Crossposting on Tildes, general thoughts?
It seems like the last real discussion about the subject was about 6 years ago
I am mostly wondering what the thoughts now are on crossposting something in different tildes groups. This was inspired by a few things. Last week I was unsure where to post something and ended up posting it in the most topical tildes group even though previous posts that took off were posted in a different group. Meaning that people that are subscribed to ~comp but not ~life might have missed the post even though they might be interested.
Then there is this post. I was about to post the same link before realizing it was already posted. The post in question is posted in ~games, I would have posted it in ~tech. I feel like the overlap between ~games and ~tech subscribers likely is a bit bigger, but also here I feel like people might potentially be missing out.
I realize this might not be the biggest issue, the majority of people on tildes seem to be subscribed to all groups. But it still, it tickled something in my brain and this is the second time in a short period that I find myself thinking about this.
Ideally, in my mind, this would be solved on a technical level where you can post something in two groups with a consolidated comment section. However, I don't see this happening in the sort term.
Tags sort of cover this, but given they can be anything and quite numerous, browsing through them is not something I personally would ever use or actually address this.
The second-best solution, and the one I'd like to discuss, is to simply cross post and in one of the posts leave a comment linking to the other post to consolidate discussion a bit.
Am I overthinking the issue? Probably. :) But overall, what are peoples thoughts on allowing cross posts between groups? Any real downsides besides double entries in the listing?
As you said, most people seem to be subscribed to all (or most) groups right now. This makes crossposting feel less necessary. You're not likely to see a different kind of response, or reach many more eyes by submitting to multiple groups.
Indeed the community seems to consider submitting the same story/article again to be a repost, even when posting to a different group. They're usually too polite to say it outright, but someone will often say something like "Previously discussed <here>", and the topic may be removed shortly thereafter.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's just the reality of our current size. Currently we're closer in feel to a traditional forum than something like reddit with wholly separate communities. If Tildes continued to grow, I think that would begin to change by necessity, but we're not there yet.
Note: For more discussion on that, see Thoughts on making Tildes groups more independent.
So yes, I don't think crossposts are all that necessary at this time. In most cases I'd say "Just choose the closest group". But I do recognize the problem you're laying out, and I think it can create friction and confusion for submitters. I'd say a technological solution would be the best one in the long-term, but as Tildes is not under active development right now that's not likely to happen.
The low-tech solution would be locking a thread and linking to the same discussion in another group, though locking isn't currently available to regular users (and that's probably a good thing). The same would be possible without locking, as you suggest above, but in all likelihood you would just lead to splitting the discussion.
For a longer-term/technical solution, I can imagine an approach of allowing a user to select multiple groups to broadcast to. In this scenario, each thread would still live in a primary group, but allow - let's call them aliases - to target other relevant groups. If a user is subscribed to multiple groups where a thread were posted, it would still only show up once in their feed, preferring the primary group if the user is subscribed there. If not subscribed to the primary group, a post may still enter their feed if they're subscribed to one of the alias groups. In this case, the post would be marked with a special "Alias" flair to alert users they're being sent to a discussion/group they're not normally subscribed to (and thus the tone/rules might be different).
Pros: This centralizes discussion, allows reaching more interested people, and reduces (but doesn't completely avoid) the "which group?" question.
Cons: It adds complexity to submitting, has some overlap with tagging, and is a potential tool for spammers. A toggle would be required to opt-out of this feature.
On the topic of tags, I'm of the opinion that right now tags are underutilized and honestly kind of useless in their current form. We have a couple people who work really hard to tag every thread, but my guess is that the only use tags get is the occasional search, and hiding some contentious topics like "politics". As a system they have a ton of potential, such as subscribing to individual tags in addition to groups, but that behaviour isn't currently possible and may never be. I don't think their current uses justify the amount of manual labour that goes into maintaining them right now. I think if we were to consider an overhaul to how groups work, that tags deserve a second look, too.
I would love to be able to submit to multiple groups, specifically to both television and movies as I sometimes post articles that are relevant to both. It would be even better if it could appear as one article for people subscribed to both but be shared with all users of both groups. An overarching entertainment group would achieve the same goal.
If it were possible to subscribe to tags, it almost seems like groups could become superfluous (thinking of cases like my gmail inbox where labels replace traditional folders). It pretty neatly solves the problem of "this really fits in multiple places".
It seems like a win-win. Tags get more of a center stage, and we get easier cross posting with no dupes. I haven't really thought through the spamming implications though, or how hard it would be to implement.
Edit: Thinking through this some more, this approach might present a moderation challenge, assuming current moderation is per-group. It would be very difficult to decide who has responsibility for a given post if it appears in multiple tags.
It's an interesting idea, and I've had the same thought. Getting rid of groups and exclusively using tags does solve some problems, though unfortunately it also creates others. For example, it's not realistic for somebody to subscribe to the 200+ niche topics they might find interesting.
Groups act as a larger categorization system for tags, and make onboarding and curation much simpler. You might think of groups as painting in broad strokes, while tags are like using a precision brush. If you painted a wall using only a small brush, it'd take a long time! So the way it's currently set up, the tags-only approach likely wouldn't work very well.
I think we could consider a way to have "primary tags" that are highly-recommended for each new submission. That way people could be auto-subscribed to them, they'd still be used to cluster the majority of threads, and it'd work in basically the same way groups do now. This approach is a lot simpler technically because there's not two overlapping systems.
However, I think there's an important difference here, though it's a little tough to describe. To me, groups aren't just for categorizing content, but they also act to isolate. That isolation is what allows different communities to emerge, cultures to form, and norms to develop. As @hungariantoast suggested, it's why ~tech feels different than ~comp. I think if we completely take down the walls, then we're admitting that Tildes is not a collection of smaller communities, but a larger, shared whole. I know the site already feels that way today so it's might not seem like a major difference, but it's the kind of architectural decision that could affect our long-term direction.
I'm not necessarily for or against this kind of change. I'm just feeling out some of the consequences of what it might mean.
Here's an example for me:
I don't subscribe to ~lgbt anymore. It's not my vibe. However¸ I absolutely want to know about big lgbt-affecting topics, like if some bigot law is making its way through the works.
The group/tag seperation kind of foments the difference between 'posts for lgbt commenters' and 'posts pertaining to lgbt.'
I actually did the same. Like you, I am interested in LGBT issues and want to stay informed, but I found that the vast majority of the conversation was dominated by US culture war topics, especially around trans people. This tends to attract a lot of negativity which ultimately turned me off.
I'd like if I could subscribe to a more even mix of gay, lesbian, NB, and trans news, as well as legal updates, scientific/medical discussions, etc. I'd like to get a better pulse of the community, but without being inflamed about the latest awful thing a Republican said every week.
Instead of unsubscribing, I suppose I could have curated my feed by hiding tags instead. However I don't want to completely hide all threads marked
politicsortransgender, since that will wipe out many other things I am interested in, too. I could campaign for some sort of "incendiary" tag to be put into use, but it feels unfair to ask others to do tagging work just to tailor things to me.I'd previously suggested an idea for algorithmic weighting that allowed you to not just hide certain tags (or groups), but weight them, to affect how often they show up in your feed. This sort of things would let you turn down something like politics, without being completely cut off from it. I think that could be a fair compromise. I know Tildes is generally concerned about magic algorithms, but I feel if we give the levers to the users, that can be a useful and ethical approach.
I've also spoken before about how LLMs are a good candidate for automatically tagging threads, since they can pick out a list of topics and run them against a local database of possible tags. I think that sort of thing could really reduce the manual labour required to allow these sorts of curations. I also know people are tired of hearing about AI, but this is exactly the kind of problem that LLMs are good at.
Of course, everything we're talking about now is just theoretical until such time the website is under active development again. Though I still think it's useful to brainstorm some alternate approaches to get a better understanding of the problem space.
I know you probably didn't mean it that way, but it's worth mentioning that "transgenderism" is derogatory.
Sorry about that, I'd never heard that before. I've updated the text to "trans people" per the suggestion from the article.
Can I ask how long ago you unsubscribed? I've seen pretty much none of that in ~lgbt unless you classify any news about queer people as culture war topics (which I assume you don't, since you say you're interested in seeing queer news). But it's possible it was different back when you were last subbed. In my current experience I'm more likely to encounter "culture war topics" outside of ~lgbt because the kinds of people who start those negative discussions tend to not be subscribed to ~lgbt.
Hi sparks, I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier. At the time I was worried my words might be misinterpreted, as there's a lot of subtext and context to be aware of when discussing this topic, and I don't always know enough to navigate those waters safely (as evidenced by cfab's earlier correction to my comment). I did feel I owed you a response though, so I'm responding now.
I definitely do not consider all topics related to LGBT issues to be "culture war" topics. I know it's not uncommon for conservatives in the United States to label things that way, but that seems like very outmoded thinking. Most of these topics I wouldn't even consider to be "political", in the usual sense of the word. Insurance coverage for gender-affirming care should not be political. Tampons in public bathrooms should not political. These are simply services that benefit humans.
What I was referring to in my previous comment was the war part of the culture war. More specifically, it's the Twitter takedowns, the targeted memes, the caricatures of others, the clickbait videos ("defeating LIBERALS with FACTS and LOGIC"), the dishonest or miscontextualized reporting, and the general demonization of others. That's what gets me down. It's what makes me pull back.
I fully recognize that the vast majority of that vitriol is coming out of right-wing communities. I'm definitely not trying to "both sides" this issue, or place myself above it all. It does have ways of bubbling up in any concentrated community, though. It seems difficult to participate in the discussions and news - even on Tildes - without also being exposed to the war. It's baked into all the context, and colours our discourse whether we realize it or not. It's visible even in the cautiousness of yours and cfab's comments ("you probably didn't mean..."), because even with the principle of charity, there's always the other possibility: you might have meant. We've all learned to be guarded.
I want to state very clearly that I don't believe that trans people, or other LGBT members are perpetuating this culture war. In fact, they are the victims of it. They are being targeted as part of a rallying cry to help enflame voters. Politicians have long-realized that by exploiting people's ignorances and insecurities, they can blame an outgroup as a scapegoat for all of society's problems. In the past the target was often followers of the wrong religion, or those born into the wrong skin colour. Today, it's those with the wrong gender identity.
Of course, the major difference from those past conflicts is that new technologies serve to make mass communications extremely rapid and hyper-optimized for spread. Algorithms then do the work of amplifying and reinforcing those messages. This repeats until lies and misrepresentations poison all discussion. It's why a legitimate topic like critical legal studies can no longer be discussed without preprogrammed responses and extreme bias. It's also why my mom believes that children are identifying as cats and dogs at school. She isn't a hateful person - she's just been lied to.
So, that's the part of the culture war I don't like. It smothers all legitimate discussion and leaves only resentment. I don't really know what the solution is, either. I recognize it's not reasonable to ask that people take abuse without giving any back. But I also don't think it will do much good if they do. Adding fuel to the fire doesn't help when the fire is at your own feet.
One positive thing I can say is that representation does seem to work, and we're seeing more and more of it today. I've argued before that simply exposing people to new ideas will help them become more comfortable with those ideas over time. We saw this in the 90s and early 2000s with better gay representation in media, and are seeing it today with better trans representation. I think that's a great start. Knowing a trans person in real life or seeing them on TV can demystify some of the ignorances that bad actors were taking advantage of, and makes it harder to dehumanize them.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question and explains my thoughts a little more clearly. I appreciate many of your comments on the site and felt you deserved a reply. For what it's worth, I did decide to resubscribe to ~lgbt after reading your comment and so far it's been fine. Maybe when I unsubscribed last time, it was just a particularly charged up month. We'll see, but I'm feeling optimistic.
Offtopic, but what on earth is going on with that funky-ass comma
I was futzing around with a new android keyboard, one that uses lots of gesture swipes for characters, and I definitely have been typoing a lot more unicode now.
Well, it sort of would, but I realized that we would just be recreating Reddit and its subreddits under a different name. Which would come with a lot of the same issues Reddit has.
afaik there is no separation between groups when it comes to moderation -- both the limited tagging and re-titling abilities some users have and the actual moderation abilities only Deimos has are applied across the entire site.
Another challenge with that is that tags are much more fluid and not necessarily applied in the same way. It's one of the reasons why tags barely register for me on Tildes, the one thing I do with them is filtering out politics.
Discovery would also be an issue, similar to subreddit discovery, where you wouldn't know a tag is there unless you are actively looking for it.
Of course, you can make a listing of all tags used together with the amount of posts in them, similar to groups.
But, while typing this out, I also realized that you would basically have reinvented subreddits. Which includes the moderation question you also noticed.
I think there would have to be changes to how the site handles cross-posts before doing this, simply because at the moment cross-posting would look repetitive and spammy to anyone subscribed to both the groups involved -- with such a high number of users subscribed to all groups, that's a lot of people.
Do you think it'd be a useful compromise to have a given thread moved to another ~, keeping with it all the votes and comments? That way people who had already seen/voted/commented on the thread might know they'd been a part of that one and can jump back in, but give the topic a second chance to those in the new ~ who hadn't? That gets around the need to have more than one post, but it might be a flawed idea. Just a thought.
This already happens when someone posts something in a group when another might be more appropriate, it just usually happens relatively early in a post's lifecycle. Personally I think some sort of cross-posting functionality where a post is in both groups but only shows up once with a unified comments section would have to be implemented for it to really work.
(This comment is mostly a raw stream of thoughts because I want to post these ideas but don’t have time right now to write a “proper comment”. Might delete later)
On one hand I think tildes is still too small for “true crossposting” and users should just subscribe to all groups by default unless they have a strong disinterest in a group. Even then, I think tag filtering is a better solution right now to not see content you don’t want to see.
On the other hand, it’s kind of the only solution at the moment.
I think tildes is already at the size where this needs to be addressed. My suggestion would be this:
For any topic you want to cross post, tag that topic with tags for the other groups you want it to show up it. If you post to ~comp but want the topic to show up in ~life as well, then just add the ‘life’ tag and the post should also show up in that group and anyone who subscribes to ~life could see it.
That solution maintains a single “canonical post” in which all comments are centralized in one discussion, under one specific link. I think this is a good immediate solution for tildes.
However, I’m unsure it’s a good solution for the future. Some groups are explicitly distinct and “set apart” from others. ~comp and ~tech exist as different groups for a reason and, especially in that specific example, I’m keen to maintain that separation in the future. There have certainly been times on Tildes in the last (pre 2023, to be fair) when you could tell the discussion on a highly technical topic was worse because it was posted to ~tech and not ~comp. I hope that doesn’t sound mean. I think it’s fair to say that higher quality more in depth discussion is more difficult to proliferate when the crowd your post is exposed to is more general and less specifically knowledgeable. Like I would never expect to have a riveting conversation about the upcoming memory safety features of C++26 with someone who isn’t a programmer.
Then there is ~lgbt. I won’t (poorly) rehash the valid concerns of users in the past about users coming into ~lgbt and affecting conversations there negatively by, for example, denying the real/lived experiences of some of the lgbt users here.
To summarize: some groups are meant to be distinct and set apart from others. Some groups would certainly be “watered down” or “overwhelmed” if they were not somehow able to limit their exposure to the rest of the site, especially to users who otherwise would never participate in those groups.
For that reason, I think in the future, merely cross posting by tags and centralizing all comments under a single discussion would be bad idea and have a negative affect on this community. I don’t think right now cross posting by tag would be a bad idea, nor do I think that, if implemented, it would have to be a feature we would need to scrap at a later date. I just think it would be important to recognize and respect that some groups might prefer to be more “set apart” in the future and the future moderators of those groups should have the easy ability to un-cross-post from other groups when they want to.
Finally, whether cross posting by tag is ever actually implemented as a feature or not, it’s not like “manual cross posting” like we could do now, like you have talked about in this topic, will ever go away. I don’t think doing that now is necessary, I think cross posting by tags would be better for the immediate future if implemented, but I think manual cross posting might become more important later on.
Hope this isn’t too much of a mess
No more than the post you commented under ;)
Perfectly readable and easy to follow line of thought.
I do agree with the concerns around separation. One thing that did cross my mind when thinking about technical solutions is that it might be “abused” by people wanting to cast a wider net. Not necessary because the post in question fits all those categories best.
Once you have more time, what are your thoughts on the non-technical approach?
Meaning just posting topics to different groups right now, and adding a comment in each to link them together?
On one hand I’m unsure that, for any two groups, the amount of additional users you’d reach by cross posting from one group to another would be very much right now.
On the other hand, why not try? What’s the actual harm? I recall some once-infamous words along the lines of “this site has been way too stable for an alpha”. So go ahead, post away!
Yup! I find the rest of the discussion also very interesting, but also wanted to poll a little bit if people would be opposed to cross posting under the current system.
The attitudes about gender identity have evolved a lot. If someone wants to crosspost s/he should feel free to go right ahead without worrying about negativity. :-)
I am not quite sure if I should label this noise, upvote because it is funny or do both... :)
The "joke" label exists for precisely these circumstances imo
This is a good question. I've definitely made some posts that I felt that they could fit in multiple tildes and wavered on which one to the point I'd have the "submit post" for each tilde open in different tabs. My recent post about RiffTrax being taken down on YouTube, for instance, is in ~movies but could also go to ~tech since the faults of the YouTube copyright strike system is a major discussion point. In fact, I still wonder if I should have posted it there instead.
I don't know what the neatest solution would be. I think that it'd be best to have one centralized discussion topic rather than true cross-posting like on reddit, as the size of the site would easily lead to clutter. I wonder if we could maybe tag some stuff as multiple tildes rather than submitting directly to each one. Or if we try to expand the current tagging system, maybe post to one with tags for others, and have some setting for users to enable "show crossposts from other tildes" like how we can choose to show subgroups. So theoretically if you're looking at ~tech, you can see crossposts from other tildes if you enable it, but they won't show up on the homepage.
I was thinking about this the other day. The article about same-sex penguins was posted over in ~enviro, which I can completely understand, but I'd sent the article to my queer friend and we'd had a completely different discussion about it than one revolving around it being animal/science related. We talked more about sociology and psychology (his field) and how we're evolving our open-mindedness of animal relationships in tandem with human relationships. Which is not to say that's not science, but it's not "~science," either.
After that conversation I wondered if that same article being posted in ~lgbt would've garnered different discussion simply from the implication/intention of where it was posted to. And I feel like some articles, maybe this being a lite example of that, could exist in both spaces and through that positioning offer guidance on at least two different conversations.
I don't think it would be a bad idea to have some kind of forking of article discussions. But I understand that some people will see cross-posting as an ugly solution. So what about a way to request that a post that didn't garner much discussion be moved after X amount of days to a new place and the requester(s) can try to jump-start discussion there?
In my case, fwiw, I'd just already talked about the penguins with someone else, and without a prompt wouldn't have delved into thoughts about how animal mating behaviors were used to insist that we were "born this way" and thus it's fine because it's natural and not a choice. Which, not that it's wrong but as a bi person I have feelings about as a strategy.
Mostly I'm just a little sad that he died.
But this is why I think initial posts and comments are so important.
That said, I just browse the whole "front page"... Do so many people browse by the individual ~ ?
I don't browse them individually, but I am not subscribed to all tildes groups either. Mostly because a few of them mostly get posts about things I am not really that interested in. But that means that I also sometimes miss a few posts that are interesting and would have fit in groups I do subscribe to.
Just to not spam replies everywhere. In an other comment you mention this
Groups do register for me (tags rarely do though) and do influence my expectations for discussion a little and also shape how I might approach commenting. If a more technical subject is posted outside ~tech or ~comp I tend to notice that I need to include more context and more background, for example. If I don't I tend to get more confused replies or people replying in such a way that it is clear that my actually message went past them.
I just tap ignore post I suppose, or ignore it. Lots of things don't interest me. Cross posting in whatever format wouldn't really impact me one way or the other as long as it didn't make a duplicate post I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it's less about people browsing an individual ~ and more about the expectations they have going into a discussion based on where it's posted. First posts definitely set people's expectations, too. In both cases people of a given persuasion are more likely to comment if they think that a topic is being approached from an angle that relates to their own perspective. People are less likely to engage in discourse if they feel that the topic is being broached in a way counter to their views or in a negative light that they'd have difficulty arguing politely with. Which means that some discussions don't happen.
I think in some corners of the internet we've gotten used to breathing a sigh of relief when the immediate comments we see are in some way agreeing with our own positions or gut reactions to the title/article. But that also means we're grateful not to see those other comments, which in turn means we're not arguing against it or taking the time to change an uninformed view. Not that I am arguing for freedom of that kind of speech, but that's what people might think of first. But the other side of that is that people aren't coming into a topic and saying "hey, I relate to this because of a thing that's outside of the boundaries of the category/tagging of the article." Which means their voice isn't being heard and people aren't commiserating with it.
I understand the point, but I don't think I'd have been any more insightful if the penguins were posted elsewhere, because I didn't know where they were posted to begin with.
That rarely registers to me. Not never, but rarely.
Sure. I may not have gone into it in my original post, but I'd been thinking about posting thatvarticle and just never got around to it. Had I had the time to even make a comment, I'd have talked about how nice it is to see an article like that being posted in tge mainstream and people hardly blink. Twenty years ago, even today to some extent, there's a lot ofnpushback in the scientific community when it comes to attributing emotions or relationship identity to animals outside of what is considered heteronormative. My goal would've been to be uplifting and maybe people would've had something theyvl related to and commented.
But anyway, we're getting far away from my point. I brought up this whole thing as an example of why it might be useful to try moving a post without much traction to another ~ if and only if someone requested it. It might breathe new life into the topic without having to make it a "crosspost."
Just wanted to mention Frans de Waal's book on gender in primates called Different. It was eye opening to me. De Waal's points to how incorrect or incomplete observations of primate behavior had been used to justify theories about male supremacy in humans. It's a fascinating book with a lot of detail about recent observations of both male and female and gender non-conforming primates