Daily Tildes discussion - at what point should we stop auto-subscribing new users to all groups?
Currently, when someone registers on Tildes they're automatically subscribed to all of the existing groups (except ~test). I did this because while the site is this small, it seemed like the best way to try to get reasonable activity in a wide range of the groups, but I absolutely don't want to keep doing it for long.
I think it's very important that people should need to seek out groups that they're interested in, instead of being defaulted into them and needing to opt out. Here's a really old post I wrote on reddit about how being a default subscription made it impossible for /r/gaming to ever be a quality gaming subreddit, but it applies to all defaults.
So, how should we decide when the site's starting to get active enough that we can stop the auto-subscriptions? And once we do, what do you think is a good way to start people out so that they're able to find groups they're interested in? Maybe, as mentioned in another thread earlier today, we should have a "welcome / getting started" page that new users end up on that goes over some of the important settings and helps them look into subscribing to groups?
I think the answer to this depends on how you're going to approach groups. Are there going to be thousands of groups, or just a few?
If there are a few groups, then an on-boarding page is relatively simple; if there are thousands, then it's less simple.
The simple answer is you stop once you have an easy way for people to find groups they are interested in following. A new user should be greeted by some sort of group-finding mechanism so they can choose their own subscriptions. While there are so few groups a system like that is overkill, but once the topic hierarchy really starts to take off, it'll be necessary.
The way reddit does it isn't bad per se. It does require moderators to fill out a group description so that people can see at a glance what the group is about. We haven't got that right now either, or the mods to write them. It definitely needs a better discovery system than reddit's group searching.
At some point I think we're going to want a ~tildes.newgroups (something like /r/newreddits) and places like subredditoftheday and pimpmyreddit - there's a whole host of meta-reddit communities based on finding subs and announcing them. You might also consider everyone being subbed to ~tildes by default even after putting in a new system. There has to be some kind of sitewide communications channel so that you can reliably poll and inform the entire userbase at once. Reddit has never had anything like that and they've suffered from it. Whatever mechanisms we have for group creation will eventually have to tie into this stuff too.
LOL, I disagree vehemently there! :P
I had to spend 8+ hours the other day on a new account combing through subreddits to find/subscribe to all the local city, state/province/territory, country and regional subreddits. As well as find/sub to any quality source of potential news, articles, etc. (e.g. /r/engineering, /r/netsec, etc). All for the sake of using that account (with heavy RES filtering to remove images, self-text, videos, etc) to farm interesting content to ~.
Even with detailed related subreddit referrals in sidebars, user created multireddits and recommendation lists it was a fucking nightmare. Which was made further difficult by all the fracturing of communities (/r/canada vs /r/onguardforthee) and lack of naming conventions used on the site (/r/brasil for Brazil, /r/HunstvilleAlabama vs /r/Portland for cities, /r/washington vs /r/nova for regions, /r/wsu for Washington State University vs /r/uwaterloo for University of Waterloo, etc.).
Thankfully the hierarchy and admin control of group creation (so consistent naming conventions can be used) on ~ should take care of most of the issues since when I want to find all the groups on a particular topic here I simply need the ability to see a list of all sub-groups below the main one.
E.g. ~loc, ~loc.us, ~loc.us.alabama, ~loc.us.alabama.hunstville, etc.
(or ~geo, ~world, or whatever we wind up calling location based groups).
I have very little experience in reddit. I am also hopelessly gui addicted. So, the only observation I have to offer is that I find the deviantart categorizing and subgroupings much easier to follow than spelunking the reddit cave system.
I would prefer not to be auto subscribed to everything when the main categories are more than around 30. I usually start with about 5 areas, and branch out by links and recommendations after that.
I think that should stop when we have too many subgroups in the main categories. However, I think new users should still be subbed to the main categories, just not all their subgroups.
Then, people can go to the main category of their choice and subscribe to all the subgroups listed under that category that they wish to see on their front page.