Crazy Idea: Tildes will likely change as more users join, but what if there was some magical way to use the site as it was back in some point in time?
Ok, this is less than a half-baked idea, but here goes.
I just got here, but I really feel like you all “are my people.” I know there are possible issues with this, echo chamber, etc.. but darn it, I like this group right now. I may like it even after lots of user growth. But.. what if there was some magical way to use the site in the future as it was in the past.
My initial thought was what if we “forked” the user base at different times. Here is my best thought on how that might be implemented.
What if there was a user setting called Shrinkage, Time Machine, Good Ole Days, or something. It would be a date field that had a minimum value of your tildes birthday, max value of now. You could set it to n whenever you wanted and then you would see the site with only the posts and comments of the users that existed prior to n + 1 day (so your are included.)
I think other folks will have this same “good ole days” feeling even when they sign up years from now, they could always go back to their original community.
OK, I think that this implementation is pretty harmless. Shoot me down. What unintended consequences did I not think of? Do you see any value in this?
edit: missing word
It's certainly an interesting idea though I wouldn't consider it a "fork" (since it's not strictly splitting the community into a separate new one) as what you describe sounds more like an optional filter. It has some serious problems in potentially promoting an elitist echo chamber of epic proportions (alliteration!) that I think could be counterproductive though. And just because people are new doesn't mean they can't successfully integrate and make valuable contributions to a community, as you just did, I might add. ;)
However, my biggest issue with this is that I think most of the issues you're worried about can likely be overcome with good tooling, trust + accountability and encouraging a certain culture to flourish... rendering such a filter more a novelty than a necessity, and more a potential problem than a solution to anything.
Hey, thanks! Yes, all of those things. It is a novelty that is solving a currently nonexistent problem. One which hopefully never exists. I was thinking possibly elitist too, but maybe it’s not because all users can see the content produced? And yes, one unintended consequence is that you could miss lots of great content from great new people if you abused the feature.
Regarding the fork analogy, this post was very stream of consciousness.. but maybe it works because the commits to your Good Ole Day community are merged to master (the entire community)? :)
I've proposed a related idea before of cluster based voting, where you essentially vote based on your attributes, and instead of a monolithic score you get to see what each of the different groups think about it.
It would resemble a demographic study, and show multiple viewpoints at once
Hmm, this type of feature might be an interesting experiment as a Reddit chrome extension to see if Good Ole Days ever really existed, and when they changed.
Also, how many 10-year-old Reddit accounts are still active? Probably not many
Noise Joke Troll
I remember when you could tag comments.
I wonder why this is now not possible, having joined several minutes ago?
It seems like it was being misused and is currently being reevaluated.
I don't believe this was the only reason, just the last reason. I think Deimos had been monitoring the usage for a while and not finding it to work as he would like.
In my own community we actually accidentally came up with something like his tagging, so I don't think @deimos is on the wrong track with it. I just think the tags themselves need more thought and need to operate more as emotions than as "tags".
For example, in our community we gave our users this
Yes, it's a spray bottle. An emote that isn't always understood by newer users, but this is the explanation given when people ask what it is.
The usage is simple, people use it to say "no, bad, bad dog".
This usage gets used in a whole variety of ways, for legitimate purposes, and for meme purposes. But most important of all is that it is never used combatively or taken in a particularly negative light. It's pretty hard to feel bad when it's fun.
If @deimos harkens back to earlier reddit I can recall a time when reddit users actually had their own spray bottle as an emergent behaviour of reddit. It was ಠ_ಠ, look of disapproval. Once incredibly popular on reddit, now basically a dead meme. It persisted for years as a user-driven emergent method to express disapproval without creating a negative atmosphere or horribly derailing a thread into user vs user combat mode.
I fully expect this community to gain an emergent version of this too in order to police themselves without creating a scene. If it is not given to them, it will emerge.
Also I think tags are pretty much almost certainly going to get used like emoji. Anything you can "tag" onto someone else's post is going to get used in that way, in some way shape or form. Perhaps doubling down on that by making them "reacts" and then harnessing reacts as an actual site-function too. But the tone would matter as it will affect behaviour site-wide and the overall quality and tone of discussion could suffer with such things.
This turned into a bit of a stream of thought. Apologies!
Is someone going to ask it?
It was basically just the tip of an iceberg feature. Only that the whole underwater part still need to be developed so it was basically being misused due to the whole "logic behind" missing.
Once the development of the part below is done, they'll come back.
Ha! Yeah, I am certainly jumping the gun, eh?
Maybe it’s becuase I was born under communism, and we all generally tend to find the only cloud on sunny day to worry about.
The thing that changes the most (gonna put it at 85%) is nothing to to with the site code in any way. Number of users, type of users, and how those users have been trained to behave is what people get nostalgic about.
Unfortunately you can't get that back. You have to get it right from the start.
Regarding code vs users, I think my use of the word fork was very confusing. The implementation proposed is just a filter of the user base. You could filter the posts and comments you see based on the poster’s tildes birthday. It’s like a community time machine. But upon further reflection it would just be a neat Chorme Extention that could filter communities like Reddit or Tildes based on that same user birthday.
I think it depends on usage. Over on the r/asoiaf subreddit, we kind of like having the functionality that allows us to see what the subreddit looked like right when it was made, before the fifth book came out, before the show came out, right after the fifth book came out. It's fun to see how the fandom evolved and what sorts of stuff people were discussing. It's also useful for us in terms of showing that show-related discussion was always welcome!
It's all in how you use it.
Honestly I'd be against that kind of thing. You'd be encouraging some form of tribalism, this time based on account age.
This site is barely even getting started! I think it's defeatist to assume it's going to go to shit, and would just fracture the userbase and kill the site.