Feature idea: A 'Best Of Tildes' page that shows the newest Exemplary'd comments
With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.
So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.
I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.
What do you think?
"Exemplary" labels are useful, but they're misused a fair bit to agree with hot takes, so I think a "Best of Tildes" page would work better if it had a moderator, or it's going to end up like the "explore" page on Mastodon.
The moderator could probably use a query to find the exemplary labels, though.
I've personally wondered whether or not it's worth raising the threshhold needed for a comment to be publicly marked as Exemplary. In the past, when we were small, one label made sense. If we continue to grow, it might be worth waiting until two or three people mark the comment before it gets the badge and stripe -- that way the comment's Exemplary status is more a product of the community than of any one individual.
The threshold would need to be relative to the number of people engaging with a topic, which could be a little tricky to get right.
A niche interest with an exceptional post might still only be viewed by a dozen people. Additionally, in a very large thread any individual comment might only be read by a small fraction of the viewers, particularly ones later to the thread.
I think the solution should be a label that means "not exemplary". If a comment gets perhaps >1.5x "not exemplary" votes to its "exemplary" votes then the highlight goes away.
That kind of slips into "downvote" territory though doesn't it?
We have already slipped into downvote territory. Tags like Noise and Joke lower a comment’s position and collapse it by default.
Seems like this is sort of the solution behind a few issues, scaling with the viewers of any particular post/comment etc., but not sure how that's done without invasive tracking or possibly just more general things that aren't going to be completely accurate but might be better than nothing. Like page loads for any given topic might give some idea of how many viewers are on the comment section (but not really specific comments). So while there would certainly be exceptions that wouldn't work well, it might work more often than not.
This particular suggestion seems intended to be replicating more like what BestOf was on reddit.
It could also be time based. Once the time limit has passed were you can't vote anymore (although it appears I can still apply labels to old posts) then the exemplary stripe could show regardless.
I have even occasionally used the 'Exemplary' label solely to boost the visibility of a comment in a thread, because it has relevant information for people reading the thread.
We need a new label to capture that 'hot take' voting vibe. People are telling us there's something about that post that they want to use a time limited resource to express. Once we identify that and make it useful it will stop polluting the signal. I wonder if people are using Exemplaries just to leave the little anon messages to the OP - perhaps that doesn't need to be tied to the exemplary itself.
What? Is this like reddit silver? I don't see anything on the UI that lets me do this
It takes 7 days for a new user to get labeling powers.
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments
Thanks! Makes sense now
I don't know about this? I've sometimes used the "Exemplary" label to laud behavior I'd like to see more of, like questioning disinformation, showing empathy, or graciously backing down from a mistaken position. That doesn't necessarily mean the post's contents are especially well-informed or suitable for presentation outside of the original context.
I like the idea, at least while Exemplary is still somewhat rare.
The same idea crossed my mind recently.
From a reader perspective, it would be great to be able to easily find exemplary posts.
On the other hand, I'm worried it would be seen as a kind of high score system, similar to karma, and incentivise people to try and get on the list.
But then again - if they're getting on the list by making truly exemplary posts, then maybe it doesn't matter whether they're doing it for the sake of being on the list?
Great idea! Some topics don't sound all that interesting to me, but a well-written comment can provide the depth I missed to appreciate it.