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How would you feel about a PC building/tech deals group?
Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.
No one creates groups except for the admin, but if you started a megathread that got consistent interest it'd go a long way towards showing that there was enough activity to merit such a group.
Yep, and I think it's worth pointing out the reasoning for that, since adding more groups seems to be a recurring suggestion, and not having user created groups a recurring complaint:
Imzy allowed user created groups right from the start, so they ended up with thousands of largely empty, inactive groups since they didn't yet have the userbase to populate them. The whole site ended up looking like a ghost town as a result, and that's one of the reasons it failed. And also worth considering is that reddit didn't have user created subreddits for the first few years of the site. Which is why we don't have user created groups here yet either (and maybe never will).
New groups have been added here in the past though, but they're usually created reactively, rather than proactively. E.g. ~health.coronavirus (which was recently folded back into ~health) was created near the start of the pandemic to house all the topics related to that. So if people want a new group to be made, they should try submitting topics related to that subject, and if they become popular enough a new group might get made for them.
And also worth pointing out is the latest ~tildes.official post:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/167q/thoughts_on_making_tildes_groups_more_independent
I would be all up for a PC building group but completely against a tech deals group.
Tech deal groups are most often only localised to America. It also appears spammy and generally is not the high effort content tildes is aiming at.
I'm not sure if the nature of Tildes lends itself to this sort of "firehose" posting.
I was a member of BAPCS and did find it useful. However, I mostly chose to engage with that content by directly going to that community. If my front page were composed of a ton of BAPCS deals that would have been difficult to use.
If deals are posted under, e.g., [tech.deals], I can't filter the tag (lest I lose the ability to see it at all), but I really would only want to see that content when I actively searched it out.
You can actually pretty easily see all the tags you have added to your filter, and then click them to view everything submitted with those tags. Click 'Filtered topic tags' in the sidebar of your front or group pages to see them in the resulting dropdown (if you have any set).
Oh interesting, I didn't realize clicking them would perform the inverse filter.
It's not SUPER ergonomic from a UX standpoint, but that does resolve this particular concern, at least!
Yea there are definitely some improvements that could be made. I’d love the ability to filter out only sets of tags for instance, or tags only if they show up in certain groups.
I agree, and with Tildes' current structure I think a recurring megathread would be suitable for deals.
Eventually we might want automatic topic grouping, to allow worry-free posting of firehose topics, and to visually collapse those firehose topics into a megathread.
I don’t think that type of content is a good match for tildes. Tildes is about high quality text discussion. It isn’t just a news or content aggregator. I don’t see how sales and deals could be a good starting point for high quality discussion.
I think a sales community could go either way honestly.
If we are trying to build a closer knit community than what we have experienced on Reddit, why would it be a bad idea to turn to your community to sell things related to your interest rather than selling to people who are totally random.
On the other hand, there's the drama of what happens if someone fucks someone else over? How do we deal with that in a small group? It has the possibilty of causing some big rifts if people take sides.
I think it's doable and maybe worth a shot, but it's going to need some strict guidelines.
To me, on Reddit at least, I spent the most time in the GameDeals community, which I really do miss. I enjoyed popping into threads and posting my thoughts on a particular game that's on sale, whether or not it was worth my time and money, and asking other people for their recommendations as well. I'm not quite sure how that would work on Tildes, but there is definitely value in discussion about recommendations.
I assume posts about PC building would get some people talking, there are a decent amount of tech minded folks on here.
Deals... meh. Just my own opinion, but I enjoy the noncommercial nature of the conversations that happen here, so I would say I'm not in favor of deals as a top level topic.
It's nice that you don't want to flood a group with topics about tech deals or building a pc. I guess those topics would be tagged somehow - maybe [tech.deals].
People can filter out tags by going here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
I don't know if just starting to post the topics, making sure they're correctly tagged, and including a link to the tag-filter page, would be a good idea or not. (At the moment I think it's okay if it's good content.) I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions.