But I think Algernon makes a good point in referring to the 5 commonly distinguished academic disciplines, of wich the Humanities are 1, which is also a top-level group.

With ~socialscience added, the existing ~science would remain to combine these 3, which seems reasonable:

3 Natural Sciences

3.1 Biology
3.2 Chemistry
3.3 Earth science
3.4 Space sciences
3.5 Physics

4 Formal Sciences

4.1 Computer Science
4.2 Mathematics
4.3 Statistics

5 Applied Sciences

5.1 Business
5.2 Engineering and technology
5.3 Medicine and health

I'm going to strongly argue for a top-level group for the social sciences. The point of my request is to get the "soft" sciences out and visible, not buried under the "hard" sciences.

If you like that distinction which I didn't actually set up, then we could instead have three top-level groups:

~naturalscience
~socialscience
~formalscience

FYI: @Elronnd

Do you think it's possible each of the five disciplines merits a top level group?

Yes and no.

The point is moot, though: the formal sciences are already mostly represented by ~comp and ~tech, and the applied sciences are already partly represented by ~tech and ~health. It's a bit late now to be creating ~formalscience and ~appliedscience.

Now...

Just between you and me (you won't give away my trade secrets, will you?)...

The only reason I requested a ~humanities group last year is because I knew there was absolutely no way I was going to get groups for ~history and ~religion and ~linguistics and ~philosophy. ~humanities was my attempt to get something across the line, by bundling all these subjects together to build a stronger case for a group like this. And, I may or may not be doing the same thing with ~socialscience (instead of ~psychology, ~sociology, ~economics, and so on). But don't tell anyone!

~tech is not restricted to information technology. It includes aviation and electric vehicles. It also currently includes rocketry, which might be moving to a new ~space group. These non-IT posts tend to get drowned out by the IT posts by all the IT-interested people here, but ~tech was never intended to be just about IT.

Alternatively, you could request a top-level ~engineering group. I think that's justifiable. Or, at least, a ~tech.engineering sub-group.

Deimos is the only person who can:

• Remove comments.

• Remove topics.

• Replace links.

• Lock threads.

• Ban users.

That puts him in a whole different class to the rest of us who can only:

• Edit tags.

• Edit titles.

• Move topics.

At best, we're curators: we decide where posts go and how they're presented. We can not control what gets posted or who can post. When NaraVara talks about "needing some pretty heavy and active moderation by some qualified people to keep discussions productive", that sort of thing can be done only by Deimos. I, with my meagre curatorial powers, can not stop people posting low-quality content or writing stupid comments or insulting other Tildesians. My only powers to act in those situations is to use the 'Malice' label or send a message to Deimos - which is exactly the same powers that everyone else has.

And the existence of people having these curatorial powers is far from being a secret!

We could always be chan dorks and do games.vidya

I think people can get the context pretty quickly

I agree. r/trees and r/marijuanaenthusiasts on reddit do okay, after all. The name is good for first impressions and finding groups you aren't yet familiar with, but it isn't the only way people get to know what the group is about.

But just to play devil's pedant: There may be some people who see ~games.video and think it is for videos about games (which is definitely a thing).

Aesthetically I prefer ~games.videogames over ~games.video . I argue that ~games.videogames is not actually redundant because "video games" has become an open compound word. ~games.videogames is clearer than ~games.video in the same way that ~school.highschool would make more sense than ~school.high

~dogs.hot would be the extreme of nonsensical compound reversal. ~rooms.dining is on the other extreme. I put ~games.video somewhere in between.

(What in the hell.sam am I on about‽)

This also matches well with the hierarchical nature already established in other groups, and with a decades-long precedent in Usenet groups. If someone asks me where I live, I don't say "USA dot WA dot Seattle" and yet ~news.usa.wa.seattle seems completely intuitive to me.

To me, "physical" and "real life" games are things like hide-and-seek and hopscotch and skipping rope and tag/chasey/tiggy and marbles. They're games that you play with your physical body.

On the other hand, tabletop games are specifically games that you play on top of a table - such as Dungeons & Dragons, Yahtzee, Catan, Monopoly, Magic the Gathering, and poker. It's an existing category which people will recognise.

Remember: the aim here is not to come up with the cleverest or smartest names, but the names which will be easiest for general readers to understand and recognise.

If you landed on a new site and were looking for a place to read about and discuss boardgames, would "games.analogue" seem like the place you were looking for? Does this name reflect your real-world interest in board games? Do you really think of them as "analogue" games?

I think there's a pragmatic argument to be made to reclassifying ~lgbt as ~gender and ~sexuality or something to that effect, as it makes sense from the perspective of a taxonomy.

That said, I think there's a strong benefit to having the ~lgbt group as is. Its presence makes an implicit statement that people like me are welcome here. It's similar to when businesses put a small rainbow flag on their storefront. An affirmative declaration that I'm welcome isn't nearly as necessary as it used to be given that queer acceptance has increased so much so quickly, but it wasn't too long ago that it was a real concern for me (and no doubt others like me).

Even with how far acceptance has come, I can't deny that one of the factors that made me comfortable in joining Tildes in the first place was that it had an ~lgbt group. Though I don't post there often, its presence let me know that my presence would be valued rather than denigrated.

~lgbt covers both minority gender and minority sexuality issues. Renaming it ~gender would alienate the lgb part and opening it up to all gender specific issues would crowd (and possible drown out) the t part.

A month and a half ago ~lgbt held a vote for what the name of the group should be. They voted to keep the name ~lgbt

Having a ~gender group wouldn't be a bad thing, but taking ~lgbt away would be.

Maybe we could rename ~lgbt as ~gender,

We just went through the process of deciding what that group should be called, and the majority voted for ~lgbt. Let's not override the majority of those people.

Also, as a gay man, "gender" doesn't really relate to what I want to talk about. I don't have any gender-based issues.

EDIT: Fixed wrong link.

you're tacitly assuming that the rest of the site might be a less safe place to do so.

Would I be wrong though? I didn't mean "safer space" as literally unsafe to comment. But in some cases women might want to get women's views on certain issues without having the community's more generic view dominate the discussion as it would everywhere else. Just because of the demographics of the site it's going to be a male dominant view. It doesn't signal importance, it signals that there is space for viewpoints outside the norm.

Taking an example from myself as an Indian, I'm just never going to post a topic about the movie "Sholay" in ~movies. I wouldn't do it because a.) the ~movies community is less likely to care about it and b.) I don't actually care what people who don't know about classic Hindi cinema have to say about "Sholay." It's not even because I'd feel unsafe doing it, it's because having that conversation is inevitably going to be me having to give a remedial education about the film's relevance to the development of Hindi film and I just wanted to gush about how well the movie holds up rather than having to put on my educator hat.

In that case the use can be satisfied with ~movies.India, but for women's issues its different. Because they're not just general talk, there is a woman's spin on TONS of subject areas that run parallel to the typical, male view. This would be the issue with the miscarriage article going in ~health. It is possible, and even quite likely that women would want to raise that article as a chance to commiserate with other women about the implications of it and have this be in a space that's recognized as a zone that is for them to do that rather than having it be dictated by the male-dominated user base throughout the rest of the site. But I strongly believe that, as is, a women wouldn't bother to post that article to ~news because she just doesn't care what a bunch of dudes have to say about it. This lowers the salience of the site as a space for her. You could have the same article in multiple places even, since different groups are likely to have completely different types of conversations about it.

Yeah, oof—I guess what I failed to really get across that "Three Female Listeners" is a relevant joke for listeners of the podcast, but is absolutely an accepted name. But I definitely did say it's an active room in the discord, with far more than three users, so the take that it makes me think that women are very underrepresented on that discord isn't the conclusion that you should have drawn from my comment. (And no, I wasn't saying that ~girltalk should be named that.)

And, maybe that rule is heavy-handed—all I was trying to say is I understand the sentiment, and I don't think think the idea is absurd. I was merely pointing out a situation that works where the community embraces it. A hard rule like that is probably not right for Tildes. (And, if you missed the humor—because that seems to be what motivated your comment—the "men have everywhere else", the room name, and most of the way everything else is phrased is a tongue-in-cheek joke. People get it, and it works.)

In spite of that, I also think that ~GirlTalk wouldn't be for me to speak up on women's issues—I don't think I'd be able to contribute such a nuanced opinion. After all, the group was proposed as a communal space for women to discuss womanly things, and not a a blanket "let's post all the feminist topics here so everyone can speak up", and my comment was a supportive example that hey, this can work.

i don't think that's particularly true, because ~lgbt--our token "group of people specific" section currently--is one of the smallest sections on this website and tildes's lgbt community has, if anything, probably shrunk in recent months instead of increasing in size with the website. moreover, i'm pretty sure the very nature of tildes recruitment--taking most of its users from reddit and hacker news--does more to make this place white, male, and anglophone-dominated than any section existing or not existing ever will.

Where it says that? I used anglophone to refer to anglophone countries, not the language used here.

the docs pretty clearly say that tildes is in the immediate and foreseeable future term a majority english space and accordingly, the website itself recruits english (and ESL) speakers and does so from majority english and ESL-dominated websites. ultimately, that means it will predominantly--and inevitably--be a mostly anglophone country site, and you can't really separate the two just because you draw a distinction between anglophones as english speakers and the anglophone countries. one will pretty much inevitably beget the other by the nature of demography.

Apart from that, if we assume a sole ~news.usa would reinforce a Western White image, and we assume that such image is already prominent, that situation should not be an excuse for the acceptance of the former: even if having only a generic ~news would only be a small indicator of an ideal of more diversity of users and content, it's still worth displaying that.

see the above. tildes is probably always going to be a white, western majority place because of who it recruits and where it recruits from, and like i said before i kinda don't buy that having or not having a place impacts the perception or nature of this site more than who it actually recruits to be on it and from where. accordingly, i just don't see any of that as a reason to not have ~news.usa.

All the info on how is on Wikipedia if you're curious to find out. The way I see it, it's a good measure of what are some of the most important topics to cover, while being restrained to a top 10 so you don't go too broad. It's not the end all be all of anything.

Although now I look at it again, ~history doesn't exist. I uh… yeah, that should exist.

~humanities.history is absolutely my most desired sub-group at the moment.

It's definitely in my Top 5! It's been one of my goals since I first requested ~humanities a year ago.

We're getting deep into the meta-weeds, but: ~comp.os and ~tech.linux.

~comp is, as far as I understand it, the good parts of Hacker News crossed with the good ol' days of /r/programming when it was a default subreddit. So posts about Plan 9 would be on-topic there, as would lwn.net submissions about Linux internals, new NetBSD releases, and even Windows-ish topics if there were otherwise on-topic for ~comp (24-core CPU and I can’t type an email for example).

Meanwhile, ~tech.linux would be more along the lines of "Dell announces new line of laptops that come with Linux pre-installed" type topics. There's already demand for ~tech.apple and god help us maybe one day we'll have ~tech.windows to discuss all the latest Surface Pro models.

As far as posting "here's my riced Plan 9 desktop" screenshots...I don't think that would fit in either place, or really even anywhere on Tildes. An in-depth "how to install and customize Plan 9 for desktop use" guide certainly could be...but a single screenshot? Meh. Never say never, but a topic that's a link to a single image on Imgur or wherever should almost never be a good fit for Tildes (the main exception I can think of would be OC art in ~creative).

My only question is if we create ~games.digital and ~games.analog, what exactly goes in ~games? This does get a little weird. Ah well, we knew that when we were brainstorming this system. We just have to have a little faith that we'll manage it well going forward.

is that it more readily accommodates opinion and think pieces which it might be nice to distinguish from actual news.

Arguably, the "hot take of the day" format you get when you're full of opinion and think pieces might contribute to political arguments and general toxicity. I wonder if it might be better for the community overall and the quality of discussion to discourage over reliance on think-pieces as content since they so often tend to be clickbaity and designed to stoke outrage. They're kind of like image-macro memes, a few now and then are entertaining, but they're addictive and if you let them go unchecked they will overwhelm all other forms of engagement.

The fear with a "politics" group is that it's an inherently contentious topic area and if too many of the people are engaging with your site through those discussions, then they will become habituated to engaging with your site in ways that are contentious, argumentative, and oppositional by default. Those norms become entrenched and spread to the other parts of the site that the politics crew are used to. This is sort of what happened with reddit, where they basically invented /r/politics as a way to quarantine that sort of toxicity and it wound up overwhelming much of the rest of the site.

I, unfortunately, only have subjective experience to back this up. But I think if you can make sure political discussions happen in groups whose primary association with each other is apolitical, people tend to be more willing to hear each other out and it's less likely to get out of hand. If you're there to talk politics qua politics rather than politics qua caring about the environment (just as an example), you're more likely to get dug in an approach it as an all-or-nothing team sport.

Consequently, I would argue for keeping ~news a bit drier and letting the opinion pieces get scattered across multiple sub-groups so you don't have the same types of people arguing about everything in the same types of ways. So environmental policy stays in ~environment, meta-political stuff can be in a ~politicalscience subgroup, gender politics stuff can get worked out in a women's and men's subgroup, etc.

Some amount of team-sports political discussion is inevitable though, and can even be constructive as @alyaza's threads demonstrate. So it's a tough balance to strike. We may need to have a specific "election news" dedicated weekly thread that spins up whenever there is a US election on.

I hadn't considered opinion pieces. But I imagine 'politics' posts to mostly be news about politicians/politics (such as the 3 examples given by @Douglas.

Opinion pieces are a broader category than politics, for me. They can also be on how people should raise their cats, or why we should/should't use certain terminology in political discourse or adhere to certain habits, which might go under ~hobbies, ~news.politics, and ~life, respectively. Although now I write this, I see how the middle one doesn't quite work...

Exactly. I can imagine wanting that if the volume of posts warrants it.

It's ironic that you want computer programming highlighted separately from everything else because it's interdisciplinary, but your argument for merging ~humanities and ~science is that their content is interdisciplinary. One interdisciplinary subject gets pulled out and featured in its own individual top-level group, while dozens of other interdisciplinary subjects get bundled together and hidden under a mega-group.

That's not really the case: programming is just wider as a topic to talk about: it's both a craft, a hobby, a form of art and expression, and a science. It is simply too broad to split up, and it is quite easy to discuss on it in mostly isolation separating it from the actual links of it to other fields.

Academia OTOH is a mish mash of disciplines that form an interconnected network of areas of study, there are literary papers out there that cite quantum physics; linguistics is deeply interwoven with psychology, neurology, speech pathology, computer science, anatomy, physics, acoustics, history, literature, anthropology, ethnology and sociology; digital humanities connect all forms of study of arts and humanities to the craft and science of computer science; statistical analysis and AI emerge as a reseach tool in all of social sciences and humanities; sciences are deeply interrelated in ways I won't bother listing here: the whole thing is organically interlinked, whereas programming is has become the generic tool for everything, the metaphorical Hammer for all the metaphorical Nails. It is like food, really: it is directly related to economics, society, tradition, health, history, and whatnot, but yet it is the best to talk about it by itself.

I think we should aim for pragmatic benefits to us all and productivity instead of a subjective ideal of balance.

Also, I do think having ~research as a toplevel, active community signals way better a predilection for the entirety of academia and research than a frankly inactive ~humanities and mildly active ~science.

Well sure, if we wanted to then we could ditch ~anime, ~books, ~food, ~games, chunks of ~hobbies, ~movies, ~music, ~tv, and arguably more because they're creative works and can go under ~creative, but we recognize that as being suboptimal and give these things their own spaces. You might say that these are outliers not important enough to have their own space, and that's fine, I just don't agree. Most people probably agree with you. The reason they're important enough for me is just that: they're important to me.

Of course, I'm also of the opinion that the OC / self-promotion function of ~creative should become its whole purpose. I'd like if its other role as ~artmisc was solved by making groups like this. But that's a much bigger issue that isn't on the table right now.