visible, so they're not actually tags. Then, they'll lead to actions being performed - which is what a reporting system does.
So, I agree with you that these negative so-called "tags" are more like a reporting feature. We could then use actual tags to record positive feedback on comments.