Ask and ask.survey tags
I thought I could get away from "what [general topic or icebreaker that 99.9% of people have an opinion on]?" questions by filtering out ask.survey, but that seems not to be the case. There are still quite a few that are being considered just "Ask" questions, and not "surveys". Are these not being categorized very strictly, or is my notion of an ask.survey question mismatching that of the moderators of Tildes? Or is the ask/ask.survey distinction up to the poster, and not moderators?
I come to Tildes for articles on specific subjects, not ocean-wide-open questions that generate maximum participation froth. I might have to start filtering out ask as well (as ask.survey), but I'd rather not have to do that. If people ask "what [specific problem or specific topic]" questions, I'd be interested to read them.
All tags are entirely subjective. Posters can apply tags to their topics, and tag-editors can change those tags, and other tag-editors can change those tags again, and so on, until the process finally stops... if it ever does (someone could find a 2-year-old topic and decide that the tags applied back then aren't consistent with how tags are used today, so change them).
Some of those questions could be considered discussion-starters or ice-breakers, rather than an actual attempt to survey the opinions of Tilders. So, some tag-editors might apply an
ask.discussiontag to those topics rather than anask.surveytag. And, in all honesty... neither of those tags is actually wrong or right for those questions. People are asking Tilders for their opinions, which could be considered a survey, but they're asking for those opinions as a way of getting to know each other, to find like-minded souls, and to generally start discussions. As I said, it's subjective.Maybe if you gave us some examples of topics that you believe have been wrongly tagged, we could have a long and involved discussion about our various opinions, and probably not come to any satisfactory conclusion. Because there's no central authority on tags, and it is subjective, and even if we did come up with a definition for each tag, there'll still be borderline cases, and every topic will be seen by a different subset of tag-editors who will have their own subjective interpretations of any definitions we come up with. :)
Here's stuff I've
Ignored recently:Here are
Asks which I wouldn't Ignore:So, I'm wondering how I can flip levers and turn dials in my settings here so that I see little of the first type of Asks, and most of the second type of Asks.
I was being a tad facetious with that request. I apologise if that wasn't clear by me saying "we could have a long and involved discussion about our various opinions, and probably not come to any satisfactory conclusion" and appending a smile emoticon to the end of that paragraph.
In my opinion, we're probably not going to be able to come up with any consistent rules or guidelines about what "ask" tags to apply to what question topics - particularly not rules that will align closely with your personal subjective taste about what topics you want to see and what topics you don't want to see.
Also, to be totally blunt, I'm not going to go searching across Tildes for all those 27 topics, to see what groups they were posted in, and what tags were applied to them. I don't have the time or sufficient interest to track them all down to answer your question. It might be easier if you provided us the links, rather than making us search all across Tildes like a scavenger hunt. (But even then, I don't guarantee that we can come up with the hard & fast rules that you seem to want for these open-ended discussions.)
However, a few of them are in the ~movies group, which makes it easy to cast my eye over those examples, and I see a few
ask.discussiontags among the topics you don't like. So, I filtered for this tag, and it seems to include many of the topics you don't like - but it also includes some of the topics you do like. There doesn't seem to be a fixed line between the questions you like and the questions you don't like.And this is why the 'Ignore' feature exists. For people to customise their own personal views of Tildes.
Anyway, I'm going to leave this now. Maybe some more dedicated people than me can help you out.
No no, understood (even yesterday). Thanks for your time.
I say we add ask.pistos tag to topics we think you'd like! :)
While this isn't true for everything on your lists, the primary differentiator for either list seems to be mostly, "do you like this topic". There is no tag that is going to catch personal preference.
I realize that you might feel like there is a qualitative difference that makes things on the list you like better than the things in the list that you don't, but as a person who is not you, I honestly think that difference is mostly preference. I'm not saying that to put you down at all, but I think the reality is that you'll see some things you don't want to see and can just hit ignore. The only other option would be wholesale unsubscribing from a specific group.
It may seem that way on the surface, but I think it's more like I want to differentiate between
ask.generalandask.specific. Since I have no power do this categorization (other than contributing a PR), I will probably just move on with my life.No PR is necessary for that - you can just ask our resident tag experts if that's a tag that they might want to start using; I'll ping a couple in to consider: @mycketforvirrad, @cfabbro.
I think there's enough of a distinction between specific and general ask requests that I think that this is worth consideration.
Edit to add: I would consider that it's maybe not necessarily straight forward to differentiate between specific and general, though. For example, some that you highlighted as liking were:
But these all seem very general to me.
Similarly, there are some that you ignored that seem fairly specific, such as why someone would choose a username (although one might argue that "specific" is just not the right term here; "personal" might be better).
Overall, while I think your summation of
ask.generalvsask.specificis good, I think the distinction is still rather a manner of personal taste.I get your perspective. Perhaps to help clarify the dividing line (in my head), here are some contrasting examples of general questions which would be counterparts to the specific questions you quoted:
I personally don't see why distinguishing between those particular styles of users asking questions adds much value, or is worth doing, especially since the distinction feels so minor and somewhat subjective.
And someone asking "Thinking of creating a local media center for my home. Any ideas/collaborators?" vs "What are the best home theatre systems?" is probably going to result in very similar types of comments anyways. So what is the point in distinguishing between the two with a tag?
So, like @streblo mentioned doing below, I think rather than getting even more specific with the ask tags, so people can filter out very specific kinds they dislike seeing, those people should just filter ask out entirely, and then visit ?tag=ask occasionally to check if they missed anything they might want to read/participate in. Or, if they don't want to do that for fear of missing something while the discussion is still fresh, just use the ignore feature on all the ones they don't want to see anymore.
Or alternatively, if you (or any others here) feel very strongly that those specific tags would be truly worthwhile to include, you could always ask @Deimos for tagging privileges, and curate those tags yourself for the benefit of others.
It's easy to ask us to do all these things for you, but I'll be totally honest, I am already feeling stretched thin when it comes to tagging due to the volume of new submissions, which we typically have to read/watch (or at least skim), and often google answers for (e.g. sports team locations, proper terminology, etc), in order to tag everything properly. And I'm sure @mycketforvirrad is feeling similar since he does far more tagging than me. So unless someone has a really really compelling argument for why we should start including another new tag on every topic of a particular type, I am unlikely to support it purely because of that.
p.s. Sorry if this came across as overly harsh, @Pistos. I didn't mean to totally shit all over your idea/suggestion. I am open to having my opinion changed, and can't speak for mycketforvirrad either. However, we really could use help if people want us to start adding even more tags. Every topic used to have quite a few tags on them, but that has dropped down to only a handful per topic now ever since the pace of posting has increased, and we're struggling to keep up with tagging as is.
Absolutely; I get it. I wasn't so much asking anyone to do anything to give me special treatment. I was more asking how I could move sliders and twist knobs on my end to get more of the end results that I wanted, because my previous attempt (filtering out ask.survey) wasn't working.
Ah, fair enough. Short of adding a new tag, I don't think there is any way to filter for the specific types of ask questions that you're looking for. At least not yet. But if/when advanced topic filtering gets added it might be possible though. So if you have any ideas for that feature, feel free to share them here, or on the related Tildes Gitlab issues:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=opened&search=filter&first_page_size=20
p.s. And worth noting is that there is also a draft merge request exploring the idea of advanced filters too:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/merge_requests/149
Well, I think one possible vector of attack is to come up with a score for "traffic rate" of a post, then expose it in the DOM (or even in the visible text, if people would actually be interested in that). Then grade the traffic rates into, say, 3 or 4 levels, and add a CSS class for the levels. Then people can CSS away the levels they're not interested in.
"Traffic rate" could be as simple as comments per unit time, possibly scaled by post age.
To be clear, I'm not demanding anyone go and code that up for me/us. Just thinking aloud. If you pointed me at relevant areas of the codebase, I might (might) give it a shot.
Even so, want me to create a feature request on Gitlab for the idea?
Heh, you're asking the wrong person for that. I am a very amateur programmer, and not nearly familiar enough with Tildes codebase to do that. Deimos or Bauke are probably the best people to ask for that.
Yeah. I've been noticing that, too. The workload has increased. And, until you mentioned it explicitly, I hadn't realised that I do all those things! Yes, I'm skimming articles, watching videos, searching for unknown terminology, just for the sake of adding a couple of tags to a topic. But I've just been doing it without thinking about it.
I don't know how mycketforvirrad does it. (On a side note: I am becoming aware that mycket and I have different ideas about some particular tags.)
Given the astronomical amount of work he has done on tagging over the years, I usually acquiesce to his methodology and decisions. But in a few instances where I have been confused about the reasoning behind something, or disagree with a decision, I usually just PM him. So you could do the same. He's a pretty reasonable fellow.
I know. But, you know me... I'm not a pretty reasonable fellow... ;) ... and I don't want to start something.
LOL, fair enough, then probably better to just follow his lead. ;)
I thought my ears were burning...
I appreciate the perspective that you're sharing. I'm only going to pick one that felt relevant to me, but maybe give an alternate point of view. There's one that you specifically listed as being specific that I avoided because it seemed way too general:
While "lifting discussion" is more specific than "sports discussion", it is still incredibly broad as a topic. Are you looking for power lifting? Olympic lifting? Bodybuilding? Just repeatedly lifting things to get healthier? Maximizing gains? Looking good or feeling good? Competing / not competing? Do you want to do it at home, or at a gym? Do you want to talk about equipment or exercises? Do you want to know about specific muscle groups? Do you work out with a friend or alone? Do you want a program to follow, or do you already have a program and you want to refine it? "Lifting discussion" to me is incredibly broad, and could have information that is incredibly relevant or incredible irrelevant to me.
Now I am definitely not saying that my perspective is better or more important than your perspective, or anything like that; all I am trying to show is that "specific" vs. "general" is also really subjective, and I think that you are looking at things through a personal lens, and it's not quite as cut and dried as you might think.
No, I get that. Understood, especially with this particular example. A secondary differentiator would be just the amount of traffic generated.
It sounds like you should probably unsubscribe from ~talk and also filter the
asktag whole.On second thought... maybe you're filtering the wrong thing. What if you unsubscribed from ~talk, where most of those discussion/survey opinion topics are posted? Would that solve your problem?
I don't think so, because some of them are domain specific. That does get rid of a lot of them though.
@Pistos: Personally, I had to filter out the entire ask tag. Which does unfortunately remove some useful content, so I do check it from time to time.