If you don't like a type of content, don't complain about it. Filter it!
With the constant influx of new users from Reddit, every once in a while I see people complain about some type of content that they find disruptive and annoying. They take their dissatisfaction to the comments, either criticizing the poster or expressing their annoyance.
Those contributions are often disruptive and offtopic themselves, derailing a potentially productive discussion
Tildes has a feature that may come in handy in those cases: filtered tags. It allows the user to prevent content they dislike from being displayed to them.
To add a filtered tag, click on Filtered topic tags right below Browse the list of groups. You will be taken to a page where you can add any tags that you want to filter, one per line.
For example, if you are displeased with the amount of videos on your frontpage, just add videos and save. Now you won't see any video submissions.
If, at any time, you wish to see those posts, you can either click on View unfiltered list at the top of the page or click on the tag Videos in your Filtered topic tags list.
That way, you will never be annoyed by content you don't like :)
If you don't like a type of content, don't complain about it. Filter it!
There’s room for both. Topics that don’t fit your interests but are otherwise fine? Privately unsubscribe from the group or filter tags. Specific hobby discussion might fall into this category. Topics that, in your opinion, don’t align with the goals of Tildes or are potentially unhealthy to the community if left unchecked? Publicly, politely, thoughtfully commenting. Memes, cringe, schadenfreude might be considered detrimental if allowed to proliferate without protest, negatively altering the general culture and feel of the community.
In practice, it’s tough. A lot falls in a grey area. Plus everyone’s unique personal biases and goals for the site push how a topic is viewed toward one way or the other.
I am convinced that one reason people feel so much shadenfreude these days is that the word "schadenfreude" sounds really cool.
The latter is the most grey area here. There is a certain topic that this came up in, and I don't think the post itself is Schadenfreude in a vacuum, It could invite comments that express that. But it brings into question what we should moderate for: the comments or the impending kind of comments one expects. IMO the comments in that post in question seemed fine enough, so I feel a quick removal would not have been produtive;
I am still in a strong boat of giving any potential topic a fair chance. If it devolves into too much in-fighting or tone that goes against the site's goals, then it may be best to axe. But IME this like of thinking on pre-emptively removing posts tends to affect topics that are controversial but also important to discuss. Topics like politics or the economy or social issues. And other communities simply ban the posting of such content outright.I don't want this community to become another one of those examples where we are afraid to talk about the hard issues.
I definitely agree that the grey topics and controversial but important topics shouldn’t be moderated away, certainly not preemptively. Commenting with some pushback, or at least reflection, send can be a milder action if it’s not insulting or flippant. It’s particularly needed if there seems like one of those topics is starting to dominate with multiple or increasingly frequent submissions; individually in a vacuum they’re fine, but collectively they’re sucking up all the air in the room or making the broader community mood more negative or aggressive.
I regularly check unfiltered view to see what I'm missing. It's not that I completely reject the things I filter, I just don't wanna see them all the time.
This thread can not be upvoted enough.
Too many people on Tildes want to dictate to people what to post and how to write.
I don't really have a problem with low effort comments in general, but I will say it is a bit frustrating to open a post and see the top comment being a two-sentence zinger, often with an 'exemplary' label to boot.
Deimos has written that if people alert him to misuse of the exemplary tag that he will review the situation and possibly take privileges like tags away
This thread is about the top comment being a summary of the video. That's what upset OP and made them go "so you don't like videos?" Very confused.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, I don't think it matters why this post was created?
I was just responding to @BeanBurrito's claim which is probably true. I just wanted to emphasize that while I don't want to mandate what people are writing I do like seeing higher quality discussion encouraged as it seems it's pretty difficult to filter out the noisier stuff when people often engage with it more.
To be fair it can't be downvoted.
For me this also ties in with people on other platforms that complain about how other sites operate or the culture of said sites.
People on Reddit complain about Lemmy/fediverse or tildes or whatever else is out there and vice versa.
As the old saying goes, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". All these communities have their own vibe.
I see people on Lemmy complain about lack of content. That's like going to a party and complaining that nobody's talking but then refusing to make any conversation yourself.
people want to replace x community with y community and complain when it's not the same. It seems like people want to go all in on one platform and get upset when it doesn't have everything they want out of it.
I'm a millennial and grew up on an internet of countless independent forums of all kinds of topics, personal homepages, web rings, you name it. A lot of those types of things still exist.
If I grew bored of one place, I found another, or drifted back and forth if a few sites together piqued my interest, regardless if the subject matter was shared between them or not. I'd end up finding something and whatever forum community etc. that I passed up kept doing things how they liked to do it.
Incoming users should definitely make use of filtering.
This is a very good take and one that I've seen espoused on this site before, but I want to highlight it again because I find it so incredibly important concerning how we interact with the world via the Internet. I believe it was @KneeFingers who commented a while back saying that back in the day, we used to get bored with the Internet and go do something else. Many websites today are only concerned with user retention through any means, which has led a lot of websites (notably Reddit) to becoming a sort of "one-stop-shop." Get your cat pictures and spooky stories and video game news all right here, you never have to leave!
This is related to the concept of a "Reddit alternative," which a lot of newer users are either expecting or hoping from a lot of newer websites (specifically Tildes in this case). A large amount of people, myself included, had become used to only spending their time on a handful of websites, with at least 50% or greater being spent on Reddit, because of this "one-stop-shop" focus. So people come to Tildes and they wonder why there aren't cat photos or why do people talk so much about X or etc, because they've left a shopping mall and have walked into a specialty store, so to speak.
unfortuantely very common these days.
But ultiamtely, a forum is less like a party (a place where you often want to find the new and unusual) and more like a cozy cafe. You will never truly get that same atmosphere in cafe B, even if by some miracle you got every person in cafe A to move. The location, lighting, the taste of the coffee, the banter of the owner, etc. will have subconciously different feelings on your mood. Many will adjust, but there will inevitably be some of "this wasn't like the good ol' days of cafe A".
I don't really have a solution here. It just seems to be yet another example of generational divide.
Actually I was just thinking the other day that tildes is like a kind of upscale cafe so that gives me chuckle (in a good way) to see you using that metaphor today.
Hubski seems to have a similar vibe to it, but doesn't seem like many people are talking about it.
It could apply to Lemmy too, at least from the instance and content I've perused so far.
Personally, I think a party metaphor is apt for Reddit though, or maybe likening it to a bunch of different bars/pubs. You'll run into plenty of cornballs, but there's still some neat people you'll find here and there.
I suppose you're right about the generational divide. It's not like seeing that kind of mindset really irks me, but it's sad to see people give up or give in so easily.
I guess the only solution I can see is maybe give people a little encouragement, but if they double down you just have to let them be.
I have never seen Hubski mentioned on r/redditalternatives
For those who are assuming that OP means we should tolerate low quality content, or are wondering what examples may have triggered this post: One obvious example for me is that every time an article is posted about the reddit API/IPO situation (which happens often, but not excessively,) someone inevitably comments saying that they're sick of hearing about reddit and they think people shouldn't post about it anymore. It's completely reasonable for someone to not want to hear about reddit, but it's not reasonable to expect people here not to post about it, since reddit is so closely tied with the history of this site and the types of people who hang out here, plus, tech/social media news is a relevant topic for this site in general. Reddit is clearly a topic that many people here will be interested in hearing about occasionally, and other people won't want to hear about at all. Therefore, tag filtering is the perfect solution for people who don't want to hear about it.
Since those comments happen so often, it seems completely reasonable for lou to have posted this as a reminder/refresher. I've personally introduced the tag filtering concept to at least 3-4 of those people who don't want to see reddit content, so this post will probably help a few people in advance so they never need to see or comment on reddit content in the first place.
I do not think OPs intention was to suggest that people should happily post low quality content since it can be filtered, or anything like that. There are plenty of reasonable examples where tag filtering could be used to improve users' experiences, even though the content isn't inherently harmful to the quality of Tildes - including topics involving reddit, whatever nonsense Elon Musk is up to on a given day, various weekly casual chats, videos, other random topics/journalists that annoy some people but aren't inherently bad, etc.
Reddit topics are a grey area because so many here are former Redditors who left on poor terms. There’s a balance to be struck between keeping up on significant news about a major business/service versus the equivalent of obsessing over how your bad-breakup ex is doing instead of moving on with your new partner. There’s no clear line between the two - a “low it when you see it” kind of judgement call - and there’ll naturally be some disagreement both on what it is and how to handle it.
In the past 30 days on Tildes, there were only three posts about reddit. During that time period there were more posts about Facebook, as well as Twitter, than there were about reddit. In the 30 days prior to that, there were only 10 posts about reddit, and again there were around the same number of posts about Facebook and Twitter individually. I'm not seeing a problem or gray area here.
While there was certainly a massive flurry of posts about reddit in June and July, it hardly seems like people posting about reddit recently are being obsessive, with a recent average of less than one post per week. If there is any obsessive behavior, I'd say it actually seems to be coming from those who dislike being exposed to a small number of posts about their "ex," often commenting something along the lines of wanting reddit to "get what it deserves." And again, that's perfectly fine for them to feel, but they should just filter the posts so they aren't bothered by them. It doesn't appear to be an issue that needs to be addressed beyond that.
Even moving forward, I would be surprised if people randomly started posting too much about reddit again unless there is another major event related to it, in which case it would be appropriate to post more about it anyway (similar to the flurry of posts about Twitter when it had the bizarre name change recently.) Whenever reddit kills old.reddit, we'll probably get another rush of excited and disgruntled new users, endure a couple weeks of excessive posts about reddit (or simply use tags to filter them from our feeds,) and then continue on with business as usual.
I’ve neither filtered, complained, nor commented at all about the prevalence (or lack of) topics about reddit outside of this post. My point is that I can understand both viewpoints, particularly with certain subjects.
Personally, I’m fine with seeing both the topics and the meta-comments. At most, I consider labeling a complaint thread as off-topic/noise, which would collapse it and prevent it from bumping activity sort if someone else agrees.
Having these complaints put into context is helpful, however. We're all going to have our own threshold on how much reddit talk is too much for us personally. For the community as a whole, 3 posts a month seems reasonable to me, even lower than I would have expected for right now. As reddit marches to that IPO (coming soon™), the times will continue to be interesting.
Tags and filters are a lifesaver on Tildes. There are some things that have big fan clubs that kind of drive me up the wall because of how much oxygen they consume. Especially given the default sorting by comment activity. If I couldn't filter them out I would have probably left this community. Filters are also perfect for when you're trying to disengage from a topic when your feelings are getting too strong.
I do have two problems with the filters, though. Number one is that it's really hard to find them; they're stuck behind three clicks.
The other problem is that there's no way to filter out notifications from people who just want to argue with me. :P
I agree about filters being hard to find. It’s intuitive to me to be able to click on a tag and have the option to either see everything, or filter that tag. Having to go through several steps to find it and then, crucially, having to remember the exact wording of the tag you want to filter is hard!
It's sad that people aren't used to doing this simply because the socmed platforms they use either don't have this feature or bury it under 5 layers of settings.
Though I also think tag blocking should be more discoverable and easier to do, in general, not just on Tildes.
Most social media is unfortunately about engagement, so the last thing they want to make easy is allowing you to disengage. It's still an option they need to have, but they will never adversise it. wrt Tildes, it technically is front and center (it's on your front page), but it would probably make more sense from a UX perspective to keep an option local to where you see tags. In this case, maybe there can be a "add to filter" option dropdown on each post and you can then choose which tags from a modal menu or something.
On the contrary for me, one feature I would like to have is the ability to search globally, without my filters. You can view an unfiltered list on your front page, but not when utilizing search. Just because I'm not subscribed to ~comics doesn't mean I don't want relevant comic posts to pop up when I search for Marvel.
On the flip side, please be conscientious about putting tags on your posts so it's easier to filter out if others want to.
As an example: If posting something about worker's rights that's specific to a country, tag it as
politics.[country]politics orjust[country]!Edit: Adjusted to reflect correct tagging system
While it is great to make an effort, please don't feel too conscientious to the point of choice paralysis. By all means, do your best with the tags, but, if you can't figure it out, tag wizard @mycketforvirrad will probably help you out!
It would be
countryandpoliticsin your example given. Notpolitics.country.I must be misunderstanding a mechanic here?
Right now on the front page there are 2 threads, one is tagged ask.survey and one is tagged ask.help.
My understanding was that that's how you can easily create subtags - with my example, if someone wanted to read about politics, but not french politics, you would tag it as politics.france. Aka, maintag first followed by a period and then a subtag.
Otherwise.. there's no way to filter for French politics, you'd have to choose whether you want to filter out all politics or all posts related to France.. is that the case?
France isn't a subdivision of politics, so there isn't a tag for it. There is no way to filter out French politics.
I wouldn't mind complex filter to help alleviate that. although, ["france" AND "politics"] is still a pretty simple filter compared to what RES was able to do.
Alrighty, thanks for explaining - I've adjusted my original comment to reflect this
Is there a way for us to filter out USA politics without filtering out either all countries' political topics or all USA topics?
I would filter out
democratic partyandrepublican partyto achieve this desired effect.I don’t know which topics you’re thinking of, but yes, ignoring and filtering are good tools. I also think it’s fine to comment in disagreement, if you do it right. Do you leave space for other people to disagree or have a different impression, or are you effectively insisting that any decent person must already agree with you and posting anything to the contrary is bad? Things to be wary of:
Thinking about discussions in this way doesn’t leave room for people with intermediate stances, like being curious but wary.
Another way to not leave space is to dismiss discussion by people who are just learning about something you’re more knowledgeable about as old hat, boring, or unsophisticated. It just the basics, something everyone should know already, if they were paying attention. The people discussing those things should already know what you know, so you’re not going to bother to explain.
Some topics are indeed repetitive, but if you’re not going to engage with the ideas being discussed, even to explain why they’re bad, actually, then it’s better to ignore and move on.
By contrast, I did start a topic yesterday where I thought the responses were strongly against, but overall pretty thoughtful. So that seems hopeful? Not sure why it got locked.
Yes, those are very good points, and way more sophisticated than what I had in mind!
I didn't read your post from yesterday. But I gotta be honest, from the title alone, I kinda expected it to get locked eventually. Regardless of the content (which, again, I didn't read), unfortunately, the title itself was very inviting to the kind of reaction that gets posts locked. It had a good run :/
I must be very emphatic when I say that I was not thinking about any specific topic, kind of topic, or user when I was writing this post.
I observed, in multiple instances, that many responses to posts amount to "I don't enjoy this kind of content", the stronger "This kind of content should not be on Tildes", or the aggravating implication "you should not be on Tildes".
These responses can be extremely discouraging for everyone, especially new users.
I just checked, and I currently have 14 filtered tags. Some of them are very general, others, incredibly specific. I make an effort to not get sucked into discussions where I will be a useless downer.
For example, and this is not an actual tag I have (as it is not needed), but, if we had a bunch of posts about astrology, my participation would just aggravate everyone because I can't stand even listening to people talk about it. So I would filter the tag and let them be.
Without tags in the RSS feed, filtering is only possible through the web UI.
Quite frankly Tildes is so slow that using an RSS feed feels like highly unnecessary.
I was confused about what you meant, but I think by "slow" you mean that it isn't very busy compared to other forums?
Yes. The user activity here is too small to justify using RSS if you ask me.
I imagine it's more for convenience , since you can pipe multiple different feeds into one RSS reader.
Is it possible to filter out all the scheduled topics? Not really a fan of the same questions repeated every week.
You can filter the tag
recurring.I understand filtering however the ratio of articles posted vs just chatter/discussions on anything else to me seems alarmingly high at least in the time I've been using tildes. It's probably what I find bit uneasy (someone described tildes as a news aggregator 😅😂) when using this vs reddit
Feel free to post topics or questions in ~talk or ~life or other subject groups of interest to you. Also you can search for the tags Ask.survey, ask.discussion, ask.recommendation and more that I am not familiar with. You can also sort by highest number of comments and change the default period of your search to longer time periods in the past. The default is 24 hours but you don't have to be limited to that. Also there is no harm in adding a comment to an old topic, moving it to the top and seeing if anyone responds..
It is a smallish number of members compared to reddit. You can shape the content by contributing and responding to what interests you.
I've lashed out at a couple of people lately and promptly felt daft for doing so. It will always come out from people when they're frustrated at dismissal or emotive topics. This need to be constantly polite in the face of attitude is frustrating to see policed so much.
Things can get emotive, it's when it falls over into "You're a dick" "No, you're a dick" that the conversation needs to stop.
But we really need to get a handle on these threads every week. It's frustrating virtue signalling and backpattingly annoying to see every time.
Although I share the sentiment that heated conversations are sometimes productive, in my experience they are so rarely useful that I feel compelled to avoid them.
Then avoid them, you're entitled to do so.
But I'm starting to see more of this "Can't we all just get along" type post on a weekly basis. The answer is 'no', there are topics that are frustrating and emotive to one side or the other. They're entitled to say "Look, don't be a burke, clearly Climate Change is real given x, y and z!" and the other side can say "Look fishface, I say it isn't because a, b and c" and the argument is fine.
It's where it's just the insults, sans anything else that's a problem.
Also, text sucks SO badly for conveying tact and meaning in sentences. You're either percieved as Captain Flippant OR you're Lord Academic-Writing of chatterbox! It's a right pain that we could all do better on to go into hard conversations with at least the respect for the person, even if their opinions need shooting.
I am very sorry that you are feeling frustrated in your interactions on Tildes. One thing you could try is to describe your own emotions towards the topic using an "I feel" language, so everyone understands that your intention is to express your emotions, and not to have an altercation.
I took this topic more about "I'm tired of seeing topics about X, stop posting them". Which dismisses conversation as a whole. There's a lot of posts Tildes doesn't allow (in both topic and tone), but for the most part Tildes will let you post anything here as long as you do so in good faith.
Tildes groups aren't like Reddit which sometimes tends to strictly adhere to staying "on topic". if a post doesn't fit in the group posted, the magical fairies will put it in the appropriate group for you, Which can rarely result in some argument, but reflects how Tildes is a lot more fluid than Reddit. There isn't 5 layers of bureaucracy needed to make sure content you want to share stays around.
The other half of this is tags, and tags are there to service the user. If the user doesn't take advantage of the tools at hand, then I'm not quite sure what to say. Sometimes it is important to speak up so people understand rules, but that's not what's happening here.
While this is a great suggestion, unfortunately, sometimes the issue isn't the content but the person submitting the content. And for whatever reason, Tildes doesn't have a way to "ignore" or filter out on a per-account basis. I'm sure there's a philosophical reason behind ignoring topics but not people, but in the interest of communal harmony, an ignore-user feature (to filter out comments and submissions by that user) should be an option. Personally, I know at least one user who tends to spam new submissions that fail to drive engagement. That user's posts are indistinguishable from a submission that an AI could produce. It would be a boon to be able to ignore that user, and that user's posts, so that I can weed out low-engagement spam posts from the front page.
Engagement is not a heavily weighted success metric for the site. Deimos has said explicitly that he intends this, ideally, to be a place you drop in on a couple of times a day rather than a thing to obsessively refresh.
Content that nobody cares about is a problem, but I'd strive to frame that complaint in more humanistic terms than falling back on toxicity-encouraging metrics
Respectfully, "engagement" and "content that nobody cares about" seem to be nominally different variations on the same thing. I've never heard of "engagement" as being "toxicity-encouraging"; and while I understand that the connotation is that "engagement" is a popular buzz-word for SEO and marketing types, I don't see how the verbiage exclusively belongs to that industry.
If people aren't contributing to the discussion of a posted topic, doesn't that indicate that nobody cares about the topic, and, therefore, that the topic is failing to drive community engagement? I'd submit that when one person serially posts articles that on average receive <3 replies from the community, that pushes down more interesting and more "engaging" topics and prevents casual users from seeing them due to their being drowned out.
Nah, I "engage" (as in voting or commenting) with a minority of the stuff I read/watch posted here. Most things I just don't have anything interesting to say about and I don't really care one way or another if it was posted to the site individually. But I think the site would be poorer without a healthy stream of fresh stuff to look at.
Plus I think we generally just don't want to discourage people from posting stuff that's within the site rules and culture, even if it's individually boring or not for us. If a culture sets in where people are anxious about sharing, I would worry that's a recipe for choking out the sort of off-beat sort of content I like seeing. Just because the current user base isn't into something doesn't mean it doesn't have a niche out there that just hasn't found its audience yet.
That feature was requested many times. The reason why we don't have it is not philosophical. It may eventually happen.
I dislike this content. OP is a ghoul and I am annoyed & dissatisfied
This is dumb. Everyone ignoring a problem means the problem never gets fixed, and slowly makes the experience worse for newcomers.
Tag filtering is not meant to solve site wide problems, but rather to attend to user preferences. See my example, there's nothing wrong with sharing videos. That is not a "problem" that must be corrected. But some people don't like them, and tags can help them filter those posts.
I think there was an accidental double-post.
Same topic from a few minutes ago:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/1a5q/dont_complain_filter
Yes, I did again to change the title and forgot to remove the other one. Thanks ;)
I want to filter YouTube and other video links. I'm not on the internet to watch television. Tildes does not have this capacity yet, and I don't believe they will for some time.
You can filter the tag
videos.How? Where's the documentation?
I actually gave brief instructions on this very post (look above!), but you can find additional information here under "Filtering topics".
This is such a weirdly accusatory, angry comment. None of the statements provided in the original post is wrong, nor is it directly calling out anyone or anything. I remember thinking the exact same thing when I read comments in threads about reddit. I don't think anyone is making drama here.