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Posting links to articles without contributing to a conversation about it?
I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel like there is a lot of people posting news articles and then radio silence and it’s been rubbing me the wrong way. It feels like someone throwing a newspaper through my window and not owning up to it.
Again maybe it’s just me but I feel like you should have to contribute a bit about why you decided to share the link at least. Get the ball rolling on a conversation.
Sharing information and staying informed is important but a more human touch would go a long way to making this site feel less like bots talking to other bots.
All opinions welcome of course.
I believe that Tildes posts do not always need to become topics for discussion. It's worthwhile to post high-quality links (research papers, blog essays, long-form articles from Substack or magazines, etc.) which exist only to inform, even if only a small fraction of Tildes' users find them relevant.
I routinely stumble on things that I think are interesting, and occasionally post them, with a short blurb or quote snippet regarding what I found to be of interest.
I don't always have the time or energy to engage in the sometimes tendentious, pedantic, or passively hostile "just asking questions" polylogue that follows. There are areas where I have expertise, yet turning everything into an "AMA" can be very draining.
We're all participating as best we're able. Creating the expectation that you must participate in the discussion in order to submit any topic caters only to the most enthusiastically online users. It excludes those who have offline commitments that could bring more diverse experience to future discussions.
I think not doing this is what's rubbing op, and people like myself, the wrong way. There's some "headline + link" posting that feels very low effort? You don't need to have an argument, but at least throw a quick quote from the article to give an idea of what's going on? Helps when people can't always access the underlying site and gives context as to why you thought it was worth posting.
In short it should never hurt and it's pretty trivial to do, so it'd be nice to see at least this as the minimum?
On the contrary! From personal experience, it's not trivial to select a useful quote and if done poorly it can give the wrong impression of the article. I've had a few instance with my submissions where the quotes I chose ended up confuse more (because I chose poorly and sometimes there is just no good quote) or drove the conversation into unintended tangents (because the quote was interpreted out of context).
Nowadays I avoid doing quotes unless I think it's meaningful out of context. If my submissions get no comment, so be it. Beats having to spend energy correcting people who didn't read the article.
I agree, though I think it would be nice if there were conversations given the sorting algorithm is by activity by default. It’s easy for things to get lost.
Does this happen often on Tildes?
Often? Maybe not but it does happen.
It's actually a little bit more insidious here than in other communities because there is an assumption of good faith and arguments are usually fairly well-reasoned or at least verbose; it's not as immediately obvious.
I loathed 'discussion' posts on Blackboard because I would read people's posts and try to create a crafted response that contained an open question regarding it and more often than not it was crickets after that.
And the portion was just graded on if you did it or not, so it's not like it mattered any.
I hated those too. Especially because it was never something complex that requires expressing an opinion. More often than not it was just glorified essay questions. It was especially baffling when they required you to write responses to other people, so it was full of people writing "that's true" or "I agree" with as many words as possible.
I'm teaching some online college courses this upcoming Fall semester and this is my experience too from the other side. I'm honestly going to take a day and rework those entirely in my course.
I once got extremely bored with one of those and spent one of my posts carefully cherry-picking data to prove climate change wasn't real. I thought it would be obvious that this was intentional snarkiness and astonishment that someone would choose "is climate change real?" as a classroom debate topic.
The most important thing I learned in that course was how easy it is to convince people of things when you don't care about honesty.
My counter-argument to this is that some people just aren't as comfortable articulating their thoughts online. I wouldn't want to see someone hold back from sharing a cool article they found because they are too shy to post their own thoughts on it. Maybe the rest of us will miss out. Thoughts?
I'm not referring to news stuff btw, I don't have much of an opinion there. Maybe that's different? But just articles in general. I've seen a couple really interesting articles on tildes that I don't think I would have found otherwise.
That said, I am a newbie here, so this might not be inline with the tildes culture, I haven't been around long enough to see all the nuances of it. Maybe if I'm around a bit longer, I'd think differently about this.
You make a great point. Some people find posting to Tildes to be a bit intimidating - is this the right group, what about the tags, is this going to lead to good discussion, etc.
I'd encourage people who feel like this to, after they've lurked a little bit, just start making comments and posting topics. I don't know how we (people who use Tildes) or they (people who run Tildes) can make this easier.
Yes, I felt intimidated at first on tildes, probably because I tend to be more of a lurker, so it's out of my comfort zone to interact. I was worried about putting things in the wrong place, or not providing an interesting topic. Luckily, a few long term users on tildes made it clear that you shouldn't worry about messing up tags, placement as someone will eventually move it. This definitely made it much more accessible :)
There is a discussion thread where you can ask questions about tildes and tbh I found that to be really useful. That's where I asked about the "wrong group" question and got that cleared up. Hopefully that thread stays visible to people, I think it's really useful. I also think the fact that tildes has only a few basic rules, and more a general philosophy (be civil, try to share high quality content, for example) makes it easier too. EDIT: Here is that thread i'm referring to.
The idea about just starting with some comments is good too. That's what I did. Then after getting civil responses, which was a breath of fresh air, it felt much more comfortable to step out of "lurker mode".
Also, I sometimes post an article and hold back on commenting for a while because I don't want my opinions or POV to influence others' reactions or frame the discussion. I jump in later on once enough people have read the article in the OP and given their first impressions.
Also, just a technical note: When you post a link there is no section where you can add a comment, not until you have completed posting the link. Only then can you add a comment and after a number of other people's comments, the OP's comment might be at the bottom of the thread. (Apologies if there actually is an easy way to comment when creating a post of an article link and I missed it.)
I don’t think this is an issue that needs solving. Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the comments yet is that if nobody interacts with the topic, it will just fall off the page. So if nobody feels inclined to follow the link and kick off the discussion, it’ll shortly disappear. On the flip side, if somebody does decide to leave a comment, they can then kick off the discussion - it’s no different at that point than if the OP had kicked it off, to me.
Tildes is a link-aggregator, right? Sharing links is the whole point, and discussions are something that comes from the link. If someone wants to submit a high quality link but simply observe any discussion about it rather than participating, I don’t see what the issue is.
Hear, hear. Like you said, if no one engages, the topic falls off anyway. Doesn't the problem solve itself? Things are slow-paced here; it's not like you get bombarded on the Tildes feed. We actually want to encourage posting content, not discourage it IMO.
I'm someone who posts excessively long summaries or analyses on many/most of the threads I share. I do this because I'm a massive nerd. It probably isn't fair to expect that of people who are interested in a particular subject but may not have the time, energy, knowledge, or inclination to write a starter essay. And occasionally, I see value in not wanting to "influence" the direction the discussion takes.
Godspeed you crazy internet rebel. You keep that habit. o7
I’m not sure I feel strongly enough about it to want a hard and fast rule, but I certainly feel more engaged when the poster adds their opinion or reason for posting. For breaking news type links it’s probably not necessary to have a comment, but for some articles it can be a little unclear from the title what the purpose of posting it is - a comment from the poster to kick things off helps me decide whether that 7000 word article is worth the time it takes to read
For the past few weeks there was one poster I noticed who posted a lot of news articles from a certain site, with very limited commenting. I like your analogy:
Of course this is a small site, so I understand if someone thinks “let me get the ball rolling on some discussion”. Yet again it feels like you’re being hit with pop up ads. While I don’t think every time you should have to post every time, just do it enough that we see the person behind the post.
Part of the issue is that unless you block a group, all of the content from all of the groups ends up on your front page. We are much smaller than reddit, but we have disparate tastes and interests. I am actually enjoying being more of a generalist here. But people are going to use the space for different purposes. Sharing and reading interesting content is one of them.
If I'm guessing right... you're the at least the fourth person to be "thinking of" this user in the past couple of weeks (some previous "thinkers" - one of them messaged me privately, and we confirmed we were actually thinking of the same person). And that's not even counting the poster of this topic we're discussing, who might have been inspired by the same user. That user seems to have made quite an impression on Tildes!
And, yes, their last participation on Tildes is a comment saying they might delete their account soon. (Which, obviously, they haven't done yet).
I actually don't think that user's behaviour was a problem to be solved at all (except insofar as I suspected them of being a spammer). Posting links to a link aggregator is a good thing. It's not bad. It's not even neutral. Without links, a link aggregator would die. They are the engine that drives everything else. If someone's only contribution is to post links for other people to read/watch and then discuss, that is unambiguously a positive contribution to the site.
CC: @HumbleMonk33 (because I'm finally addressing the core of their post)
Thank you for contributing so much to the discussion. I’ve come to mostly agree with your point of view. My only worry is for the future growth of Tildes and what not addressing this now will mean going forward. I acknowledge the importance and clear benefits of the shared links but I can’t shake the feeling that people and bots who do that and that alone can spam the site to death in the long run.
It’s a growing pond and I enjoy getting to know everything that swims in these waters.
It's worth noting that Deimos was reddit's "anti-evil" (anti-spam / anti-abuse) admin for quite a number of years... And, besides creating Automoderator, another reason he got hired by reddit was because he had previously helped identify several major spam/astroturfing networks that had been operating on the site (e.g. GamePro, G4TV and VGChartz GamrFeed).
So I don't think we have to worry too much about spam networks taking root here on Tildes.
Is that a polite way of telling me I've dominated this thread? ;)
But seriously: this is a subject I feel strongly about, and have done for a long time.
Let's imagine a world in which Tildes is infiltrated by bots that repeatedly post links here; not spammers, just bots that scrape the internet for interesting and relevant links and then post them here. So, Tildes gets lots of articles and videos posted here - only links and titles, with no summaries and no opening comments.
How will that kill Tildes?
People will read/watch the articles/videos being posted. In many cases, those people will comment on the posts. In some cases, that will lead to discussions about the articles/videos. That is the central activity of Tildes: discussion. A bot posting links will support this central activity.
Posting links to Tildes is like spreading fertiliser in a garden: it feeds the plants and they will grow. Unlike a real garden, posting too many links won't kill the plants.
What's the scenario in which posting more links to Tildes will kill the site?
I may have worded my reply incorrectly but I never meant to say that it would kill the site. By spamming to death I mean to say in a worse case scenario you can have the site filled to the brim with too many links being posted for any discussion to rise to the top. No humans just bots posting non stop.
Or if we want to go back to your garden metaphor a bed with just fertilizer endlessly being poured, sure you may get a super plant that survives miraculously but how many others were buried for the that kind of numbers game.
I do not claim to know what would be best for the site I just like the idea of people having discussions with people in as civil a way as possible. There is literally endless content out there and many ways to interact with it, sharing it here is a very specific choice right. Going forward can you say you really wouldn’t mind an uncaring endless hose of content drowning out actual people posting to interact with actual people about something they genuinely care about. Obviously this only applies to the bot side of this conversation, the shy linkers I’ve come to terms with.
Lol, I've had a few conversations with you where I didn't have the energy to counterpoint so I just upvoted your response and moved on hoping that you wouldn't find it rude.
As someone who posts links, sometimes with and sometimes without excerpts or personal reactions, I have learned from this discussion. We are never all going to agree but it is important to see different perspectives. The community has a goal of civil interaction but what consideration for others looks like can vary a lot. Different people have different takes.
Re spam and bots, my opinion is that they will always be rooted out with extreme prejudice as long as there isn't a change in leadership and priorities for the site. (Core moderation duties can expand to a larger group without changing priorities) If that change happens, many of us will leave.
I agree, and I'd also add that this sort of "rules lawyering" is against the spirit of this site. If this particular user has been sharing too many articles, Deimos should just message them privately. (And if they aren't here anymore, then do we even need to have this discussion?)
But since I'm here, I think it's good etiquette to leave a comment when you post an article. Necessary? No. Appreciated? Yes.
Why? If I post an article, why do you need me to leave a comment about it? Why can't you just read the article for yourself, and decide if you have something to say about it?
I don't think you need to; I just think it's good etiquette. Reading an article takes some finite amount of time (and mental energy), which means I can only read so many articles per day. Posting a short comment with the submission acknowledges this limitation; instead of having to judge the article solely by the title, I have another person's perspective on why I should engage with it.
So... the act of me posting an article or video here isn't enough of a hint that I think some people here might find it interesting?
Also, what if my perspective is different to your perspective? To invent an example: "I loved the background that this article gave me about actor X got involved with this movie", while you might like the part of the article which interviews the producer about how they convinced a studio to make the movie.
I don't think that's what they're saying. It's not that a lonely link is insufficient. As you demonstrated elsewhere in this thread links posted by themselves do just fine. But if OP posts a link, and offers some ideas why the link was interesting or mattered to them, that is an enhancement, a piece of candy that people do appreciate.
I mean that's kinda the point -- that's a good thing! I find the users here themselves interesting so if the actor is what really grabbed their attention, I might engage with the article on another level I wouldn't have unless prompted by their perspective. To me, someone's interest is itself interesting. :)
Anyway, this thread has long turned into navel gazing. It's clear this kind of thing should be an entirely organic process on the site rather than anything mandated.
Why am I picturing myself as a dirty old man driving around in a van, offering lollies to the neighbourhood children...? ;)
I'd rather discover what's interesting about an article for myself, without having the OP tell me. I'm old enough to read things for myself, and to work out what's interesting to me and what isn't. I don't need to be told what's interesting. I have my own opinions.
It started that way. Most topics posted in ~tildes are navel-gazing of one type or another.
Tildes is a link-aggregator, at its core. Sharing links is the primary point of this site.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
I know what the expected answer is, but...
In the past week or so, apart from commenting here in ~tildes, I've barely participated in any discussions - and yet I've been active on Tildes every day. I've been reading articles, watching videos, perusing comments, and so on (plus some minor editing of tags & titles where appropriate). And I've been content with that.
If this site was all discussion, I wouldn't be here. It's the combination of being able to read/watch things, learn new information, increase my understanding of the world, and occasionally being able to discuss what I've read/watched, that keeps me here. If there were no links being posted, and the whole site consisted of ~talk, I'd be gone overnight.
So, for me, the links are the primary driver of Tildes, with the discussion being an added incentive.
EDIT TO ADD: On the other hand, if the site consisted only of links, with no comments and no discussions, that also would probably not hold my interest in the long term. Like I said, it's the combination of content and conversation that keeps me here.
I was actually on Reddit for years before I actually created an account because the links were the thing I came there for. Reading the comments was a nice bonus but it took a while before I realized that I wanted to be part of the conversation rather than just passively consuming it. Of course that was the "glory days" back when experts would expand on whatever the article was about.
I'm saying that the ability to read without commenting is a welcome feature.
I agree. I'd prefer it if people said what they found interesting about either the reporting or the situation described in the report. Tildes is about conversation, so please do help those convos happen.
I think the difficulty is that the first post can set the tone of the discussion, partly because journalism can be pretty poor.
[edit: snipped some stuff that didn't need to be here]
What if I'm posting something that I think other people might find interesting, but which I myself have zero interest in?
Why would you post that, and not leave it for someone who could turn it into a quality contribution?
To refer back to a discussion about AI: if people are just posting links that they think other people may find interesting, why don't we just have an AI bot that posts 200 topics a day to things that people may find interesting?
That doesn't answer my question in any way.
If I stumble across an article/video in my internet activity, and it doesn't interest me, but I think it might interest some people here on Tildes, I will post it here. I have done exactly this in the past. Why should I have to post a discussion prompt as well, when the item itself is the prompt to discussion? In particular, to address your point: how can I say what I found interesting about the item if I'm actually not interested in it, and I'm only posting it because I believe that other people might be interested in it?
Or am I only allowed to post things to Tildes if I like them? Is that what Tildes is supposed to be: a collection of our own selfish personal interests, rather than sharing things for other people?
However, to answer your question:
I would post it to Tildes as my contribution here. Tildes is a link aggregator; without people posting links, it will die. Me posting a link is contributing to the website.
Even if I don't find it interesting, that doesn't mean noone will find it interesting. Someone or someones here on Tildes will almost certainly find it interesting, even if I didn't. So I post it for them to read or watch.
I read/watch articles/videos that other people don't see (we all have our own different group of internet sources we refer to). If I don't post something I see... then maybe noone will post it. And noone will make that particular contribution to Tildes. And noone will have that particular discussion on Tildes.
By the way... I post articles with summaries, like this and this, and without summaries, like this and this. There's no pattern to which ones attract more discussion. If anything, the pattern seems to be that items which focus on Australia draw less attention here than items which focus on any other topic, such as LGBT acceptance, a scientific discovery, or U.S. politics. It's about what I post, not how I post it.
In fact, I was surprised to find that even you will comment on an article I post without a summary! :)
I'm with @Algernon_Asimov on this one… I've sometimes posted content here that I have come across and is obviously high quality but which I don't have a specific interest in, just because I believe it does belong here.
I wouldn't "wait" for someone else to post it. Why would I? What tells me even anyone would come across it and post it? The internet is big.
I'm really struggling with the idea that you would post links to content that you think are not interesting. To me this is a clear sign that content should not be posted, but I appreciate that you think that even though you're not interested in the link you might be interested in the discussion of the link.
They probably wouldn't, and there would not be that discussion. But the Internet is big, and the Tildes user base is growing, and the mid-Tildes slump anxiety of "there are not enough people to drive content to drive engagement with the site" should be abating. Posting things that you don't find interesting feels less useful if we have 10,000 people doing it.
Attempting to use a clumsy analogy: It feels like "Schrödinger's interesting": the topic exists in a super-position of interesting / not-interesting, and when it's posted to Tildes the waveform collapses and we observe it for what it is.
If we're posting stuff that people may be interested in, why not just have bots that post everything in the "Recommended by Pocket" Firefox feed? I used to be active on another site. Should I post here any links I posted there that got more than 100 upvotes? (Slowly, over time, to avoid flooding Tildes)?
So, I am afraid that your rule would be too narrow and would exclude good content. I am not a programmer or developer but I was intrigued by this article and related discussion posted to r/blind, so I posted it. It is technically far beyond my understanding although I can see some of the implications. At least one person explicitly thanked me. https://tildes.net/~comp/196i/drupals_approach_to_accessibility_posted_to_r_blind
But more generally, I think most gatekeeping causes more harm than good. People have different preferences and styles and we are trying to be a civil community. We can work together without fully agreeing.
No, your example does not fit because...
...you found it interesting. I'm not talking about articles that you found interesting and that you think other people may find interesting. I'm only talking about articles that you do not find interesting but that you think others may be interested in.
I also don't know where you get the idea that I'm trying to create any kind of rule. And "don't post things that you don't find interesting" is hardly gatekeeping.
Maybe we're arguing about the meaning of "interesting"?
I have heard and I believe understood you. I am going to peace out from this Meta analysis of what people on Tildes should and shouldn't post. As readers, we also have tools to avoid unwanted content. We all have different preferences, but maybe people reading this are influenced. I believe most people here want to be considerate of others.
Perhaps instead of gatekeeping it would have been more clear if I said rule making where it is for one hard to assess and enforce and two not serving a highly necessary purpose. The song Free to Be You and Me is one of my earliest and most formative childhood memories. I tend to default to that philosophy unless there are obvious compelling reasons not to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PS3nOcLbHI
If you reply, I will read, but not answer.
To be honest, this is my biggest complaint about Tildes. Isn’t the point of Tildes to have high quality discussions? I’d love to weed out these link-only posts from my feed. At least tell me why you cared to share the link! Otherwise it feels like any generic, automated aggregator site.
So you want to unsubscribe from ~news?
I certainly agree. I usually leave some kind of comment but I neglected to do that after posting about the US women's soccer team losing in the World Cup because I thought it would be fairly self-explanatory for sports fans but it ended up getting the headline changed and then changed back because there were enough people checking it out who didn't know how monumental that was. It's the worst finish the team has ever had in a World Cup or Olympics and only the second time they haven't medaled. If I'd just made a comment about the fact that the defeat was the monumental, newsworthy part, no one would have been as likely to want to change the headline to a generic "results and discussion" post in the first place. Which only happened because someone summoned @Deimos, who only acted in line with not being an asshole--someone said they didn't want spoilers so he obliged, not necessarily realizing there was more to the story, which we can't really fault him for because I hadn't made it clear!
I’ve used Hacker News for years and one of my complaints about it is that “Ask HN” is anemic. Often good questions get asked, they fall off the “new” page and never get any responses.
My take is that the links on HN might be better or worse depending on your preference, but the linkless discussions on Tildes are indisputably better because they get more participation.
My posts to both HN and Tildes are selected by me and my agent YOShInOn which had me try to systematize my judgement about what a good post is. Someone said “a good post is the nucleus of a good discussion” which got me to make a statistical model of the ratio of comments to votes. The average post there gets about 0.5 votes per comment. Overall I’d say high comments to posts (much more than one) is not a good sign, or rather it is a sign of clickbait. HN users will often vote up a scientific paper a lot but not leave comments but then I discovered that HN users really like to chat about cars.
(When it comes to science my impression is that even more Tildes users feel unqualified to comment on science articles.)
I guess I gotta try some Tildenalysis, I was thinking of making a model that puts categories on things but thinking about it, score and comment/score prediction might work well on Tildes: for one thing score=0 is unusual on Tildes.
I personally comment on every submission I make, and like you, I think threads are more likely to be successful if OP shares their thoughts and opens up conversation, but I'm unsure if we should require starter comments.
I'd prefer to avoid lazy opening comments, some kinds of threads probably don't need them, and I don't really want to make the barrier to participation higher. I do think we should cultivate a population of submitters who do post thoughts and context. So perhaps instead of punishing those who don't, rewarding posters who do might be an idea.
I see what you're saying but I'm of a different mind. I have posted (some pretty long) articles here in the hope that someone would find it interesting enough to read the whole thing and form their own opinion about it. A tl;dr at the top will discourage people from reading the entire article or click on the link at all. A few framing sentences might frame the article in a way that biases the reader - I want their view on the article without my guiding them towards a certain POV. When I post I really do want engagement but in the way I might having discovered that a friend just read the same article that day - I want their fresh unbiased take.
Exactly I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m wondering if there is a way to implement a system to force a bit more out of the linker without scaring them from posting in the future.
This may sound a bit kneejerky (I promise it's not), how about insead of waiting for OP to write a summary or share some highlights, those who want to can do it for them instead? Browsing this thread, it seems some people actually like doing it and are confident they can do it well, while some others don't want to because they don't think they can do it well. Maybe we can encourage both sides to do the parts they're good at, instead of forcing one to be more like the other.
I thought I left "TL;DRs" behind on Reddit. I don't expect to see them here.
The medicine subreddit on reddit has a rule that's probably like what you're thinking: link posts require some starter comment. Usually it seems to be a brief summary of the article, and maybe a short thought to jumpstart the conversation. Very low commitment.
That said, as stated in another comment, I just wonder if we as a community would lose out from the shy lurker types who found something valuable they wanted to share with us, but aren't as comfortable having the dialog themselves. I'm sure they aren't meaning anything negative by it, it's just some people's personalities. I think each additional rule like that on any forum just puts more barriers to people sharing, which I find a little unfortunate, personally. It's just something to weight in when thinking about stuff like this.
You can see the problem here I'm sure.
Encourage is better and the quality of the links are a bit more important in my view. For me personally, I know I threw up two similar-ish links recently and didn't have much discussion although they weren't very active threads, I prefer to be succinct if I can and sometimes there just isn't much to say.
A summary would be good if the title wasn't explanatory enough or clickbait style but I don't think this is something to force people to do. If users are just throwing links willy-nilly with no discussion in a reddit karma-farming style then that is something that should be addressed but I don't think dealt with in a way that adversely affects all users.
For me, I'd like this place to be for quality and 'nice-ness(‽)' and it seems to be doing ok so far.
This is a good point. Sometimes I might find something interesting that I want to share, but I don't understand enough to really say anything useful about it. Maybe even I want to learn by seeing what others have to say about it :)
This is something I experienced myself recently, an article of a man who got bitten by a stray cat in the UK and as a consequence got a new infection. The bacteria itself was as of yet unknown, which is really interesting because it shows well.... what has already been discussed in the article itself.
Link to the thread itself.
Even though I would've liked to see more discussion on the topic, I know too little about it to actively comment. By coincidence I have a bit more background on bacteria than most people but not enough for this topic.
And that's perfectly fine in my opinion. It's better to have a small, more concentrated discussion than something that's too big. The former may not have the quantity we like, but lowering the quality in favour of quantity is not ideal.
I do prefer if OP kickstarts potential discussion, but I don't think it's an absolute necessity.