It is time to do away with the empty recurring weekly threads
It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads.
Those who do not wish to see topics on those events should unsubscribe from the relevant keywords for their own browsing, as all of us with other interests unsubscribe from those keywords.
There is no flood of this content that makes gathering things in weekly threads relevant.
No content is drowning on tildes, as no group has issues with too many posts.
It's uninviting to folks who are actually contributing submissions to the site to be told they shouldn't be making these, but should rather make them in empty, dead posts. That is not fair to them, nor is it a good look for the site.
These dead recurring threads should be done away with. They serve no function. The experiment has shown they are not needed, are not used and are simply auto-generated robotic clutter.
(This comment will focus on the weekly recurring topic for US politics, but I don't think any other recurring topics on the site should currently be removed either.)
The point of having a dedicated, weekly US politics thread isn't to hide away posts for people who don't want to see them, it's to act as a containment area and steer the community away from constantly posting and arguing about an extremely toxic subject.
US political news has proven to be cognitohazardous for Tildes. Almost all of the worst turmoil this community has been through has come from arguments over it. The recurring thread exists to (mostly) contain US politics in a single area, where it's easier to moderate. This helps prevent the subject from taking over the rest of the site, especially ~news, like it has in the past. That is also why there has never been a dedicated ~politics group. The point is to discourage the constant over-posting of US politics and the endless arguments that it generates. The warning included in the recurring topic is a scar of those endless arguments and past turmoil:
The weekly US politics thread does a good job of what it's designed to do. People who still want to share something they read on the subject can post it in that week's recurring topic. Those topics aren't empty. They regularly contain plenty of links people share and discussions on them. If you search for all topics tagged
recurring.weeklyin ~news:https://tildes.net/~news?tag=recurring.weekly&per_page=100
And search the page with
Weekly US politics news and updates thread, you'll see that the US politics topic (and the Israel-Hamas topic) is not devoid of participation.So, I disagree that the recurring US politics thread should be done away with. I think its implementation has lead to an overall healthier community.
I do agree that special topics like megathreads, or the automated recurring topics, should get new features that make them easier to navigate and monitor, for users interested in following them.
Finally, I'd like to note that containment isn't the point of all the recurring topics. The "what did you do this week" recurring topic in ~talk was originally started to encourage more casual discussion, sharing, and camaraderie in the community, for example.
I participated in the discussion in 2020 after a single user had in 2019 taken it upon themself to make weekly threads specifically about electioneering for the presidential election, not for US politics as a whole.
The overwhelming feedback in the discussion at the time in 2020 was that a tag was appropriate, so those who don't want this content, could use the tags that have been used consistently for years at that point.
But a different single user made weekly threads regarding all US politics despite the meta-discussion in the fall of 2020 not leading to that consensus.
Then these threads were quickly made official. Looking at even the first threads from October/November 2020, it worked: Those who wanted to stop people from discussing US politics on tildes ended up with a segregation link-dump of little-to-no interaction from the community.
That's four years ago. This is tildes in 2024.
We do not have issues with the volume of US political content or with content relating to the other large topics dominating world politics right now.
Tildes does not have issues with the conversations taking place in threads on these topics.
Other topics are the ones where problematic comments have to be removed.
It's not reasonable to preemptively depress conversations on specific issues to "steer the community away from constantly posting and arguing about" these issues.
It's especially unreasonable to suppress US political discussion on tildes in the run-up period to the time every four years that Americans get to vote for their president.
Isn't having a decent place to discuss US politics and other important topics like LGBT-issues, mental health, climate change, research and the like precisely the point of the site? That we can build a community that can handle these things, or if we have assholes who can't mange, those people get removed from the conversation?
There’s likely going to be an increase in postable links and discussions in the run up to the US presidential election.
Just as a counterpoint, I think it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone outside of the US would want to be subjected to this predictable increase in what I view as niche topics of discussion.
I think keeping it contained to a thread does double duty — if you’re interested in it, you have a single place that keeps everything together and easy to find! And if you’re not interested, it doesn’t take up more and more of the top slots of discussion, it’s a single thread when I’m looking at the homepage and scrolling past posts.
If you aren’t interested, just filter out the politics.USA tag, or whatever is being used.
I think megathreads make sense to consolidate things like breaking news. For example when the crowdstrike thing happened, news will be coming out in fits and starts for a while. It makes sense to put that in a megathread. They don’t make sense as a “I don’t want to setup a tag filter, so throw all the trash in that bucket”. I understand that is a straw man of what you are saying, but that’s how the megathreads feel to me.
I also should add that this opinion only applies to the megathreads about news. The discussion based megathreads don’t have this issue. For example the mental health megathread is wonderful and should absolutely stay.
A megathread functionally breaks the mental model of a link aggregator. I find a link and want to post on tildes. I need to pick a title, some tags, and a subtildes. Oh but if there is a megathread that loosely pertains to the subject, now I need to both know about that megathread, and then post it as a comment in that thread.
A megathread is a collection of links that are loosely related around some general category. But we already have a way to create a bunch of links loosely related to a category: subtildes. Why are we creating an entirely new paradigm when we have a solution that exists and works well?
I personally am interested, albeit in bursts, which is probably why I like the megathreads so much. Most of the time when I pick up my phone, I’m not looking for US politics discussions and articles, but sometimes I’m really in the mood and I like the megathreads because I know it’s a big bucket of the stuff, and I can just chain article after article and feel like I’m “caught up” and better informed.
Just as an example, (and for context I live in Australia) on the first day of the Trump assassination, I had no idea it had happened, and when colleagues were talking about it at work, I was a little lost. But that evening on the train home, I found all the articles about it (iirc some had been posted outside the megathread, which makes sense given the significance of the news) and read up on it, and the next day in the office I was better informed about the details that had been confirmed than most of my coworkers and was able to answer some of their questions.
I guess I could achieve this same result by filtering out that tag from my main news feed, and then selecting that specific tag and viewing only those threads when I’m in the mood, but I wouldn’t know how to do that (or if it’s possible) on the app I’m using - Three Cheers.
It doesn’t appear that the third-party app supports search yet, but on the website it’s as simple as searching “politics.usa.” Tag filters are disabled during searches.
This requires them a) to be tagged b) also runs into other issues. For example, when the tag isn't quite as useful given the overall subject. This thread is a good example, I have politics as a filtered tag. This thread has that tag, so I didn't see it until I was looking at someone's profile and noticed this post.
The discussion has mostly focussed on political megathreads, but suggests doing away with them entirely. If that latter discussion had happened, I would have liked to be part of that.
There hasn't been a single Weekly US Politics megathread that didn't get any comments or posts since June, as far as I can tell. The one for this week is currently empty because it was posted an hour ago. The one from last week currently has five different articles posted in it.
This single thread shows that the activity would be much larger and is much more appreciated than any of the empty, recurring threads:
I think we should trust users, their votes and their comments: Anything gets a better response and more exposure than it does when it's relegated to die in any of the empty, recurring threads.
Again, all arguments against removal seem to boil down to either a) Not wanting these topics to gain exposure, or b) not liking this content, or c) a combination of the two.
The numbers and threads speak for themselves. They do not do what they were supposed to do.
Generating activity is not inherently virtuous. That thread is also a counter example, there's more votes for the comment about people not wanting it to be a top level topic than there is for the topic itself.
The whole idea of tildes is sharing good content so it reaches an intended audience. For a submitter, the whole idea is generating activity of quality.
Not getting any votes, views or discussion by being posted in an empty, recurring thread is clearly not in the interests of any submitter, nor a tildes user.
The exception only exists for a tildes user who does not like a specific type of content covered by one of the empty recurring threads.
Anyone who posts in one of the threads should be told that they may want to post a stand-alone submission to get the best possible response and traction.
That just shows that there is no constructive function of these defunct threads.
If nothing else I'd support getting rid of the megathreads to get rid of the spammy comments on every standalone post about US politics insisting that OP post in the megathread instead.
Imagine making your first thread and having that as your welcome!
Especially when it's demonstrably really. really bad advice.
I don't want to speculate at the intentions behind making these comments.
If you want discussion on your submission, you should under no circumstances post it in the empty, weekly recurring threads.
This post has more votes than the comment you're referring to. Seems there's disagreement!
I'd also like to mention I like to see us politics stuff but I don't go in the thread because I can't just see what I want to read or not (I have to sift through it myself). I'd rather it be seperate topics based on the news story than have to just sort through one thread to find what I'm interested in.
And that's just an example of some one who may want to read the topic and how having a bunch of different sub topics in one thread turns me off from reading it.
Yeah, having a megathread actually removes the ability to take advantage of a lot of the useful features of standalone topics. I can ignore a standalone topic, but I can't ignore one thread in the megathread. I also can't tell if new comments are for a thread I want to pay attention to or not within a megathread without just reading them all.
I disagree with this.
There is a already a lot of interesting stuff that gets passed over on Tildes. Containing some of the 'junk food' threads in megathreads is worth the cost in my opinion.
Except that it doesn't practically work to do that, since news about US politics already gets posted as standalone topics and the megathreads are underused. At best, it's doing a very poor job containing "junk food" -- and I'm not sure it's fair to contend that anything relating to these two topics is the "junk food" of tildes. Some of the most interesting discussions have happened in standalone threads about these topics.
This is partly because people try to only post the most interesting or significant political news to the front page
That may well be true, but I don't really see evidence that the news posted in the megathreads is of significantly lower quality or would have lower quality discussions if they were standalone posts. If anything, I think hiding them in the megathread lowers the quality of the discussion regardless of how interesting the topic itself is, since it means so many people who may be interested in the post may miss it entirely because they don't regularly browse the megathread.
True. It's a theory but no evidence.
This is an idiosyncratic site, designed by one person. If we were free to create groups as users, I would be tempted to create ~politics but I am not going to give up the good things I find here over one pain point.
I think it would likely be hard to distinguish whether to post in ~politics or ~news anyway, so honestly I think having a politics tag is more effective in terms of allowing people to block politics from their front page. But ofc that does require knowing where to find tag filters, which is admittedly not super intuitive.
I think right now is exactly the wrong time to get rid of the US politics thread, but I can see your point on the other thread.
Revisit the US politics thread in December, but if anything, right now we should be encouraging anything that isn't full width headline level on that topic to be in the megathread, imo.
No-one is using the thread. Therefore it doesn't do anything, unless the whole point of the thread is having people not submit content to tildes that they otherwise would by nudging them away from posting US political content.
I don't think the site should lead people away from posting content they feel is relevant, especially not in the short window every two years where Americans actually get a vote to decide on who their national politicians are.
If anything, getting rid of the thread is more important now than it will be in December.
I'm new as of the most recent reddit mass exodus, but I have obsessively read past meta discussions in ~tildes and my takeaway from that reading project is that Deimos and some others do want to nudge us away from talking about politics here for the most part.
I'm American but I want to respect that this site is a Canadian nonprofit organization and that many users are not Americans.
I also want to not increase the moderation load on Deimos.
At minimum I would like it if the megathreads could be pinned as another user suggested. I regret that megathreads make it impossible for links to be tagged. From my perspective, a politics group would be a good thing but I am already happy with Tildes as a site and a community.
These recurring threads do sometimes serve as a prompt. It doesn’t always work.
Do we need to be prompted about the US election, the Ukraine war or the Palestine/Israel conflict?
These topics are pervasive anywhere links or news is shared. There are developments and updates every single day.
There aren’t recurring Ukraine war threads anymore. I think a megathread would have been a good idea for recent developments. We ended up posting in other topics for this, because some of us do prefer not posting top level for minor updates.
I don’t want to post middle east news at top level, so I would probably go back to starting megathreads manually.
Are there really though?
Perhaps the reason there isn't much engagement on these topics is that they are largely repetitive and just not that interesting. Depressing, sure. But interesting? Not convinced. Just because something is in "the news" doesn't make it interesting or worthy of people's time to discuss. Even if you live in the relevant countries - which the majority of people don't - it's very much the same things happening day to day.
Occasionally in one of those spheres something unusual happens and is interesting to talk about - but that will end up with it's own thread(s) anyway.
I think this is shortsighted.
Those threads exist to help compile that kind of information, and often those sorts of subjects go in bursts. We're very clearly about to have the US election vomit out all sorts of information that some people might want to discuss but others won't want flooding the site.
I know you can "unsubscribe" but for those like myself who might want to read that information some days and not others, I don't think that works as well.
Further just from a moderation standpoint, it helps consolidate a LOT of the harder to handle conversation, and leaves those that are handling that with some easy spots to check, as opposed to digging through tags.
There is literally one person handling that. Only Deimos can do that kind of moderation, and the most effective way to get his attention is to mark a comment as malice. If anything, fewer eyes on these megathreads means people are less likely to see toxic comments and mark them as malice to be removed.
Furthermore, having everything consolidated in a megathread means that I actually can't ignore any topic in the megathread if I'm interested in any other topic in the megathread, whereas if they were standalone posts I could ignore the one that's bothering me and continue to see the one I'm interested in.
I think the community needs to have this kind of meta conversation. What is the purpose of the megathreads and what should go there is worth talking about. I think personally it's hard to keep seeing them since they are weekly and posts fall off most of the filters before that. Even at 7 days, they'll fall down the page(s) pretty far by the end of the week. I'm not sure the format works great for Tildes' setup.
I don't mind the threads existing but I'm very frustrated by the frequent comments about how a post should have gone into a megathread. To the point where more than half the engagement is under that comment which itself doesn't engage with the post.
It's off topic and increases the likelihood of that post consistently popping to the top of the page.
I acknowledge a possibly irrational level of annoyance at those comments, but there's not an "ignore comment" feature so I can only mark them as off topic or noise and move on. There is an ignore post feature. I think a "hey there's a megathread for posts like this" would be better taken from people actually participating in the conversation about the post, or letting the post whither away and die. Or if there's genuine conversation, great. That's the purpose of posting it.
Anyway that's my 2¢ for whatever it's worth
Megathreads only work to foster discussion while keeping it contained if megathreads are discoverable. On Tildes, they are not because they are not pinned, so they quickly drop down the page which exacerbates the discoverability problem. Subreddits do not have this problem because subreddits pin the current megathread to the top.
So at the moment, Tildes megathreads mostly function to stifle the discussion of hot topics. If that is the intention, well I can understand that. But let's not kid ourselves that it's doing the people that want to discuss politics a favor by consolidating the discussions. Those megathreads get way less engagement than they would if individual submissions were allowed.
EDIT: I like the lack of a daily dose of politics here on Tildes.
The UI makes it very easy to unsubscribe from groups - it does not do the same for tags. If the suggestion is tag muting should replace the megathreads, there should be one click muting of tags from the tag page, if not the submission page.
Currently tag hiding is 3 pages deep in settings in a manual one tag per line UI.
I agree it could be more clear how to filter out individual tags. That may require programming. Stopping these pointless threads is better than not stopping them, even without those good and useful changes.
For ease, the location is here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
However, this is the same for all topics. There is no reason why a few topics should be penalized because a small number of vocal people are not interested in those specific topics.
I support the continued compartmentalisation of those topics because:
There is no issue with these topics having taken over communities on tildes. It is not happening even though the threads are not being used by anyone for anything. If the actual argument made here is that these threads are needed to devalue specific types of content and try to nudge people away from posting the content they'd otherwise share, then someone should make those arguments. I hope people aren't of that opinion.
These are not the topics that cause removed comments on tildes. Topics relating to identity politics are. If this is a problem, then deal with those issues, not unrelated, unaffected topics that have been segregated.
These are two of many completely normal news topics. There are more than 50 conflicts happening in the world right now. There are issues of hunger, crime and drug reporting and all sorts of other news-related content that is distressing. Anyone who is afraid of being distressed should under no circumstances follow any news-related topics. Arguments relating to distress or trigger-warnings are not germane; they relate to the entire body of content in these groups, not these pieces of news specifically.
Preemptively dealing with only these topics is only a matter of dis-preference of content relating specifically to these events. Again, that is best resolved through users who have those content preferences setting up their own tildes accounts to match their preferences.
Yet clearly these threads do have posts in them when they're not one hour old, so they are being used. This is a little bit like the old "what do the IT team even do? The computers aren't broken, there's no work for them" question. Or "why do we need guardrails, people aren't falling off this platform"
The topic that you link elsewhere in this thread (and indeed a lot of the politics topics that get the strongest "why didn't you use the megathread" response) were posted in ~misc , not ~news.
This feels like the best way to summarise my thoughts on the topic. Also as for timing mentioned elsewhere in the thread surely the US election coming up is the time we most want to contain US news since it's covering everywhere else on the internet and some of us don't want that.
I don't think your comment is made in good faith. I feel a responsibility in saying that out loud, as the whole philosophy of tildes is assuming good faith on others.
Here are all the weekly recurring threads: https://tildes.net/~news?order=new&tag=recurring.weekly&period=all
My claim is that none of these threads show activity through the course of a week that in any way means it's reasonable to have a designated recurring thread.
We're talking averages of less than 3 submissions a day over the course of a week. And that's at the very extreme outlier-weeks.
Again, if someone is making the argument that these threads serve a function because they mean people are making less contributions on these topics and that's good because these topics shouldn't be posted about on tildes, someone should make those arguments.
I don't see anyone making those arguments. Therefore, I'm assuming that we all want the conversations relating to the topics covered by the recurring threads to be he best possible for those interested in those topics.
It follows that others who don't want to see this content can just filter it out for themselves.
My comment that kicked off this chain was about why these topics shouldn't be encouraged. "I hope people aren't of that opinion." is not a point that can be discussed, simply a statement of difference of opinion, hence why I had not responded to it.
I think I've stated why I feel that way, and you've stated why you feel otherwise, and I've also stated at the top of the chain why I feel tag filtering is inadequate for my goals, even if you feel it is a more appropriate tool.
As a result, there's little productive in continuing this thread if you don't feel my engagements are in good faith, so I'll be dropping from this topic now.
To me, straw-manning views different to my own in that way isn't discussing in good faith.
I did not want to assume bad faith on your behalf or that of others in the thread.
If someone argues that yes, their tastes are more important than those of other tildes users, so they should be able to force their preferences on the rest of the community, they should write out those arguments.
Because those arguments betray paternalistic values I think many will find unappealing and do not want to be associated with.
Especially if the idea is repressing the views on topics concerning embattled minorities in Israel and Palestine.
Or the authoritarian whiff that comes with wanting to suppress political discussion on a platform that wishes to encourage those who choose not to partake in conversations because they're bullied away from being open about their personal politics on other discussion sites online.
If the idea behind the recurring is sapping the life out of all discussions of US politics and Israel/Palestine, to me those aims are not good. If the goal is having people linking their links in a designated space and not having discussions, then the threads are working as intended.
I'm not going to assume that destructive intent on behalf of others, especially unless they actually say that's what they want to accomplish.
I agree. I don't really post, but every now and then there is an election-related post I think about sharing but I know it's going to be ignored in the weekly thread. We can always go back if it gets out of control.
I'm perfectly content with the weekly threads, but I'd like to bring attention to a different problem with them: unless your time-based filter allows posts "from last 7 days" or "from all time", the weekly threads will disappear from your front page before the week is up. (Unfortunately, I don't know what the default time-based filter is -- I think it might have been "from 3 days" when I signed up, but it seems to be "from all time" when logged out.)
I suspect many users (including some users who reproached for not posting in the weekly threads) have shorter time-based filters and therefore do not see the weekly threads for most of the week. I think there is some evidence for this claim if you look in the weekly threads: most activity occurs in the first couple days.
If we're going to keep the weekly threads, it might be worth exempting them from the time-based filters so that people will be more inclined to use them.
This is a really good point, and it feels like knowing the default time window is foundational to discussions here and the decisions (if any) that get made as a result.
Can any new users chime in? What is the default time window set to for new accounts?
Asked a friend who I gave an invite to but hasn't really posted. They confirmed it's all time for them by default, too.
Logged out in an incognito tab it was "Activity" for "all time"
Which would bump things down if unused.
I usually hang out at 7 days of All Activity
Either drop something unused for a day off the first couple of pages.
Multiple weeks I've seen political posts posted outside the megathread on Sundays, the least likely day to see the megathread, with the frustrating (to me) "post this in the megathread" comments.
I am having a hard time finding where I can edit the time based filters. I see in settings where filters are, but it appears to be only related to tags?? I must be missing something...
Up on the top of the main page is Activity, Comments, New etc and a drop-down box with all-time or 3/7/whatever days
Ooooooh yes, okay. Thanks!!
Some recurring threads have activity, others do not. Some threads with little activity may eventually have more. Some are valuable even with few activity due to having themes people will complain about on the main page. Video thread comes to mind. A lot of people really hates videos.
Threads make it easier for people to filter out subjects that are sensitive or upsetting to them. They could use tag filtering, but for one reason or another, they don't.
I filter "recurring" myself. I still look at these posts, I just don't wanna see them all the time.
I think this topic is principally about topic-based megathreads, namely the "Israel-Hamas war" megathread and the US politics megathread. The others I think have demonstrated more value, since much of the content therein would not be suitable for individual posts, but these ones only serve to poorly sequester content that could just be standalone posts with relevant tags. Putting these in a megathread doesn't actually do much to filter out their subjects for people who don't want to see them, since some news in those categories is big enough to merit a standalone topic and the megathreads themselves don't see a ton of use overall.
I see. It might be valuable to have a more explicit post to talk specifically about those recurring megathreads.
I think most of the discussion here is specifically about them already, but yeah, it's unclear from the title and topic for sure.
Personally, I'd prefer if megathreads were more usable. Some of the issues mentioned could be solved by new features. Notifications on particular reply chains, pinning recurring topics, default sort by new on megathreads, etc.
Is it reasonable to do a bunch of development of the site to make these topics less inferior to use than just regular submissions, or should we rather just go back to using regular submissions where all these features already exist?
If the site were drowning in content and it was hard to navigate due to the volume of submissions, then these multi-threads would serve a purpose.
We can cross that bridge if we ever come to it.
I generally am against recurring megathreads, except for things that are typically not suitable for the site (such as the pet pic thread). I think one-off megathreads are useful for noisy events (like the Trump assassination attempt).
Even as someone interested in US politics, I am not interested in tracking down the megathread to read about it. I would much rather see the topics among others on the site since that’s how the site is really supposed to work.
Tag filtering is incredibly easy to set up, and using topics for their intended purpose has the benefit of allowing searches and filters to work as intended. If I want to see US politics topics but not those about war for example, I could filter out the war tag and have those excluded from my main feed. This does not work on megathreads since the comments cannot be tagged.
I somewhat agree with OP. Somewhat because I am not sure what happens if the automated threads go away.
My experience so far has been:
For these reasons I would prefer for them to go away. However, I would then worry whether more topics I have no interest in would start taking up the front page e.g. I don't care about your dog pics (but cats are cool).
I would like these threads to go away:
But on the other hand I would be interested in posts on these topics about only very specific things...but seriously nothing else even somewhat related:
Anything else and I'd be wishing for the annoying auto-posted threads back again, so I don't know what the best option is.
Maybe just leave it as is.
The one recurring thread that I think needs to be done away with is the Game Deals thread. Deals are often valid for less than a week, and as Wario64 continues to show (At least I assume, I have given up the dead bird site,) they happen at all times of the day every day of the week. Forcing deals to a single thread defeats the point of even having deal posts since there's little to no visibility here when a new deal drops and for the best deals you're often going to miss out if you're not there in the first brief moments of a deal being live. Which all in turn means that the motivation for people to try and share deals here where they'll be buried in a week old thread that may disappear tomorrow is basically zero.
I rarely see any of those threads with more than a comment or two outside of Steam Sale weeks, and those are typically just people talking about what they like in the sale that everyone and their dog already knows is happening, which I guess is fair enough since it's nice to hear what people are enjoying out there, but it's basically useless as a means of finding good deals. Hell, the whole ethos of this site where in-depth content is supposed to be king basically makes deal posts as they're intended to function a non-starter here because they're shallow AF and only intended to share one piece of timely information and maybe possibly follow that up with an indication when the deal has ended. There's nothing discussion-wise happening in 90% of posts to deals forums, that's not the point. Either allow individual deal posts with appropriate labels, or do away with the mega threads, the middle ground we're in now is basically worse than worthless because it's clutter that reminds me of better times with sites I've since given up that take deals seriously.
I think I both agree and disagree. I check the Save Point thread every time I see there's a new comment. I personally don't check Steam and Fanatical every day, and sometimes it highlights games I knew of but didn't think to wishlist. Most deals last a few days, so it kind of makes sense to have a weekly post for them all. Also, they seem to average at least 10 comments, even if a lot of those comments are replying to a specific deal.
You make a good point about time sensitive deals though, I've missed out on a couple of free games that way. If it's a single day or two days only, I can support it getting a standalone post. But given the frequency of sales, and how most last more than just a day, I could see clutter being a big issue. If we did away with Sales Point, there might need to be a whole subgroup for game deals so they don't clutter the main page and feeds. And there would also probably end up being a recurring weekly thread anyway for recurring deals like the weekly EGS games.
So for now, I'm against getting rid of Save Point, but support the idea of highly time sensitive sales getting standalone posts.
I initiated the Save Points topics in big part because I was worried about clutter and noise. Game deal notifications are already pretty shallow content, so I didn't love the idea of having a lot of them appearing in our feed.
It did seem like there was an appetite here for deal-specific posts after I saw the reception that this post got though.
Nevertheless, Tildes is more about depth, and I was also sensitive to the idea that some people come here to get away from advertising, commercialization, and consumption pressures. Having a full gamedeals group on here feels counter to our ethos in a lot of ways.
The Save Points topics were sort of a balancing act for allowing shallower, advertising-adjacent content but also sequestering it at the same time. I liked the idea of having a space for game deals, but I wanted it to be small and easily ignorable. I made sure it had a unique name and tag so that it could be easily filtered. Anyone who doesn't want to see the regular topics can simply add
save pointto their tag filters and never see one again. A reminder of this is even in the body of the text each time it's posted!I also originally hoped that they would end up sparking thoughtful discussion about the games included in the deals. It's been a long while since I've really surfed r/gamedeals, but it used to be one of my favorite places on reddit not because of the deal notifications but because I felt like people would give genuine, thoughtful insights into games on offer. It also tended to spark discussions about smaller games that weren't happening in bigger subreddits. reddit's algorithms on gaming subreddits naturally tended to centralize people's discussions and focus onto bigger games, whereas on r/gamedeals, much of what got posted and discussed were smaller indie titles in bundles.
Admittedly, that type of conversation isn't really happening in our Save Points topics. They're mostly just notifications. I'm happy they're here, and I appreciate the efforts of the people who consistently post in them, but I'm also biased because I already like that type of content (and because I started them myself!). If they're not working for what they need to though, then maybe the idea is worth revisiting and tweaking. There's nothing set in stone that says we have to have a weekly game deals topic -- it's just something I kicked up and then later asked Deimos to schedule after the first few were well-received.
As someone who posts consistently in the Save Points I gotta say I very much prefer having a weekly deal post to post in, I already feel like I'm spamming people but at least it's opt-outable. Another thing is having a group is so much harder to vet anyways and I don't want to put even more strain on our small tagging team.
I'm also just saying, the fact that we only have a few posters makes me think a group isn't even necessary, unless people just kinda expect us to cater to them and post everything?
Personally I think the Save Point thread works pretty well in its current format, for the reasons that you made it. Game sales don't usually generate much discussion unless the people are passionate about the game in question, and the Tildes userbase feels a bit too small to get that sort of regular discourse compared to reddit. The megathread does give people a place to talk about specific games they like that are on sale, or ask questions.
So right now, I don't think the Save Point thread needs any tweaks or changes. To be honest, it's the one megathread I always check, so I'm admittedly a bit biased as well. The main tweak I would make is add a new tag for time-sensitive sales/deals/freebies or really good deals like The Talos Principle, and encourage separate posts for those since they can get buried. That said, I don't think anything is really stopping people from posting those separately right now though.
I feel like this is another example of why megathreads would benefit from more features. Notifications every time there's a new deal in that thread would both contain those kinds of posts, and make sure interested users get timely updates.
I agree -- I think there may have been periods in the past where these megathreads served a purpose, but much like the separate "covid" subgroup was removed when covid news stopped being so salient, the megathreads should be retired as there's no longer enough content to really justify their existence. While I agree with others here that tag filtering could stand to be more visible, I think that's really a separate issue from the megathreads, which are barely used anyway.
How much of the issue can be worked around if ignore preferences were retained across reccuring threads? Have it in settings that if you ignore one iteration of a thread, it spreads to all new instances?
I don't think I follow how ignoring the threads which sometimes contain things I want to see (when posted in) would help?
I don't think it would help reduce the number of "this post shouldn't be posted but be put into the mega thread" comments either.
What if I don't want to ignore the whole recurring megathread, but only discussion of one particular news items therein? It's not possible to ignore "a comment and its descendants" the way you can ignore a whole thread.
An issue for that was created on GitLab years ago, though it's still unconfirmed:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/727
Reading the old discussion (which is also linked in the issue on GitLab) explains some of the difficulties with implementing that idea:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/x0c/ignore_comment_thread
For what it's worth, I support implementing that feature, along with the ability to follow topics and receive notifications for them, as if you had posted them yourself, and the ability to do the same thing with individual comment threads.
I think implementing all three of those features would alleviate almost all the pain points people in the comments here have complained about (and they are valid complaints) in relation to recurring topics and megathreads.
I don't think Deimos is currently actively developing the site (rather, since he has to have a day job, he just keeps up with admin as needed for maintenance), and even if he were, those changes are fairly broad, so I don't think it makes sense to make current decisions based on the potential existence of such features. When and if those features are implemented, the situation can always be re-assessed, but it will likely be months if not years before they are.
I was just pointing out that an issue for what you mentioned already existed, in case you (or someone else) wanted to implement it yourself.
I'd also like to point out another problem with these recurring threads (though it's tangential to the ultimate decision of whether to remove them) -- it seems like it's not possible (except presumably for Deimos) to change the title of a recurring thread permanently. There was a lot of discussion in the "Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread" in the past about changing the name of the thread, and after one particularly fruitful discussion there seemed to be a lot of agreement with the idea of changing the thread title to "weekly Gaza megathread" -- enough that someone with the power to do so changed the title of that weekly thread. But when the next weekly thread rolled around, it was back to "Israel-Hamas war". Regardless of one's opinions on the particulars of those titles, it seems like it's a negative if, even with consensus, the title of a recurring topic cannot be changed by anyone but Deimos.
I support this suggestion.
Agreed