21
votes
Label for appreciated course corrections
With Tildes having a distinctive approach to content and comments I found that I was missing an option.
Without calling out anyone someone posted a submission today that was simply an image collection. I did invite them to also post a bit more about as a comment starter, which they did.
I naturally gave their comment an upvote. But I found myself wanting to reward them a bit more for their recognition. I could go for exemplary as label, in fact I did. But I can't help but feel that I am missing a meta label that is positive but doesn't weigh as heavy.
How do other people look at this?
I think we need more labels, much more than is convenient, in fact. And also get rid of votes entirely, do everything through labels. When Tildes is going to start its journey on community-based moderation as we dream it to be, we're really going to need to be able to deduce people's intent from their actions. And the only way to get there is by having granular options available for people to indicate what their intent is.
Sure I can label a comment as "Noise" and when others agree the comment gets collapsed, but it doesn't get at the heart of why that comment is noise, it doesn't help anyone. Well it simply can't help anyone because there is no intention behind it. If I post a comment and I see later on it was labelled as noise and got collapsed, I am just left to guess it wasn't up to the community's standard. What a worthless feeling.
Voting as we have it now has the exact same problem. Yay something I posted got a bunch of votes, but why I don't know. It could be because it's the topic du jour, it could also just be luck. I think I'd rather know why something I posted was liked by the people that voted on it rather than be left guessing.
By having granular options something can be labelled with intention and can be used both by the system to weight the labeler/labelist (whatever the word is for "label applier") accordingly and by the person that posted the comment (or topic if labels ever get there). If a comment gets labelled "Missing the point" a bunch of times (just as an example), maybe let's gently inform them of that and point them in the right direction. Similarly we should reward people, even if it's just for vanity, by telling them "You posted something a lot of people found insightful" or "A fun read", or whatever. Number go up is pointless.
Tell, don't show is what I think we need. That's what makes the Exemplary label good and that should be taken further.
I like this idea, and I like the idea of sorting being label-based rather than vote-based too.
Want to take a look at the most
insightfulcomments in a topic? Sort by that. Perhaps you'd rather take a look atresonantorpersonalones instead? Go for it. Maybe you'd rather read something that'schallenging, orthought-provokingor maybechanged my mind. Or maybe you're in the mood for a little less seriousness and a little more lightness in your life, so you sort byfunnyorcleverorlighthearted.I like the idea of different labels having their own different "top" comments, and letting people customize their commenting experience by choosing what they prioritize. It helps get rid of the idea that there is a single top comment in the first place, and it also allows for different forms of expression to each get their own little spots in the sun.
Now that reddit is getting rid of the various awards, I stumbled on this comment and loved the idea that exemplary become split up into tags such as these to give me insight into why a user found the post exemplary. All those tags you came up here are wonderful and it would be really fun to have them in say different colors or something. I think the idea of sorting by labels only can work if voting is removed entirely (as the parent comment suggests) and labelling becomes the default "not a comment, but still an interaction" thing on the site.
Negative tags I think should remain hidden and have just "background" effects as they currently do for the same philosophical reason downvotes don't exist on the site.
This is pretty much what I am trying to figure out. Sometimes I don't feel that replying would contribute much to the discussion, at the same time an upvote or the current amount of labels feels like it covers what I am trying to convene. At the same time, I am also well aware that introducing too much granularity doesn't always make things clearer, certainly not for newer members.
I mostly agree with you. I don’t understand why Exemplary is the only label that comes with a message. I also don’t understand why others can’t see the message included with the exemplary label. I think I read some reasoning about it elsewhere but I can’t remember off the top of my head. But as a viewer I sometimes find myself wondering what did that person find exemplary about a comment
Oh no, I don't mean it that way. It should be visible only to the receiver. As I imagine them the labels should be informative for the people receiving them, not everyone else that wants to see it too.
Close to the beginning of Tildes we had labels that were visible to everyone and it was terrible, so terrible in fact it was quickly disabled and reworked to be invisible (back then they were called comment tags).
Well, if you’d like them to be invisible completely I can get behind that. I don’t love the middle ground we have right now where some labels are highly visible but the reason behind the label is hidden to the masses.
Continuing with how I imagine it, only Exemplary would have a message attached to it from the person applying the label (or maybe it would not need to exist at all). All the rest would be like Off-topic, Joke and Noise are now, where you only apply it and it affects the sorting. The gentle nudging and informing users would be done by the site automatically or moderators/curators/librarians (whatever the word will end up being for this role) wherever it can't be done automatically.
The way I think Exemplary should be interpreted right now is that you only need to know that someone found it a great comment, and the reason why isn't of importance. This ties in with replacing votes with positive labels and what kfwyre's comment mentions. If we had all these extra labels we wouldn't need to know the exact reason for anything, it would be baked into the system.
I do agree though that the place we're in right now is definitely not ideal.
Edit: I just had a thought that maybe we're misinterpreting each other a little bit because there are multiple different perspectives to view labels from. You have the perspective as the comment poster, as the person applying a label and as an outside observer/reader to that. I've mostly been focused on the first two perspectives and now see you were talking more about the third, my apologies if I missed the mark a bit there. :P In any case once we actually get to a point of trying stuff out like this and it's more than just talk it will all be sorted out.
Your last comment nails it, I’ve been approaching this from the perspective of a new user coming into discussions and wondering why that label is on some comments.
If the Exemplary message was visible to all, it would function as a kind of super visible comment that people would respond to.
I can see how that might lead to unintended consequences.
But it already is a super visible label, the only part that can’t be seen is the reason why this comment is being called out. Idk, to me that seems backwards.
I understand your concern, but I think that showing the text you submit for this label would make for a very different result because it would be functionally like a kind of comment with enhanced force or visibility.
It would be difficult to prevent people from using it as a way to "stick to the man", so to speak. Essentially, people would use this super comment to affect others, instead of showing appreciation for the comment receiving the label.
This is something that already occurs, and I believe would become even more common.
I see what you’re saying and in that case I’d honestly prefer if the label itself only showed for the author. It can affect the sorting for everyone else, but why do they need to see the label if they have no way of knowing why it was assigned ?
That makes sense. A lot of people argue to make even votes invisible. I really like being able to see that stuff because it makes the website feel lively and personal, but I understand the reasons to hide them.
This reminds me of Slashdot moderation, and I think it could work well even without going to an inconveniently large number of labels. Even if vote were switched to a dropdown of 3-5 possible positive labels, that would be a significant increase in granularity, enough that I think it’d be valuable without disrupting the flow of the site.
There could maybe be room for optionally adding a free form tag (like the topic tags) to the label itself for another layer with bounded-but-infinite granularity, and as long as it isn’t mandatory I think the flow still works, but I haven’t yet convinced myself it’d be worth the extra complexity.
That's fair. What I felt is missing is that as the one that brought attention to it, there was no proper way to acknowledge this. An upvote is just an upvote and exemplary, I feel, is reserved for other types of comments. Then again, maybe these sorts of interactions should stand on their own, as you suggest.
I think voting is fine. If a comment is negative and hurtful, label as malice. If it's not adding something, off-topic. If it's positive, a vote, if it's great, exemplary. I usually don't vote by default, only when I think a comment adds interesting nuance to a conversation, so I personally use the Vote in the way you're describing a potential sixth label.
I generally agree, I suppose I was looking for something in between a vote and exemplary. I honestly don't know if that is too meta/micro, which is why I made this discussion thread.
This sounds like how it works on Ravelry, the fiber arts site. They have a few different options and they are not mutually exclusive, you can click as many as you want (even those which seems mutually exclusive. They have agree, disagree, love, interesting, funny, and... Helpful perhaps? It's been a long time since I've been there.
It was a nice way to be able to indicate what you referred to - disagreeing but acknowledging value. For that I would click "disagree" and "interesting". And for the times where you feel especially conflicted, clicking agree and disagree could scratch that itch. While they do maintain the same ratio as not responding at all, it also indicated that the comment elicited a (set of) responses.
I think this is a good opportunity to create a meta label that's both useful and catchy. Something that can be along the lines of "insider" jargon among Tildes that isn't a direct carry-over from another internet community, while still being true to the nature of the site. Basically I'm advocating for a term that isn't used elsewhere or misappropriated and also something that might be cool (not that I'm the right person to decide that, haha!).
Tildes uses
Exemplaryto tag informative, sourced posts; that's very nice. Some subreddits definitely have some unwieldy terms they use. Valued Contributor, Quality Contributor. In the end these are all qualitative labels of the post or the user. The more qualitative and wordy the label, the more weighty and forced it feels.An example of the kind of term I'm suggesting:
Apt. It can be used to describe something that is "appropriate or suitable in the circumstances" or someone who is "especially skilled or qualified (to do something) and quick to learn" as well as "having or showing keen discernment, sound judgment, and farsightedness." Apt overlaps with the context ofExemplary, but is distinct. Something that can become it's own thing and that people should understand in its own context.All that said, I never liked Slashdot's tagging-categorization system. Maybe it's just an issue of implementation. We'll see how Tildes' tagging plays out.
In my time discussing things on the internet, I have often wished for a feature that would be the silent equivalent of "thanks for being reasonable." I think it could be useful for:
Most of this is probably noise to some people, but I enjoy internet pleasantries, it makes things feel more like normal human interaction. But it is best if this can be done efficiently, since seeing hundreds of people exchange little notes of acknowledgement/thanks takes up a lot of space and time, unlike offline interpersonal interactions. So far, I've enjoyed how the UI of Tildes seems to take this concept into account and would like to see what happens with it moving forward.
I agree. I think that fundamentally the best solution is to always give verbal thanks. We don't need to be making everything button-ified with "like," "upvote," etc. It commodifies social etiquette without providing anything useful to do with it. And a useless currency makes people doubt the relevance of it and what it symbolizes (in this case politeness). But in this case I think there's a certain amount of appreciation that can be recognized without explicitly saying "thanks for changing your tune" in situations where that might be awkward for one or more parties.
I like this! So many discussions on the internet turn out to be about "arguing for the sake of arguing" or people not actually wanting to exchange ideas. Having a label for something that is outright reasonable does sound very compelling to me. I am not quite sure if it would be used in the spirit what it says, but that is probably true for any sort of label.
Maybe more labels are required, I wouldn't know.
But in that situation, I would simply write something.
Maybe, but that would draw the discussion more into the meta sphere of things? I really felt like I wanted to explicitly acknowledge their effort to bring the post more into the content philosophy of Tildes without making more out of it as well.
It's hard to say in abstract, but I have noticed that some users get a little paralyzed by a desire to comply and support the site's culture. Which is laudable, but those are principles, not hard rules. If you feel that you need to show appreciation to someone, I'd say do it. Unless you're bumping an old, inactive topic, it's usually fine.