Creating an official politics group?
So this topic is something that could very easily just be bothering myself, but I figured I’d share before unsubscribing to ~misc. If this is the wrong group, I apologize, please feel free to move it to the correct location. I will also preface this by saying I only really view Tildes occasionally, and am not the most active user, so those two things might be contributing to this.
I am wondering if creating an official Politics group would be beneficial to Tildes. I’ve noticed that the majority of recent posts in ~misc is mostly regarding politics. I don’t want to necessarily just unsubscribe from ~misc, in case something non-political and interesting to myself ends up getting put there, but if that’s the solution I’m more than happy to do it.
I just figured that with the amount of activity going on there fairly regularly, either a dedicated ~politics group or a sub group (maybe ~misc.politics or ~news.politics?) would be better? That way other users similar to myself could unsubscribe to that instead of unsubscribing to the much broader ~misc group.
I personally do enjoy the way that Tildes is setup, and don’t see any bad interactions in those posts. It’s definitely more of a personal thing.
That said, I don’t want to make people think that I’m telling them how things should be run, merely throwing my two cents out there, no matter how worthless they are.
Thanks to everyone for posting, and to the mods/admin for keeping everything running smoothly. This really is a solid community!
As @Nemoder said, adding
politicsto your topic tag filters is the best way to avoid seeing political topics on the site. But as for the issue of creating a group dedicated to politics, for people that actually want to see more political topics here, but also keep those discussions contained, that has been suggested in the past and was decided against. From an old comment of Deimos':p.s. A moderator of /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics also made an excellent post way back in the early days of Tildes where they explained why groups dedicated to politics are typically garbage, and exceedingly difficult to manage without very strict rules, and extremely tight moderation. Which is something I doubt Deimos wants the headache of dealing with.
I think the correct action here is to go into your account settings and click on "Define topic tag filters" and add "politics". That's what I did and I never see any of them.
Wow. I’m dumb. I didn’t even realize that was an option. Just did that and it immediately solved my issue. I might add some other tags and even resubscribe to ~news now. Thanks so much for the help!
As a side note, should I just delete this topic then, or leave it up as a monument to my inability to find basic things?
Leave it. It can help others learn about useful features.
Nah it's pretty easy to miss since when you're looking for ways to block content you look for options like "ignore" or "hide" but "define top tag filters" doesn't make much sense out of context. I think it's mentioned in the new user docs but by the time you need it you've probably forgotten about it. So yeah, definitely keep the post up for others.
The tag filtering system is one of the underrated features on Tildes. People in my experience have been super diligent about tagging posts properly so it's always easy to filter out things you don't want to see.
Personally I made a few filters for particular sources. I think most people like reading and discussing politics, but only if the temperature is turned down. I also try to hit the ignore button on individual links that have a high probability of making me angry, it removes the temptation to revisit.
I did not know about this. Thank you!
I put in filters for "Israel", "Gaza", and "Palestinians".
Social media discussions about the October 7th war have influenced me to hate people I have never hated before - especially the comment authors. I don't need that.
You're going to want
palestineandgaza strip.I started reading your comment and thought you were going to tell me about wanting a "bigger boat". :-)
My only problem with that is that I mostly would like to filter out us politics. It is something I struggled with on reddit as well where I was interested in domestic politics of other countries. Just not the US flood of politics often with the extra flair for the dramatic involved.
I suppose it is better than nothing, though.
This sounds like something that could be addressed with better tagging, perhaps
politics.usabeing applied where relevant and filtering that?Alternatively, if the topic filtering system could be updated to filter tag combinations, such as
politics+usafiltering tags that feature bothpoliticsandusa, that would probably be more widely useful without further complicating existing tagging standards.Yeah there's no easy solution for that, though you can always occasionally click the "view unfiltered" when you're in a better mindset for it.
Hah, that would be the rarest of occurrences. :D
We're explicitly encouraged to post US politics stuff in the weekly recurring thread.
But a lot of users ignore this and post US politics stuff as new topics. Maybe the mods should start enforcing this.
Not really specific to you, but worth noting for those unaware: Tildes doesn't really have moderators. There's Deimos, who's an admin and does all the moderation work, but other than that all we have is a small bucket of folks who can do ancillary work; i.e. tag fixing, topic moving, title editing, and wiki editing. Nothing beyond, and no topic removal.
As for your suggestion itself, I'm softly against. I don't see a big reason to change it, especially when topic tag filtering is available as mentioned above. If you see a topic that you feel would be better off in the weekly thread than posted on its own, I'd say just gently suggest such to the poster. If they agree, they can delete and move the thread themselves. If they don't, no harm done.