Non-anonymous "thank you" function
I really like how Tildes encourages meaningful discussions and discourages "useless" noise.
But it leads to occasionally awkward situations where for example I ask a clarification question or whatever, get a wonderful reply that answers everything I'd like, but leaves me in a situation where I have nothing meaningful left to add to the conversation, yet still wanting to personally thank the other person for their reply.
Obviously I place my vote on the reply, but it still feels like i sort of ghost the other person. I'd like them to know that I appreciate their reply.
My suggestion would be a kind of "Thank you" function or tag that would be available exclusively to replies to ones comments, signifying ones personal gratitude (man, that sounds pretentious, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it. I'll just blame the fact that English isn't my native language...), maybe coupled with an automatic vote.
The receiver of a "Thank you" could then get a small one-time notification in their inbox.
The comment in question could theoretically also display the "thank you" status to the author, maybe after the vote count at the beginning like this: "10 votes and a thank you from Landhund"
What do you think?
This is not meant to be sarcastic or snarky: there is already a function on Tildes that does this. Leave a comment, which says "Thank you!" You can add to it if you want; "Thank you, I'm going to try this!" or "Thank you, I did what you suggested and it worked!" But if you want to thank someone, then thank them. I feel like there are a lot of people who have recently come from Reddit who are looking at the culture here and getting really caught up in a few things. They seem to get stuck with these ideas:
None of these are true. Make jokes! That's why there is a joke label. It is not a way to report jokes so that jokes get removed - it's a way to identify something that doesn't necessarily need to bump a thread. Jokes are important - they help build bonds. I've made the same joke twice recently (1 and 2), and it's okay to have done so; humour is one of the ways that I show affection and bond with people.
Similarly, say thanks! It can add to a conversation, or it might be noise, but there is a noise label, and that's why it is there. Manners are a way to form positive bonds with people. I don't think we need to extract common manners into a button. I think that would actually be detrimental to how this site functions and feels; what if you forget to use the thank you button?
I think there is a much more important things to remember than the bullet points I wrote above, none of which are true. Here are the things that I would recommend thinking about and remembering when interacting on Tildes.
Every single username is attached to a real, living, breathing person. Try to remember that there is a human on the other end of the usernames that you interact with. If they share a kindness with you, it is courtesy to share a kindness back. This includes saying thank you for things; if someone gives you great advice, you are absolutely within your right to thank them in a comment; it can be a single word, "Thanks!" or it can be four paragraphs in which you explain how what was shared has helped you, but both are acceptable. A lengthier thank you might not merit a noise tag, but a short one might get labelled as noise and that is also okay, because the website has been created to address that.
If you leave a comment in good faith, then it is an acceptable comment to make. Not every comment or discussion on this site has to be of philosophical importance. Sometimes people discuss things deeply, and sometimes surprisingly deep things come from joke comments, but sometimes there are jokes, and sometimes we have small interactions that are public, but mostly for a couple of people, such as if someone pings someone else because they posted something that person would really like. Those are perfectly acceptable comments. They remember that there's a real person, really engaging with the site.
You don't have to be a scholar to share your opinion. I have seen several comments where people talk about how they elected not to participate in a topic because someone else wrote a lengthy and cogent comment, and they felt like their short opinion would be buried. But just because someone else wrote something, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't participate. At any point, if you feel like you have something to add to a conversation in a constructive way, you are free to do so. Someone else writing something lengthy doesn't mean that your pithier comment is not worthwhile, and someone will read it and likely appreciate it.
Agreed. But I would also add a small caveat. Don't make jokes as top-level comments, please. That's about the only unspoken "restriction" I think there is. Joke away in threads, as replies, when appropriate. But top-level comments should generally try to be more substantial than just a simple joke.
As a newbie who came over from reddit, I did get stuck on those points you outlined. It's helpful to be reminded that the primary rule is "don't be an asshole", and labels like "noise" / "joke" / "off-topic" don't necessarily mean that a comment is frowned upon, it just doesn't have to bump the topic to everyone.
I really appreciate you explaining all of this clearly. Thanks so much!
You are welcome.
And I mean both possible meetings of that sentence.
I haven't commented enough to ask something which generates the need for a thanks, but the way you went in-depth into related topics (in particular the last two paragraphs) made it relevant to me. So, thanks for sharing and for the thoughtfulness in covering related areas.
You are very welcome! I think a lot of people get overwhelmed at a new site, and as a community we have a lot of reddit detox to do, so anything to help people get over the small speedbumps and feel like part of the community is important.
Thank you for that. I do often feel like I don't have anything intelligent enough to say in response to articles. But I've been reminding myself it's okay? I just respond and quietly apologize internally.
It also does take a while to reframe the idea of labels in your head. When I first saw the labels, I immediately thought that these were bad. To have a label was bad. Except examplary that is.
It took me a while to get used to the idea that labels are just labels for sorting. It doesn't mean it's bad or discouraged.
I don't know why seeing labels automatically made me assume it's a bad thing. And I'm not the only one who thinks way obviously.
So what has primed us online for us to think that way?
Your point about labels is such a good one. I think for a lot of people it feels analogous to "report" on reddit, so we have been conditioned to think that labels are bad. Other than malice, none of them are bad! They're just classifications. We have the same issues when someone adds tags or updates titles, because we have been invested in other sites where we get ownership of those things in a way that we just don't have here.
It's easy for me to just point at reddit and say "that's why we think like this" but I think that it's more than that; there are just so many parts of internet culture where we forget about users being people. On top of that, so much of society is polarized these days that it can be difficult to remember that other people are people and treat them accordingly, nevermind usernames on a website.
To this, I now think when a user unlocks labels, a small text line saying:
should pop up below the labels interface the first 10 or so times you click on them perhaps hyperlinked to the philosophy docs on labels.
You might be interested in this recent discussion about the etiquette of "thank you" comments on Tildes. (The thread helped me understand that "thank you" comments aren't really discouraged, they're just marked as noise to indicate that they don't need to bump the thread to everyone.)
I'm also interested in this and added my suggestion to a related topic-- self-labeling comments. (I would like to be able to label my own "thank you" comments as "noise".)
Maybe labelling one's own reply as noise before posting it in order to prevent short-term side effects would be a nice feature to have. If I write a simple 'thank you' beneath a post I already know that reply will be mostly noise. Why wait till after the fact for someone else to label it?
Labelling one's own comments is already on the "to do" list.
cc: @lucky
Oh sweet, I hadn't realized. That's awesome!
Great! Soon I can mark all my posts as exemplary! XD
I think Joke and Offtopic would be another good thing to flag your own post as, when posting
It would be cool to be able to freely label content so that people can filter it out if they aren't interested in anything but discussions, but I actually kind of like the restriction to add a little more to conversation?
Like I'll think up jokes or quips, but having to participate in the discussion is the push I need to add further context or ask questions or meaningfully participate on top of my joke. It's a little extra incentive to engage further instead of spamming noise out of my reddit habit.
Thanks for linking the relevant topics.
I believe the main motion against self-labelling is the potential increase in the number of joke/noise/offtopic comments.
While not strictly bad - especially as they would hopefully be properly labelled - the status quo of awkwardly wondering if one should add noise, etc. seems to give people pause. Thinking a few times before commenting does seem to fit the site ethos.
I also have a vague recollection of an earlier proposal for directly labelling a comment with a :heart: or :like:, as seen on some forums.
Opposition to that was likely gamification and addictiveness, which also impacts only-visible-to-recipient proposals.
I expect this isn't an area Tildes will see development in any time soon, unless someone is particularly motivated to implement something for Deimos to trial.
Drat, I've just remembered a few additional things, so I'll break them out here:
A potential side effect could be increasing a bystander effect, where people are less inclined to label noise etc. appropriately as they may have been labeled by the author. This is getting into social engineering big time, so I don't want to put too much stock in it. But it seems plausible.
Also, a desirable outcome of awkwardly wondering about thanking someone is instances where someone tends to gives thanks when they have something else meaningful to contribute to a discussion. I realize that a simple thanks is sometimes useful mostly as a conclusion to a discussion, but encouraging someone to reach for a little more effort, like perhaps explaining why the comment was helpful, also serves the site well.
A compromise could be to encourage "Thank You" comments but automatically mark comments with fewer than 10 words as noise
Since websites are technical things, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve social problems through technical means. But the issue with introducing hard rules like this is that it invites people trying to game it out while also cutting people on the edge cases.
The more you keep interactions on the site focused on fuzzier ideas of "am I making good contributions and getting along with others" and less on technical ideas like "how many words make a good comment" or "what's the optimal tagging hierarchy" the better people will tend to behave because, like @aphoenix said, it's fundamentally about keeping people mindful of the fact that there's a real person on the other side of the line. This is why the cardinal rule is simply "Don't be an asshole." It's open to interpretation so it doesn't invite lawyering and meta-conversation about what the rules ought to be instead of just regular conversation. Lord knows we have enough meta as it is.
Idk, there's a reason we have a word for short but insightful bits of cultural wisdom ("proverbs") - they're plenty common. I'm sure length correlates with value to some small extent, but I don't think it can be used as a test to reliably filter noise.
Simply dropping proverbs is perhaps insufficient, regardless of length.
Though I can speak in under ten words.
I still like the idea. Maybe seven?
Sure, I don't disagree (that's a great quote, both on the surface and as self-commentary!). My point was simply that it doesn't always take much to contribute meaningfully to a conversation. "Proverbs" specifically was perhaps a poor choice example.
The word "noise" in a forum context has negative implications from my perspective. A new tag could be a nicer option for "thanks". Like "ack" (for the techies) or "acknowledgment" or even a "thanks" tag. Or something a bit more blunt like "nobump" for self tagging.
Hmm I hear you, "noise" sounds negative to me too. I agree with the suggestion to rename it to "nobump" or something like that to make its purpose clearer and more intuitive.
I like this suggestion, since I've often answered questions, or others responded to my questions. On Reddit, I would leave a comment. Here I would feel a bit more awkward since I ask myself: Is this comment worth bumping the topic to the top of the front page?
Something I’ve thought this site could benefit from for a long time is something like a “sage” feature that you find on a lot of image boards that lets you respond without bumping. Never found anyone discussing this here, so I’m wondering if others have thought about this too. But yes sometimes I will come back to the site after a few days or more and there are replies in my inbox that Id like to respond to but wind up deciding that the bulk of the conversation has run its course and it’s not worth bumping the thread again.
The Whisper/aside comment idea was basically that:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/141
I got worked on at one point but unfortunately never finished.
Would an aside comment essentially just be marking your own comment as noise before even posting it ?
Basically, yeah. But probably with a few changes. Like perhaps applying different sorting changes to the comment. And way back in the day there were also some ideas thrown around about potentially using whisper/aside to interact with bots, and force bots to respond with them too, to cut down on the noise those interactions create. I don’t think anything was entirely set in stone yet though. So if you have any other ideas for it, feel free to mention them in a comment on the issue.
Oh are there bots on Tildes ? I hadn’t seen any 👀
Treating the sorting for aside and noise differently could make sense.
Thanks for the answer ! I’ll have to get around to making a Gitlab account so I can contribute on that front.
No bots yet, AFAIK. But how to handle them when they inevitably start being created has been discussed before. One idea was to force them to register using bot specific accounts, so they could be more easily monitored, quality could be enforced, and users could easily recognize them/filter them out. Another was forcing them to use the whisper/aside comments for all interactions. Another was to “adopt” (make semi-official) the really useful ones and perhaps even integrate them into to site itself (like Deimos’ did with Automoderator on reddit). Etc.
Imo simple human interactions to close out conversations are valuable, and if they end up creating friction in the platform, that's a flaw in the platform that should be worked out, not the other way around.
I’m not talking about ending conversations, I’m talking about continuing them but feeling like it would be rude to clutter peoples front page so two people can continue discussing a topic that everyone else has moved on from.
Part of a good conversation, is having a grownup ending.
I don't think, "That's really interesting, Thanks!" is noise. It's the end to a conversation you (and hopefully the otherside) has enjoyed having.
I personally don't feel as though I'm being ghosted by anyone if they don't reply to my comment, perhaps due to being in the know (i.e. bumping topics), so my question would be do people feel as though their contributions aren't appreciated by others, or is it a problem solely perpetuated by those wanting to thank them even though nobody actually has a problem with not being replied to?
The other aspect is, if it's a recent topic with ongoing conversation such that it is being bumped by others within the thread anyway, then is it really a problem writing a once-off thanks amidst the rest to cap it off? I wouldn't consider it so. If it's an older post that you bump by asking a new question, and then this question is answered, I wouldn't consider saying thanks noise in this context either as new information was garnered.
In a hypothetical scenario in which this did need to be addressed, I would be in support of a lower-stakes label than Exemplary that is only visible to the author, the latter being important because the last thing I'd really want to see on Tildes is Reddit Gold and the myriad of other pointless awards that only add to the popularity contest feel of their respective comment sections.
What if we could self-label our own comments? That way you could thank someone, and immediately label it Noise (and if you forget, someone else still can).
I suppose only Offtopic, Joke, and Noise would make sense for self-labeling.
Labelling one's own comments is already on the "to do" list.
cc: @douchebag @CosmicDefect
Oh, wonderful. Thank you 👍
This would be my go-to solution. Just allow self labeling with a weight of 1.0 (rather than 0.5 on other people's) which would be a tidy and hopefully light change to the codebase.
I feel like that's the 20th time I see a post or a comment about "thank yous".
Guys, it's okay to say "Thank you! X will be very helpful!". Yes, we have rules and best practices, but Tildes is not Stack Overflow. Relax. Just... Talk. Like a person. No one's going to get you. It's fine! ;)
Made me chuckle. Their reputation really precedes them.
I first disliked the idea, but I now agree. I remember that I used those functions in forums very often.
It doesn't have to be a facebook level reaction, or some kind of "helpful|agree|disagree" system, but something along your idea would be nice though. I think it could end a conversation in a quick and friendly manner without adding noise and giving the feeling of ghosting.
I think its generally desirable to encourage this type of interaction because it makes the site and the exchanges more meaningful - after all, this isn't StackOverflow. But I see the point that there is an equal importance attribtued to "keeping the noise down". @Landhund 's suggestion might be worth keeping in mind for any future update.
I would also however also encourage us all to make use of private messages if someone has really contributed something valuable. A quick "thank you" via that channel works very well too.
A feature like the OP is suggesting is already on the "to do" list.
A feature like this is already on the "to do" list.