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Absence of geographic or political groups
The absence of geographic or political groups is notable. Is this because of the early stages of development & growth? Is it a deliberate choice?
I'm as keen as anyone for this place to not become yet another den of intolerance. Does not having those groups help in avoiding such a descent or does it risk becoming a feel-good but ultimately uninformative echo chamber?
I'm not really sure how it will escape the filter bubble phenomenon unless it has mechanisms explicitly built in to counter that process. Even the trust system itself with a seed userbase that is so heavily biased against half of the american populace will inherently create an echo chamber if it isn't moderated externally somehow.
Companies like facebook have expressed an intention to combat the filter bubble phenomenon - but only for those groups/ideas facebook disagrees with, e.g. exposing people with wrong thoughts to more content that is what facebook wants people to think like. It's pretty slimy.
I've only been using it for a few minutes and it already feels like such a refreshing feeling. I feel like reddit jumped the shark so long ago but we have all just been looking for a life pod. Hopefully this platform can stick around and forge on to be my new go-to.
I'd like to have geographical groups eventually (and I think the hierarchy will work particularly well for them), but for now I think the site is just far too small to really support them.
As for political content, @huadpe wrote up a great post a while ago about how it's difficult to do well: https://tildes.net/~tildes/4v/thoughts_on_handling_political_content_on_tildes
Some kind of official starting point should be set for geographical groups I think. I can see people fighting about ~geo.asia.china.tibet or ~geo.asia.tibet, same with Hong Kong and probably and many others.
Given ~ is a Canadian company, it makes sense to use the Canadian Standard Classification of Countries and Areas of Interest (SCCAI) which reflects the Canadian government's official recognition statuses and is already organized in a hierarchy. It brooks a lot less room for debate when you rely on the already established standards, so long as you keep them up to date with that standard (the SCCAI is updated every few years).
In the contentious cases you mentioned, the SCCAI would dictate they be ~geo.asia.eastasia.hongkong (recognized as being a "Special Administrative Region of China" but distinct from China, same as Macao), ~geo.asia.eastasia.china.tibet (no longer recognized as a Country but instead a region in China) and, also worth mentioning, ~geo.asia.eastasia.taiwan (recognized as an Independent, Sovereign Nation).
Makes sense, thanks. I guess that in any case the deep structure shouldn't be a problem if there are shortcuts (~tibet). But do you know if these are going to show just as ~tibet (in the heading, for example) or they would actually redirect to ~geo.asia.eastasia.china.tibet and show that instead?
Well, also keep in mind that ~ doesn't necessarily have to abide by the exact SCCAI hierarchy structure for the continental regions. Some paring and rearranging can probably be done for practical purposes without causing any controversy. e.g. Most of Asia can probably safely be merged into ~geo.asia rather than further broken up into the four recognized regions, ~geo.middleeast can probably be split off on its own, and the same could be done for all the other continental regions as well.
And AFAIK the plan was, if namespace aliases were implemented, they would most likely redirect to the proper place in the hierarchy, e.g. ~tibet would simply forward to ~geo.asia.china.tibet since that would cause less confusion and help with group discoverability.
Ok, I see. I can foresee some complaints regarding ~geo.europe.spain.catalonia as well, for example. Like the flair drama in r/europe.
People can complain, sure... people will always complain, no matter what you decide... but, once again, the nice thing about relying on the Canadian government or internationally established standard is it absolves ~ of some of the responsibility and any unreasonable complaints that run counter to the standards are easy to dismiss/redirect.
E.g. "Well, you may feel Catalonia is independent of Spain but the Canadian government doesn't recognize it as such, and as a Canadian non-profit the SCCAI is the standard we rely on to determine the structure of the hierarchy. If/when they do recognize it as independent it will be reflected in the hierarchy."
Which shifts the debate from "why doesn't ~ recognize it as independent!?" to "why doesn't Canada recognize it as independent!?" ;)
Makes sense. But then that itself (maintaining compliance with said standards) requires some external form of administration. I suppose though that may be part of the value inherent in tildes. I'm very interested to see how it shakes out.
True, but thankfully Canadian government websites are well designed so maintaining the standard here is as simple as writing a cron job to occasionally check the "Date modified" element on the Stats Canada - Geographic classifications page to notify us when a new version of the standards are released. Stats Canada may even have a program you can sign up for to be notified of upcoming changes as well, which is something I should probably look in to eventually.
Then it's just a matter of quickly modifying the hierarchy database, shifting the ~geo group/subgroup positions around, to match the new standard.
Makes sense to me, better to rely on something external to avoid issues. Just for clarification, I'm not sure I would be opposed to other types of classification, just a heads up, seems important to consider this kind of stuff.
"~geo.middleeast can probably be split off on its own"
I've read that the label "Middle East" is controversial for some people, because it's a Eurocentric label: it's only east if you're looking from Europe, and it's only middle in comparison with the distances of other regions from Europe.
Be that as it may, it's still recognized as the official name for the region by the Canadian government so that's not up to ~ to decide. See, once again, aren't relying on standards nice? ;)
Of course! I totally agree.
Definitely. The OP of this post has been tallying responses by country, and the vast majority of ~ers are from the US, with Canada and the UK in 2nd and 3rd but still nowhere near the US. Of course, given this site has over 1000 users and that thread has 246 comments (and not all are top-level comments), it's suffering from nonresponse bias, but it's the best data we have at the moment, and I think that even if people knew about individual communities for their countries (if they existed), there still wouldn't be enough content or engagement.
Great write up, thanks.
The points about neutrally-worded questions asked in good faith and the strictly enforced civility rules are interesting. I wonder if the starting point would be discussion of political philosophy as opposed to policy, practice or partisanship.
This is by design at the moment. Political ~ would need clear guidelines and a quality moderation team to avoid the pitfalls we see on Reddit and other forums.
There was a recent discussion about the topic in this thread.
This is my biggest worry with the division system, and my view of the biggest potential. I assume there will eventually be a ~politics. This will presumably(?) be followed by ~politics.liberal, ~politics.conservative, ~politics.libertarian, etc. Here's where we get two possible outcomes: either these subs will bring great content up to ~politics to be properly discussed, or (more likely in my eyes) ~politics will go unused and its subgroups will become echo chambers.
I don't know how to fix this other than just not making those subgroups, but I'm not sure that's a good idea either, as it may lead to a lot of incivility in the main group, Do you think people would manage to stay at least somewhat sane in any of these scenarios? Which would be the most likely to work? I'm honestly not sure yet.
"This will presumably(?) be followed by ~politics.liberal"
This wouldn't work so well here in Australia, where the Liberal Party is actually our right-wing party (it was formed to stand for a liberal unconstrained free market). We even have to specify whether someone is a "large-L Liberal" or a "small-l liberal". I might suggest "progressive" as a tag rather than "liberal".
Yeah of course regional dialect would need to be considered, I'm a filthy American so I wouldn't know anything about foreign culture lol
Progressive and liberal are different things but I guess it could work, would there then be a ~politics.neoliberal? Progressives are further left than liberals, enough that there's a noticeable difference, but at the same time I would want as few political subgroups as possible since too many would lead to especially specific echo chambers.
Ah! Rather than creating groups around political orientations, why not create them around political issues? ~politics.welfare ~politics.healthcare ~politics.taxation ~politics.education and so on. That ensures that everyone mixes in together, and prevents the formation of echo chambers.
YES. This is exactly the sort of solution I was looking for. It ensures that people get to talk about the issues they care about most, while also ensuring that they get input from people of differing political orientations. I love this.
In fact I think I might just have to tag @Deimos on this one :D
Just FYI, mentions are still not working. Bu I guess he'll probably go through this thread, anyway.
Getting on the tag wagon. @Deimos, this is a fantastic idea!
This gets my vote. It's a better explanation of what I was saying earlier about discussion of political philosophy rather than partisanship.
Great idea! That would be an awesome way to make conversation in a more focused and constructive way. People would be less afraid to share their opinions too since it is a fragmented piece of their political views. I love it!
We have a winner - that is a very good idea. Count me in.
I ... literally only a few hours ago made this exact distinction in the recent political identity thread. Not even Australian.
Your "big L liberal that typically makes up most of the democratic party" is quite a bit different to our "large-L follower of the Liberal Party". Our large-L Liberals are right-wing, while your big-L Democrats are nominally left-wing.
Yep, but it's still the same structural distinction. "Big-L" means associated with The Party, while "small-l" is associated with the (same) classical ideology.
Big-Ls in America typically aren't as keen on the historical and pragmatic reasons for why they're a giant mostly meaningless umbrella that includes communists, socialists, anarchists, progressives, environmentalists, unionists, and all the other "good" political-ists. Most other countries did not have nearly as immense a pragmatic pull to get to 50%+1 coalitions to be politically relevant.
I my past online lurking experience, political topics eventually (if not already) cancer.
If might be fun during the start, but ruined in the long wrong.
Cancer is the right description, or perhaps viral infection. Russian bots actively search for any forum mentioning politics and sprout.
Abuse, such as the bot networks you describe, will really test the multi-dimensional nature of account trust/value described in the ~ design docs. Under the banner of 'user experience', I trust that this type of activity can be effectively minimized. Not eliminated though of course.