Should bylines be more prominent in the topic posts?
I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?
Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.
I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As someone who does not care who the authors are, I don't see the advantage of having a more prominent byline than already exists in the tags. I've found following specific authors around tends to create a type of cult of personality that makes some of those followers less willing to question what they read because, for whatever reason, a self fulfilling author-was-right/I-agreed-with-author-on-X-therefore-it-must-be-the-same-for-Y.
It's directly how hundreds of authors/personalities have achieved fame/following and how they continue to have such after long since moving to obviously questionable takes or flat out falsities.
For me it's the opposite. There are some authors who are very good at creating headlines that make me think this is going to be an interesting or thoughtful article but the articles themselves are always shoddy and I regret having read them. There are others who I like to follow because I think they're good, but in those cases I tend to already be following them on Twitter/Mastodon/RSS.
But for the most part, I just think people should get credit for their work over and above the publication that runs their stuff. In the current media environment where writers are having their careers aggressively "gigified" by media companies I think it's important to give them leverage.
This is where tag filters come in. I have about two dozen for things ranging from soccer to substack (where people with no expertise talk as if they are experts).
They get credit from the publication and the tag. If this was some massive site that scraped the article and posted the text here without having to click on it, I'd get the need for bringing attention to it. But we're small, there's no leverage gained by a small site having a slightly more prominent byline. I believe the focus should remain on the content, not the author.
I don't necessarily want to see them filtered out though. I can generally infer what the current zeitgeisty perspective on stuff is going to be from the headline, I just don't care to hear the argument under it.
Yeah I just don't think it looks as good in the tag. I view the authorship of the piece as a fundamentally distinct bit of information about it even if it's all just metadata on the backend. And I think most writers, editors, or thoughtful readers do.
Then increasing the prominence of the byline, by your own account, pushes users in the direction of reading headlines only and not the articles. Which is counter to a site that focuses on discussing the content itself.
But not discussing articles, because I won't click it at all. Attempting discussion without RTFA is the behavior to curtail, but this is a way of screening out whether it's worth having the discussion.
If you won't discuss it because you won't click on it at all then there's no use in the byline being more visible as you're effectively self-filtering based on author, which can be done for you via tag filters without changes to the site.
So you're conflating two separate things. I think they byline should be separate because it's symbolically important to give authors credit and socially important to give authors more credit than publications.
I value knowing who the authors are because for a bunch of operational reasons as well that are achieved by tags (though less elegantly than just putting it on the topic).
Currently the byline is scraped automatically and included along with the word count in the topic itself. But you have to click through to the topic to see it instead of it being available for view from the main page. This encourages people to click on things they may not have otherwise clicked on and directs them to prime for discussion (in a comment thread) on a topic before knowing if the article is of interest to them or not.
The byline is present in the tags and visible on the front page. A simple userscript can highlight this for you without changes to the site.
Authors are given credibility by the publications they are allowed to publish within and fired from those positions when they prove to not be credible. There's a reason there's no .blogspot addresses in the list of Pulitzer winners. You're just as likely to immediately dismiss an article by a specific author as you are if that article was posted on Newsmax.
At most I think your suggestion could be implemented in tag sorting to put author. at the front of the tags, as metadata isn't always present or accurate and credit to the author is already provided on multiple fronts.
This is a.) incorrect and b.) 'credibility' isn't the only standard for evaluating an author.
For a.) OpEd columns run the gamut of opinions and quality of analysis, but unless it's coming from the newspaper editorial desk not even they really seem to care about standing by the credibility of the authors anymore. Just that first fact, that they run the gamut, and also that you can't tell the news and opinion sections just from the favicon and website unless that is also tagged makes the author of each piece worth knowing about.
For b.) Credibility isn't really the standard when dealing with most culture writing since that's fundamentally opinion-based. I don't care about the credibility of your opinions on film so much as whether your views on them are ones I jive with.
A userscript can completely rewrite how the entire site is presented for me. This seems like an odd response to a suggestion for improving the UI. Like I said, the byline is both a culturally and socially important aspect of any work. It's why it's on every book cover and directly below or beside the title on everything.
I don't think this is really relevant. We already have the author tags, we are not discussing anonymous articles. A more prominent byline isn't going to create cults of personality on Tildes any moreso than they may exist already, that's just absurd.
I personally am fine with the way the author tags work now, although I can see the appeal: authorship is in many cases a better indicator of quality than publisher, which we already heavily support and is also susceptible to 'cult followings'. Maybe alphabetically sorting them would make them easier to use overall and have a side effect of mostly doing what @NaraVara wants.
Yeah but you have to click into the post for that. If you're just scrolling from the front page you don't see it.
The scrape is also not 100% accurate unfortunately.