47
votes
Suggestion: Make megathreads more prominent
So while megathreads are a thing, I think we can really benefit from making them more prominent. Because right now there are two topics about the Titan submersible on my front page (and two more if I go to the second page), multiple surveys about movies, and at least one new thread per day about the current reddit fiasco. It's getting a bit cluttered.
So my proposal: make megathreads more prominent.
- Give designated megathreads a colored border or some other simple decoration to make them grab the eye and stand out.
- Pin some megathreads so they show at the top of their respective tildes, especially if they relate to ongoing or developing events. I don't think this is necessary for all megathreads like recurring ones, but it will help cut down clutter. (Note: I did check, and this is indeed on Gitlab. Deimos left a comment three years ago that code was made, just hadn't been merged into Tildes yet due to not being needed at the time.)
- A little more advanced: for ongoing events, maybe have some way that multiple people can edit a post with updates on new developments or links. That way even if the original poster is offline when some big event happens, someone can update it or add new links.
- Related to above: have a pinned comment on such megathreads to help collect links and such. This would probably be the ideal editable comment rather than the original post.
- To help cut down on the survey threads that typically just ask for lists without much discourse (e.g. "favorite X movie"): Have recurring survey megathreads asking the most common such questions, possibly each week or every other week
- You could either cycle through different questions each time (particularly in movies where you can just go through the different genres), or just collate the most common questions
- Also, have a list somewhere of previous times a question has been asked, and then have a "cool down" period before a question can be asked again. Maybe a wiki-style list that people can edit and add links to previous threads?
Of these suggestions, I think the first two would be the most effective and also the simplest to implement. Adding some visual indicator for a megathread would be a simple CSS change, and apparently the code already exists for pinning threads. Just a couple thoughts!
I don't like megathreads, I didn't like them on reddit, and I don't like the idea of them being here.
Once a megathread gets too mega it becomes a chore to read new comments with new info and it gets to a point where it's just better to have a separate, new, thread.
The idea of updating things like titles as stories develop is already occurring here on Tildes as you can see in the topic log of this post.
Megathreads have always felt like a lazy option on reddit to make moderation less of a headache and I can't remember the last time I saw a megathread pinned on reddit for 3 days with hundreds of comments and didn't roll my eyes and scroll past it, regardless of the subject.
Survey threads aren't for everyone, you can block the ask.survey tag if it gets too much for you as an individual, but for me I prefer survey threads sometimes because that's where tildes users really show themselves as individuals and community is developed, taking the human element of that away by them being recurring has never felt right for me.
The two Titan posts you pointed out is a good example of a flaw in that, but at the same time, if we get too worried about posting etiquette then people, new people especially, will be afraid to post anything.
Reddit and Tildes have some architectural differences that, in my opinion, make megathreads a a good fit here.
On Reddit, new comments are heavily de-prioritized after a certain timeframe. On Tildes, this is not the case.
On Reddit, older posts are heavily de-prioritized after a certain timeframe. In Tildes, posts have longer lifetimes because the only real factor is the number and level of comments where readability starts to be affected.
On Reddit, everyone has a different front page and subreddits are fairly insular. Here, we all share the same front page and mostly it’s a single community.
In my opinion, megathreads help increase front page usability, particularly for noisy topics such as last week’s Reddit discussion.
Those are all fair points, I think that @agnesnutter said it better than me about what my main gripe with megathreads is
It becomes an issue of navigation for me, you can click the most recent comment link to jump to "up to the minute" updates, but that has not always been a foolproof way of navigating new comments, even here on tildes where it is much more convenient to see new comments than reddit.
Yea they might not be the best for the kind of breaking news items where you have updates A, B, and C and each one invalidates the previous update. But I’m not sure that having posts about A, B and C is any more useable than having comments A, B and C. And I would say for most megathreads, A, B and C are independent but related updates, so their sorting in the actual post doesn’t really matter.
This one may change as (if) we get more groups and subgroups. And in some ways I think it may be for the better. I'd feel less hesitatnt about flooding everyone with news from this month's (online) game fests if I knew I wasn't filling everyone's feed here.
I think I saw in the Tildes wiki or in a comment from @Deimos a proposal to attribute different sorting defaults to certain topics where the context would prioritize newer comments over older, more highly voted ones. Perhaps a feature like this could help address some of your criticism against megathreads?
I hate megathreads too, no better way of killing discussion on a current event than a megathread and while I understand their use to ease moderation they're a really poor way of getting around the unfortunate reality of needing to do more work.
I think a lot of this solves itself with two related features:
Right now, the problem with mega threads is that we have no way to enforce them, and reminding people just comes across as nagging. If they are enforceable, I think the culture of using them correctly comes organically.
One of the frustrations with megathreads is when new developments happen, there's no way to highlight it as a separate mini-discussion, and it feels buried in the main thread. There has to be a way to pull those out somehow, make it feel like a fresh thread within a thread. Will do some thinking around it.
Megathreads are often used to sweep things unde the rug. They end up becoming big quickly, and then discussion dies down as it is hard to find anything to discuss.
Sometimes there is just one big hot topic everyone wants to talk about, and that is totally normal and OK.
It would be good to have an ability to merge threads together, that way discussion about the same exact part of the topic can be kept in one thread.
This is how I feel about Ukraine news and politics -- they have been swept under the rug entirely and there's no discussion at all here. Obviously there are people here who see that as a feature rather than a bug -- I would suggest that a better solution would be actually making topics so those people can unsubscribe, rather than killing the discussion entirely for those of us who are still interested.
I think this is just new users having PTSD from Reddit megathreads moreso than anything else.
Assuming people are interested in a topic and click on the megathread, there is nothing preventing discussion vs. an actual post. If you look back through the history of megathreads on Tildes, they have a pretty good participation ratio relative to the activity on the site at the time.
The thing is, the megathread is buried somewhere off the front page -- the regular voting mechanism doesn't surface new individual events.
OK, maybe I've found the source of confusion. How are you sorting your front page?
The default 'activity' sorting or even 'all activity' should be considered the primary way to interact with the site. Any comment made in a megathread that's not deeply nested or in an offtopic/noise thread will bump a thread to the top of the front page.
This is also why having a ton of posts on a topic is somewhat bothersome, because if you have updates A, B, and C in a short enough time frame, any discussion still ongoing in A and B and C cause them to surface regularly.
I’m sorting by activity. The only mega thread related content on the front page for me is this post talking about how mega threads should be more prominent. Any article that gets posted to a mega thread basically goes to the graveyard as far as interaction goes.
I think you're extrapolating the last few weeks as a general rule and I don't know if that's quite fair. People are still figuring out how to use Tildes and why we do things in certain ways. Megathreads have a long history of being well utilized on Tildes. See any of the AI megathreads for example.
Now, I'm open to being wrong here. It's very possible my experiences using this site for the last five years have been informed by a level of activity that don't scale well. But I suspect that, given time, people will come to the same conclusions we did with regards to competing posts on similar topics and activity sort.
With regards to Ukraine specifically, I think it's a combination of people checking out from the war in general and that Tildes sits in this weird space that is interested in the war at a surface level, but doesn't quite have the userbase to discuss in detail.
One more thing to think about -- all of this is subject to change as Tildes evolves. Perhaps groups or tags get flashed out in a way that makes a front page more tailored rather than general and the concept of a megathread isn't needed as much.
Megathreads are a terrible instrument to circumvent an issue, without actually addressing the root cause. They result in a ton of comments in a single post, most of which go unnoticed. They don't encourage conversation, at all.
If people are posting too much of the same thing, the solution means looking at why that is and what can be done to either encourage people to not post duplicates and/or to give users the options of ignoring similar posts. If people are posting the same question over and over again, encourage people to search for past answers (if it's a question looking for a solution). If it's a popular news post, perhaps adding something like post-linking (to link posts relating to the same story, that could then enable additional functionality) or encouraging a stronger use of post tags.
And, users always have the ignore post option.
it technically does. The post is removed, the user is redirected to the megathread, and people who care can focus on the megathread.
I agree it is too heavy handed and arguably gatekeeping, but it is a solution to the "too many of the same post" issue. The equivalent of "let's go to Denny's for dinner". Minimum viable product.
Well that part can be identified:
There is an important update on an ongoing but similar story to another post and a comment isn't as visible as a post. But your goal is to reach as many new people as possible. Some may delineate a new post, some may not. But this perception is subjective. There are two conflicting types of users to consider:
I believe you're thinking of how they work on Reddit. See @streblo comment for the relevant differences.
Personally I don't think those differences really overcome the issue of megathreads, which is just the sheer number of comments. It's not quite the issue here that it is on Reddit, because there aren't nearly as many people here, but to me that's still the issue with them.
I see.
Maybe relevant info: most of our recurring megathreads are weekly, and when other megathreads get huge we usually start a new one.
EDIT: I wrote all this and sort of realized that I'm conflating two types of "megathreads" in my head here: The "contain a bunch of small news updates to one post", and "reoccurring threads to contain long term discussion to a stream of posts". My rant below was more about the latter. There may be some overlap with the former, but my suggestions won't fix most of the "news megathread" issues.
To be honest, I always thought reddit megathreads as a concept were clunky (since they go against the very nature of how reddit sorts content). I know what I'm asking for is much more lofty but I think my optimal megathread experience would be this
These don't really clash with OP's suggestions, and in fact can compliment the style. These are more just lofty long term dreams of mine to fix problems I've always had with super long term threads, which I absolutely welcome but also feel are dreadful to search through. The tree structure fixes a lot of what used to be wrong in old school forum megathreads, but there's still a few adjustments that I feel could make them really stand out sort itself out, and not feel intimidating to new users in participating in.
Oh, I should also note that these aren't necessarily a replacement for reoccuring threads. There are certainly some instances like with episodic media where you may was a harder divide in posts and links. You don't want to risk watching episode 1 of something and clicking right into episode 50 by default.
slight tangent/rant aside:
Yes, I think this is an interesting feature to experiment with, one Reddit couldn't really ever do. A wikipedia style "community sticky" where certain approved users can help keep information visible. I imagine this isn't trivial to integrate, but it's nice to hear it's implemented somewhere.
I'd also ask if this feature would let you "subscribe" to the comment. That way you can get updated when edits occur.
And on a similar train of thought:
Sticky's... I think it's an inevitable feature but I always hate how sites implement them. You don't always want to read through 5 old sticky's before getting to news. But you also want that visibility.
Maybe granularity would be a solution here. I liked that Reddit limited subs to 2 stickies, but also realized it's a huge limitation. Maybe there should be "hard stickies" that always stay on top and are limited, and "soft stickies" that can be easily accessible but are collapsible, or overall in a different part of the content feed.
I think the issues you’re seeing with multiple posts for the titan story is very different to the issue with similar ask topics. Breaking news is more understandable to have multiple posts - it organises the commentary into different timelines. If I’m looking for details on the most recent story, I don’t want to wade through the speculation about what the banging noises are and whether that indicates hope for rescue, for example. Having said that, it would be helpful to link them in the main post so that it’s easy to find the other discussions.
The similar ask topics do feel a bit repetitive to me too, but I suppose for someone very into the topic they might feel totally different and foster very different discussion.
My personal view is that the solution is to make liberal use of the ignore feature and move on
With the increased traffic, duplicate or similar topics seem to be becoming more of a problem, but it seems like more an uptick then something to worry about too much. It used to be the "new" page would barely budge. Now we're getting above 50 per day. This falls under "a nice problem to have, but still a bit of an annoyance."
It's not happening that often yet, but it will be pretty inevitable with more topics coming in. Doing searches before you post would help.
Some UI help for that would be welcome. Issue trackers try to discourage duplicates, but they don't do a particularly good job of it.
I have no idea what would be the best method to achieve that, but I totally agree with the premise here. Megathreads and recurring posts are awesome but are often buried, and every once in a while someone creates a post that does the same as a megathread but gets way more attention, leading to division and a duplication of effort.
I don't like megathreads (shouldn't they technically be megatopics?). It's clear it's where topics go to die, since many of them end up looking like RSS feeds. I think two simple features could replace them: more subgroups and ignoring tags. If there is a whole category that certain users want to ignore, that's what groups (and subgroups) are for. The urge to create a recurring megatopic should prompt the creation of a group. For multiple posts on the same or very similar topic, say reddit, the ability to ignore tags should resolve that for those not interested. For a ton of topics on the exact same story/event, merging them or locking the new ones ASAP and adding the alternate sources to the first topic might be the way to go. I feel like megatopics just hide the issues, where keeping pain points painful might help prompt change if there is a better solution than a megatopic.
That exists already. Your tag filters can be set here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
So my experience as a newcomer has been mixed. I have posted at least one article that belonged in a megathread because I didn't know the megathread existed. On the other hand, I took what I thought was a very interesting article, posted it in its appropriate megathread and got no comments or votes, while other less interesting to me articles were posted as separate posts and received lots of engagement from the community.
Specifically for breaking news, if you are going to post it in a megathread, you should change the title of the megathread to reflect the new situation. But generally, do new posts in a megathread bump them to the top at all? How do people know when there are important develpments to a megathread?
My understanding is that if I want a separate group for a topic of interest, I should be posting more items that belong in that category. But I don't want to annoy the group. It's a conundrum.