12
votes
Sense of Humor
Having a sense of humor can be very positive for a discussion, but how do we go about that without discussions degrading into reddit-esque meme chains?
EDIT: Will users have to tag every single comment in a chain as a joke? Will all comments in a chain be hidden if the first one has a tag and I filter based in it?
My problem with Reddit is that sometimes you have a really good conversation with a interesting new point, and then someone just makes a one-line joke — which is funny — that then gets upvoted, gets up to the first position, and all meaningful discussion afterwards gets drowned in more funny business.
I like the idea of a joke tag, with the ability for the original poster to disallow them.
But humor is not black and white, rather a spectrum, whereas a joke tag is black and white.
And not all jokes are funny to everyone, especially when they rely on too much field-specific knowledge or go into controversial areas (politics, race, religion, etc.).
Or even become meta...
I like the idea of having the Joke tag reduce the overall "weight" of votes on a comment. So a joke could still get voted and appreciated but more in-depth replies would end up higher on the conversation tree.
The joke tag in theory is great, but look at Steam. People are always tagging serious reviews as a Joke review which I feel like is detrimental. I know one person already got banned here for misusing and abusing tags and that's great for a small community but will it be able to be controlled once Tildes grows?
Moderation could perhaps play a part in this, as well as a limit on tagging based on the kinds of behaviors we start seeing. Other then that I think it's essential that the intake of Tildes users stays steady so newcomers acclimatize to the usage of tags rather then alter it.
Good point.
I wonder if my main problem on Reddit is that a brief, derailing joke gets more upvotes than a lengthy, thoughtful reply. Maybe one could set a "funny" flair, and intersperse serious discussion threads with those "funny" remarks?
While I'm at it, a certain weight should be given to posts of a minimum length. Yes, one sentence replies can be helpful, but in a "bang for buck" (read: "karma per keystroke"), short replies are overvalued at reddit.
I think the Joke tag will eliminate this issue. I don't think the idea is necessarily to completely eliminate stuff like the meme chains, but wih the tagging system, you'll be able to filter out all the fluff if you wish.
But sometimes the joke contributes to the conversation. Filtering out joke wouldn't always work too well.
especially when people replies with half joke half meme and half useful information.
Precisely.
Well what if there was a third setting? Show all joke tags, hide all joke tags, or maybe give them some transparency so they aren't as prominent as serious replies?
I suppose you still have the issue of deciding what's a joke vs. what's a joke with useful information vs. useful information with a small pun it it though...
It is a middle ground so it may work, but I wish there a more accurate middle ground, one that wouldn't discriminate on a comment just because it was also funny.
I feel like a joke that didn't contribute would be listed as noise, anyway. so you could probably just filter noise to leave the jokes that contribute.
This could actually work, but only if users actually tag this way.
I believe that we should disallow most image format memes/jokes in comments, as those seem like they have a unique ability to derail conversation.
Outside of that, I think that, depending on the norms that we here establish, the problem of meme/joke chains will mostly disappear. That certainly seems to be the way that things are going so far, as, even without a joke tag or anything like that, most of the jokes I’ve seen in comments have been tasteful and at least somewhat contributory.
We are still a somewhat small community which I think contributes to low joke/meme level, and I'm sure there's also some that are nervous about making even tasteful jokes.
I'm hoping we could avoid Menes getting out of hand as we grow, without users having to feel nervous about a little humor.
The head honchos have made it quite clear that they don't want any humor on this site, including not allowing any kind of humor group. It's not my preference to have it all serious all the time, but that's how the people who run this site want things. :\
That's because you can go to pretty much any other site online to get that type of content, but there's very few places to go for decent discussion. The lack of memes, jokes, images, fluff, etc is one of the things I enjoy most about Tildes so far.
That was somewhat my impression, hence the nervousness part.
Wait, when did they say that? I must have missed something.