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Daily Tildes discussion - allow in-line expanding of videos/etc.?
Whoops, forgot about posting a daily discussion until pretty late today, sorry.
Simple topic since it's late: what do you think about adding "expand inline" functionality for topics that point to sites that provide embeds (like YouTube)? There's already the ability to expand text topics, and it can certainly be useful for other types as well. It's a bit dangerous for things like images though, and if we do allow it we'll need to be careful about whether it starts tilting the site towards "quick" content.
Any opinions?
I understand expandos are convenient and that is why people want them but I personally think they exacerbate an already huge inherent problem on social media sites where votes dictate visibility, which needs to be addressed first before allowing them.
The bottom line is that text/articles simply can't compete with pictures/videos when it comes to speed of consumption since they require way more effort and time to process before making a judgement on whether to vote for them or not. Expandos make pics/vids even more convenient and quick to consume.
Without anything to level the playing field, a site that allows pics/vids (and has expandos) will naturally tend towards those becoming the prevalent form of submission. When a community is small this isn't so much of an issue but at scale becomes extremely problematic especially once the new queue begins moving so fast that even the few extra minutes it takes to consume text/articles means they struggle to rise unless people judge their title alone to merit a vote. This is why clickbait headlines become so prevalent on sites where images and videos have become the primary content since they are the only text/article based submissions that can compete with them in the new queue.
As for things that can level the playing field, there are many ways that have been tried to varying degrees of success: Outright banning them, banning direct links to them, community standards & policies with consistent enforcement that restrict the types of pics/vids that can be submitted, etc.
But one way that I was thinking about that I have yet to see anyone try is using metadata and weighting votes based on the length of submitted content. E.g. Something like this:
Pictures, 1 vote is always worth 1pt
Video that is 1min, 1 vote = 10pt
Video that is 10min, 1 vote = 100pts
Article that is 10min read, 1 vote = 200pts
Article that is 1hour read, 1 vote = 2000pts
Etc.
The point value can be tinkered with to find the right balance and even take into account user trust to add more points. It could also be adjusted on a per ~group basis depending on the needs there. The reason I like this system is it would allow you to put greater emphasis on text over purely visual/auditory content and on longer form content over short form. It will give content that requires longer to consume a leg up in the new queue, as it would take far less votes on them to bump them further up the rankings, which allows people the time necessary to actually consume them before making a judgment call on their vote. The same system could even be applied to votes on comments based on their length as well.
I have no idea how well this system would work in practice but I think it's an idea worth considering and experimenting with.
The big problem I see with this is that a lot of the time on reddit, people don't actually RTFA.
That one hour read could take over the front page based on three guys liking the title.
I was merely using those numbers as an example and would imagine the weighting to be much less extreme; Just enough to give longer reads a level playing field over short, easy to consume content. But I do see your point.
People not reading the article before they vote and comment is definitely something else that I wish there was a better way to address too but most methods I have seen to do that are severe impediments that discourage people from participating entirely. :/
Oh, I definitely get that they were just example numbers, but even so - at the current scale of operation, even if a 1 hour article gave double points, they could dominate the site, especially if someone who is trusted likes 1 hour long articles. If we have multipliers on multipliers, it could certainly skew things.
I don't think that this makes it unworkable; this is something that I would accept. I just thought it should be noted.
At this scale the system doesn't make sense, I agree. I was more thinking forward in time to:
However if you did implement it right now, it would probably be more like 1.2pt per vote for a 1 hour read instead of 2pt. But that's kind of the beauty of the idea... it can scale with activity to keep things balanced.
And TBH, even if longer articles did come to dominate a little bit, is that necesarrily a bad thing? I would rather long reads become the prevalent submission on ~ than memes.
I think it's important to recognize that it's impossible to make all types of content truly equal. Once we accept that having some biases in the system is unavoidable, we can change the goal from "how do we eliminate bias?" to "how do we make sure the biases are in favor of the types of content we want to encourage?"
Isn't that pretty much what this system does? Ideally it makes them equal, but it also simply encourages the longer form content by rewarding them with more points.
Oh, yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with the idea or anything. I just think that whenever discussions like this come up, a lot of people seem to get caught up in "but that's not fair" without recognizing that not treating different types of content differently isn't fair either.
Ah fair enough. And yeah I agree. Fair isn't always good when human nature is involved. e.g. Favoring immediate gratification > challenge/substance.
I think expandos are a good idea, yet I never end up using them. My only strong opinion is no default expandos and/or the choice to disable entirely in preferences. Basically, if I don't have a strong opinion on a specific feature (or find a feature polarizing), I lean towards the ability to choose. ~tildes has been advertised--to me at least--as a pretty nerdy place, and I'd love a massive, well-organized switchboard people can use to fully customize their experience. Inspired by RES but with better articulated information about what each switch does since RES isn't as obvious as it could be IMO.
I also like what /u/rkcv says here:
My only other potential hangup is, does implementing the new feature create a disproportionate burden on you in relation to a) how much people will use the feature and b) where it ranks among other possible features in terms of necessity/importance? It's not very high on my list at all, but others may disagree.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether expandos should exist or not. On the one hand, yes, they devalue text in favor of images and video. On the other hand, sometimes all I want to do is browse goofy images. For example, /r/aww only really makes sense in the context of images.
I think it would be more interesting to start without them, and see what happens. We already know what happens with them on a website.
Could expandos be used selectively per ~sub? Then you'd get the use of them in obvious candidates like ~gifs or ~videos but not have them in ~science or ~writing.
I like expandos for videos, I don't really think it will change much in user behavior, they make it less effort to look at a low-effort post, which matches nicely.
Maybe not for the topics, but for inline elements in text bodies, that way you don't have to disrupt the flow of reading comments/etc to see a referenced image for example.
It’s too convenient to say no to. But how about a vow to never auto-expand all as the default, ever, ever? They switched me to the reddit redesign again today and it was... unpleasant.
Along the same lines of thought that cfabbro was going, I think that reducing the amount of time to consume a piece of content can feel nice even as it has counterproductive effects on the community. Even as it is, people are more likely to vote based on the title of something rather than whether the content was quality (sorry, but I'm people too here).
A lot of the answer for this question depends on how important keeping users in-house is to keeping the flow between link sharing to link voting clear. The more you let us stay on site for all this, the more voting we're going to be doing (and the more voting of similar content that lets us stay in-house we're likely going to do).
So this is a question that has cascading impacts. I don't think images are wholly different from videos here, because videos can be super short as to effectively be images or gifs, but the distinction does impact some of the depth of the potential impact.
I like expandos, but only if they're not expanded by default (see Reddit Redesign). Media has a huge advantage over other content in that context.