I am missing a neutral way to flag low-effort or potentially spammy posts
Lately I have seen a few posts here and there from accounts that have been silent for a while, where I can't help but feel that these new posts are made by different people or that the initial posts they made were intended to "pad" the account. In other words, they feel a bit like spam and because of that I would like to "flag" them somehow.
The obvious question people will have is likely "Why not just comment about it under the post?"
I have done that various times, and it has the opposite effect of what I'd like:
- Commenting boosts the post for people who sort based on comments or activity.
- From what I have observed, when a post has one comment, it is more likely to receive more votes as well. If it has more than one comment, it will receive more votes. This, to me, bizarre voting behavior is something worthy of a meta discussion in itself. But from what I gather, people seem to think that it indicates discussion. Making them think that there must be something worthwhile about the post. This obviously doesn't apply when it's just the OP sharing a quote and me raising a concern.
- Sometimes I am not entirely sure and would like to have someone with more insights behind the screens take a look at it. If I commented my suspicions while being wrong, that would suck for everyone involved.
Basically for the first two points I am not sure what a good solution would be. I am not advocating for a downvote ability, though something would be nice.
For the third point, I guess I am saying that I am missing the ability to report a post. With comments, I can use the malice label and write out a report, for posts there is no such thing.
No disrespect, this place runs well, and it doesn't need more of an atmosphere of control.
Maybe the way to go is to just leave it alone?
One of the reasons this site runs well is because of one very obvious mechanism of control, the invitation system. You also might not realize this, but comments already have all sorts of mechanisms people can use to indicate one thing or the other. Different labels have different kinds of effects and one of them already functions as a report button. I also know for a fact that these reports are already being acted on, so if by "atmosphere of control" you mean "moderation", this is already taking place.
Posts lack any of these, which for the most part is fine, as I also never really saw a need for similar things on posts. But again, as I already have stated, lately I have noticed a few more instances of posts that by all accounts very much feel like spam or spam adjacent. Now, I could leave this all alone, as you suggested. But at the same time, if we all do that, and it is actually spammers getting traction on tildes that would actually turn into a website that is not running well.
What I ended up doing is using the malice label on one of the OP comments and putting my thoughts in the popup. A little while later the posts were gone and so was the account. Meaning, that my thoughts likely were not that unreasonable and that some level of control is already applied in order to keep this place running as well.
Often, certainly on the internet, when a place seems to "just run well" it means that behind the screens people are actually working to keep a lot of the shitty things out.
I do agree we don't need heavy-handed control, but some level of moderation is still going to be needed.
I didn't write to remove existing controls. Maybe just not add more. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
I know, that's also not something I am attempting to respond to. I am using the existing functionality to showcase that there already is a level of control being applied.
Well yeah, that's why I explicitly included that until recently I didn't think this was needed. Now I have noticed certain types of posts enough that, to me, it feels like a good moment to at least discuss it.
It is social media. I say let people be social. Let people talk.
Again, most (practically all with) types of social media where people like to talk are the ones where there is some form of moderation. If I took your comment literally, I would ask why you are saying I should not talk about this subject ;)
You would be misinterpreting what I wrote. I made the suggestion that you leave the situation alone.
Isn't implying that I leave the situation alone asking me to stop talking about it? How communities (dis)function always has been of interest to me so I like to consider these sorts of things, view different angles, etc. Which is great because on tildes there is ~tildes which in the sidebar says
So why shouldn't I discuss meta things about tildes I notice? When there is a specific area on the website exactly for that sort of discussion? This going a bit on a tangent and at this point is a bit off-topic for this topic specifically. But it honestly baffles me that in the place intended for meta discussion on how the website functions you seem to insist on telling me to not discuss it and haven't given much of an inclination that you attempted to internalize what I wrote. Sorry if this is too direct, but it just tickles me the wrong way when people attempt to shut down conversation like this.
Reading the docs for the first time in a while and just had the thought is there anything stopping attributing an exemplary message for a user other than yourself. i.e. me submitting "This comment is great -creesch"
I mean I think you can also mark something exemplary and then write "butts butts butts" as the comment. TBF I might laugh real hard at it. But it is against the spirit of the thing.
How many "butts butts butts" Exemplaries you get for that? You kinda set yourself up on that one. :P
Only one, and I'm not mad about it at all.
Edit. 2
I suppose there is no way of stopping you from doing that from a technical perspective.
The only downvote/report on a post we have is quite simple: just @deimos (or PM) and they'll get it sorted. We're a small shop here, so we can request audience with
the kingthe admin.I honestly have no idea what goes in with the activity logic, I have only ever been a knight of new and prefer staying that course (not like we have a lot of activity to get through either, thankfully).
I mean, that's just going to be the game at this point, but there isn't any 'karma' system or anything like that here, so anyone whose after pumping those sweet activity metrics are going to be missing that here.
The reason we have a lot of post + op comment, is because most of our posts are links, and the only way to leave a reasoning behind posting it, with some form of context, is as a comment. Only option I could imagine is if we had some minute amount of logic that showed a label next to the comment such as:
Which would be as simple as
Edit: I also just don't see much spam here anyway, which is great, and for 'low-effort' that's kind of the thing we go for at times, especially when we just post links to things we enjoy and others may enjoy from around the 'net. We're not a 'discussion forum' per se, we're just a link aggregator, that sometimes have discussions.
I mean, I said that I don't always want to leave a comment ;) Fair enough on the PM, I honestly keep forgetting that Tildes has that ability.
That is not the point I am trying to make there. It seems to me that there is a tendency from some people to blindly upvote posts with comments regardless of content. As I also said, that probably is a separate meta discussion to have.
I get why as OP of a link post you would leave a comment.
I'd argue that one of the selling points of tildes is actually more involved and more meaningful discussion compared to many other places.
There isn't much in the way of super obvious spam. In fact, I am not a 100% sure the posts I would report are spam. But, having moderated on reddit for years I have been trained to look for signs things that are potentially spam. And I have seen a slight increase of posts over the past few months when I felt that it could be the case and where someone with a bit more insights behind the scenes might be able to make a more definitive call.
It is less likely given the invite system. But I think it would be naive to assume it isn't happening at all, as there have been cases of blatant spam attempts here and there. So I am pretty sure that there are also attempts at the more subtle cases of spam/self-promotion.
Edit: Btw, I ended up using the malice label on the OP comment. I figured that if OP leaves a comment under the post it is a good place to tie a report directly to the content. And it seems my spider senses going off might have been right in this instance, as the posts in question are now gone.
I want to challenge something, are people actually blindly upvoting or are they just voting on a metric you don't agree with? Do they find the low effort post funny, are they voting the comment as a thanks for the post to the OP, are they in a back and forth and feel upvoting the person they're disagreeing with us fair play?
I forget to upvote more often than I'd like, personally, but I don't assume others who voted are doing so blindly.
I am not talking about comments being upvoted. I am talking about posts being upvoted purely based on there being comments under them. Which is a pattern I have noticed regardless of what I have think of the posts in question.
It very much seems to me that posts with at least one comment do get a slightly higher amount of votes than posts with no comment.
Apologies, I follow now, but still think that you're making assumptions about why people are upvoting. You're noticing a correlation, but I'm doubting the causation. Especially as someone that basically never looks at the number of upvotes a post has.
All I am saying is that I want to avoid adding a comment to further "boost" a post that is potentially spam. Either through upvotes, but also through the other means people have sorted tildes I mentioned.
As far as the upvoting behavior itself goes, there are various reasons and mechanisms I can think of why this happens. But like I also said, that feels like a separate discussion to have. A conversation I don't really feel like starting, as I don't think it is inherently wrong most of the time and in this case is just one factor of multiple.
PMing Deimos is by far the best way to handle concerns like that. I do whenever I notice topics of concern (be it suspected SPAM or low effort stuff that probably isn't appropriate for Tildes), and he is usually quite responsive.
Yeah, that seems like the most obvious approach in hindsight. I ended up using the malice label on one of the OP comments this time. The DM system on tildes is something I use so rarely I often forget it is there.
One hesitation I would have is that I know there are a few people (like you) who have a few more rights as regular users. And I can never remember if they might also be able to handle removing spam posts so just messaging Deimos seems like unnecessarily burdening him or the most efficient with timezones in mind.
Only Deimos can currently remove comments and topics... although for seriously problematic topics we have a few tricks we have used in the past for when Deimos wasn't immediately available to remove something, like re-titling the topic with a warning for others to ignore it, changing the link to something benign, and moving it to ~test until Deimos arrives to deal with it. If he ever starts to feel overwhelmed I'm sure that will change and he will probably grant a few other people the ability to remove stuff though, since that was the original intention behind the planned trust system. So I wouldn't worry too much about PMing him over valid concern you're having with certain posts.
p.s. The privileges I do have are listed on my user profile :
That's fine, I was responding to this:
I don't think that's happening. That's all.
Fair, it is possible I am drawing the wrong conclusion:) It is difficult to tell of course. Just in case I am not, then I don't want to further boost a potential spam post by leaving a comment. But for that there is also the obvious solution people have suggested by now to simply DM Deimos.
I can't imagine I'm the only person here who pretty much ignores posts with no comments. If there's nothing there giving me some reason to read the main article, unless the headline grabs me (which is rare, since I've developed some pretty good anti-clickbait senses), I'll just ignore it. The wider internet sucks for a lot of reasons, and it always takes some convincing to get me to venture out into it.
That is something I can completely understand. But then I assume that when there are comments you either check what sort of comments they are or at the very least check out the linked content before leaving a vote, right?
Yeah, of course, though I don't comment all that often, so from your perspective it might seem like I'm only voting because there are comments. Very odd that you'd see behavior different from that!
Ah yeah that's normal behavior as far as I am concerned. I don't expect everyone to leave a comment where they vote.
I am more or less talking about posts with a clickbait headline, terrible content and a few comments pointing out both those issues. I have seen it happen several times that the vote count for posts like that just steadily keeps rising.
And to be clear, in cases like these, the comments are not a discussion that make the post worthwhile for the discussion alone.
Of course this also might happen with posts without comments (based on the headline alone) but that seems to be less likely to be the case.
I often do this, TBH. My informal metric is that if spend a noticeable amount of time engaging (either reading the article or comments) I'll up vote in appreciation of the engagement. Now I'm not sure if I'm helping or hurting.
I must have worded my initial post in a very confusing manner for people to get hung up on this. If you are engaging with the post through comments or reading the linked article and appreciate all that through a vote then none of the behavior I described applies to you :)
I think I understood your original post just fine. I was just adding some context to support the previous poster's proposal that there may be varied individual heuristics people are using to decide when to vote on a post. I absolutely agree that some sort of flagging should be possible on posts as well as comments. I wasn't really aware of the absence until you mentioned it, but it seems an odd thing to omit. Maybe I'm missing something, but the comment system seems to work pretty well (aside from some minor disagreement on nomenclature). I wonder why the same system isn't available at the post level?
There's also always the noise label. And if it's egregious, the malice label which I'm fairly sure pings/notifies the admins or the two or three mods that we have here.
I guess off-topic but I can't believe I never thought of this. Definitely gonna change to scrolling tildes this way, thanks for that random sidenote!
It is worth noting, though, that you can't label topics, only comments. So a "noise" label on a comment will lower that comment's rank, but it won't lower the rank of the whole post in any way.
Which is not a thing on posts as I noted, which is why I created this post :)
Missed that part, gotcha. Yes we could do with a "spam" label on posts for sure.
No problem! Once you switch it over, a button will appear to 'set as default', if you want to that is.
I’m just curious what these potentially spam posts specifically are.
Normally I wouldn't want to share specifics without being sure, but in this case it looks like the user has already been banned, so Deim must believe they were a spammer too. These are likely the two submissions in question:
They felt like spam to me too, and is partly why I posted a questioning comment in the first one. I was curious to see if they'd respond to explain themselves.
In this case it was possible to report the user's comment as malice to get Deim to review, but if they'd only left the thread and not commented, that wouldn't have been the case. I guess a PM would've been the next best option.
Yup, those are the two posts in question.
Yup, malice label is what I did and cfabbro confirmed here that sending Deimos a PM is the best approach here.
Just to confirm it again officially: yes, always feel free to message me about things like that. It would definitely be better to have a proper report function, but a message does the job. In the end, since I'm the only person that can act on the reports they would have to be sent to me directly, so they'd really just be a different form of message anyway.
That is so interesting. Out of curiosity, why would someone be interested in spamming on here? There doesn't seem to be enough active folks to warrant that behavior.
SEO spam would be one reason, while commenting and posted is invite only Tilde itself is visible from the outside world. Including for search engine crawlers.
But for the most part I can only speculate.
Quality back-links are still a thing. Google has lowered their height in the algorithm, but I believe Bing is still heavily weighted with them.
With that in mind, getting links on to Tildes seems like a good strategy.
I'm thankful you posted these, and that creesch confirmed them, as a lot of the discussion was almost pushing that Tildes is an anti-fun place. In most of my life, joking is a major part of communication and community building. I sometimes enjoyed the stupid comments (or at least solid puns) on Reddit. I get that it's not the vibe here, though I miss that from time to time.
Almost changing topics, I would definitely recommend posts like this one come with enough examples to help clarify what specifically is being highlighted. Like chocobean said elsewhere, for some of us, figuring out what is considered "noise" is a little tricky.
Jokes are allowed, I just try to blend them with more thoughtful comments too. And made a pun thread!
I am a jovial person, and I find the fun in a funeral.
With the Tildes mindset, I would not be "jokey" on a top level comment, but second or third comment and I'm all in on having a laugh.
I'm not one to put "agree", or "beat me to it", just to write some text, not unless I have something specifically to follow up with.
I've had a comment or two tagged as noise, that's not really bothered me. Opinions of mine may be against the norm, part of being human I suppose. Putting in jokes and hoping someone else gets a giggle, smirk or smile out of it is all part of the enjoyment of an online forum. Tildes isn't a soul sucking sad old men's club, it's a nice social community.
tbh I don't think the joke tags do terribly much to block comments; they're marked unread, so they'll draw attention and get engagement if people like it. It's more like a (warranted) content warning that it doesn't "add" to discussion, so anyone who really wouldn't want them can probably just ignore them along with noise/malice tagged ones. I say crack jokes if it's not dragging the mood down.
The most recent ones were for the most part SEO tailored low effort "articles" on a "tech news" website. Just done well enough that it wasn't obvious at first glance. Except that this user posted two articles in a row to the same website with the same author and in both cases left a comment that was very robotic in nature. This triggered my spam spider senses and made me check out their account. Where I saw a hiatus between these posts and the previous posts, which very much reminded me of similar deals happening on reddit.
This in turn made me check a few more things on the posted websites, further affirming my suspicion. Which prompted me to make this post.
Then I figured I might as well label on of OP's comment with malicious and explain it is about the post. Shortly after that, I went to refresh my tildes view and the posts were gone, and the user banned.
So I can't link you to the specific posts as they are gone. Even if I could, I would not because of the third point I mentioned in my post.
The theory behind how tildes should work is still something I don't understand. But I do get where you're coming from.
This was the problem with old style forums. A troll with start a thread, and everyone would keep it bumped by responding how dumb the thread was.
Maybe it would be nice if we could make non-bumping, "noise" by default comments, where someone provides some feedback to a poster. It'd be less threatening than a direct message, but avoid turning a thread about an actual link into a long discussion about posting etiquette.
There is a great deal of information in the docs about Tildes from both a theoretical point of view and a practical point of view. One of the interesting things about Tildes is that it can function differently per person depending on what they have set as their default sorting settings of which there are a variety of options. Normally I think this is great because it allows people to consume content on tildes how they like.
In this case it caused me to overthink things a bit because I wanted to do something without boosting it one way or the other :D
I doubt it'll ever happen because of the snail pace of feature development thus far, but "sage" (non-bump) replies are an excellent feature from 4chan and something I wish more sites adopted, so you can respond to / debunk disinformation without feeding the engagement loop the poster is trying to create.
I can see the point in theory, but is it really a big issue in practice? I barely register votes and mostly just follow topics by activity, and use the "ignore post" feature if I don't want to follow a topic anymore. While I have also seen a few posts which I thought was a bit weird or seemed low effort, I really like the general approach the Tildes community has with a mindset of reading in best intention. Be curious instead on why this post was made, and I have seen a few times in comments where people found out that the site linked was a bad AI reposting thing and OP didn't know. With just a small friendly non-judgemental interaction, things was resolved and people left knowing a little bit more.
I feel like that since Tildes doesn't have image post and thus memes, it removes practically 95% of low effort posts in practice. Of course, if Tildes starts to get flooded with hundreds of low effort spammy posts per day, there might be a need for improved tools, but right now I believe the best way to improve Tildes is simply by engaging with posts and people here. With a curious mindset, also to what may seem like low effort spam at first. It might not be intended that way.
Votes are just one of the ways a post can be given a boost. If it was just low effort stuff, I wouldn't have brought it up. Maybe I should have been clearer about that, but it is mainly about things spam adjacent. In fact, the posts that directly prompted me to make this post have now been removed, and the user banned.
I applaud your optimism and honestly try to withhold my judgement when I am really not sure. Or, like you suggested, engage with OP first.
Having said that, I have moderated various online communities over the years. I also think I have developed a reasonable instinct judging where things fall on the spectrum between what is effectively unintentional spam (the AI reposting you mention) and what is very intentional bad faith spam posting. Today was a clear example of the latter and luckily fairly rare still on Tildes. But I do feel that I have seen more posts that fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.
I also do know for a fact that while it is not nearly as bad as on reddit that Deimos is also actively working on keeping out spam and other people acting in bad faith. So in a way, part of the nonjudgmental interactions we are allowed to have are also partially possible due to this active moderation.
Just wanting to add my two cents, as someone who was notified my comments were "noise" at a time when I was pretty depressed outside of tildes and decided I should take a hiatus from this community who I had previously thought valued my input based on the likes my comments received - there should absolutely be more immediate feedback when a comment is being marked "low effort".
At no point was I aware of any issues surrounding any of my comments.
Having to hear from the creator of tildes that I was a burden on the community was not good for my mental health. Knowing sooner which comments I should have elaborated on, or removed, would have been extremely helpful.
First of all, I want to clarify that I think creesch is talking about a way of reporting topics ("posts"), not comments, which don't offer a label mechanism. So this may be a little off-topic. However, I feel what you said is interesting too, and I'd like to address it as well.
I've struggled a little with if I should say anything or not when I see low-effort comments. I was a little more verbal when reddit last had an exodus and we picked up a lot of users, because I felt it was important to set the right example at a time when our identity was more at risk of being shaped from new users. I even saw a comment a few days ago that was just a row of "🤣", and I nearly left a gentle reminder that it's not in the spirit of the site. But instead I tagged Noise, and eventually it ended up collapsed. Today, I mostly stay silent and just use tags for this purpose. I understood it as you described, that Deimos will talk to those who have a high frequency of comments labelled as Noise.
I think you raise a good point that more immediate feedback can be helpful, and offers users the opportunity for improvement. That's definitely a good goal. However, I feel it also carries some risk. Primarily that - if we adopt a culture of evaluating each other's quality - that might lead an uncomfortable environment where we feel constant scrutiny of our comments. One where we're afraid of not reaching a certain level of quality, even when doing our best.
Now for a community like Tildes to thrive, I think some level of self-discipline is necessary. We do try to post higher-quality articles, and keep the discussion on-topic and productive. But if we turn that dial up too far, it may begin to feel suffocating instead. We need to find the right balance, and so far I think we've done a pretty good job of that.
Another consideration is that by moving the discussion of noise to the comments (instead of labels), it risks one user being ganged up on, or what I call dogpiling. Dogpiling is a distinctly online interaction that we humans are just not well-equipped for. If you say something dumb in person, you might have a small group laugh at you. If you do it online, it can invite hundreds of people to hound you about it. We see this happen on reddit and Twitter fairly regularly, and it's not a good experience at all for the recipient. Nobody is ever able to accept and incorporate criticism in that situation. Not when their pride is wounded, and they're feeling frustrated and impotent.
While Tildes is largely protected from this kind of behaviour, it's not completely immune from it. Even just the inclusion of votes and exemplary labels are occasionally enough to make a discussion feel one-sided against a person. I suspect that a culture of calling out low-effort comments could worsen this, and lead to dogpiling as described above.
In general, I think it's better to address a pattern of posting rather than any individual examples. Nobody is perfect, and we all leave a comment that doesn't quite meet the bar now and again. Sometimes we might just be short on time, or lacking in sleep. Leaving it up to our admin to intervene also allows some discretion, so there is someone to evaluate if the labels were applied fairly before responding.
Addressing a pattern of low-effort activity also reduces the emphasis on any one comment, which the user might wish to argue for any number of reasons. It's just easier to discuss a trend. It also lets us sidestep the recency bias, where people feel more emotionally invested in things they've done recently, like that hilarious ascii art they posted earlier today and spent almost ten minutes getting right.
That said, I do think some sort of automatic checks wouldn't be completely without merit. If you received an automated message after receiving 10 labels in a month or something, reminding you to review the site docs to better understand the site culture, that seems fair. Something like this may be necessary if Deimos doesn't have time to review these labels, or if the site should suddenly scale up again.
There's other considerations like if this kind of automated feature might be abused (see reddit's "get them help" feature), but I think with enough safeguards it could be viable.
Overall though, I don't think there's a simple solution to getting people to improve their contributions. It's a good question and worth thinking about, but like many "people problems", it's a hard one to solve.
That's something I can understand. To be extra clear though, I am talking about posts here and then specifically things bordering spam.
I absolutely conflated "posts" with "comments". Thank you for your clarification.
I've been a guest on this site for over a year now, and I've yet to mark any post or comment as noise. I think the label itself has a lot of negative connotations, more heavily negative than perhaps the original intention? Even a down vote or straight up " I don't like it " would be easier for me to handle than receiving a "noise" label: the former sounds like subjective opinion, the latter is a noun label implying Universal, Objective Truth. I'd sooner be someone boo'd out of a room than have a scientific gadget aimed at me which pings and beeps then marked Noise Generating.
I wonder how other members feel about the label, or having their post or comment labeled as such
I've always wished it had a different title than "noise" but when you sit and think about it, what else should you call a really short comment that adds nothing to the discussion? When someone just comments "sometimes they don't think it be like it is, but it do" or "yeah I agree", what else is it but noise? The vote button would have accomplished functionally the same thing, and the words just clutter the screen.
Of course, this isn't touching upon people weaponizing noise, or other architectural choices on this website designed to reduce friction and minimize conflict. Down votes are disabled, but I've absolutely seen noise weaponized as a sort of down vote (more-so than malice, which I think is named appropriately to discourage it's weaponization). There's also specific ways you can interact with this website that will cause other users to get timed out for replying to you before you are timed out for replying to them, making it seem like one side of a debate/discussion changed their opinion, gave up, or just left the conversation. I don't think there's a perfect way to thread any of these needles and it's difficult to curate a community and maximize interaction in the way you want people to interact and minimize what you deem negative. Overall I think noise is a reasonable "middle ground" position, albeit if someone were to come up with a better word for the label it should probably be renamed.
Is it the noise label in general that bothers you or that you were once labeled as noise and took that personally?
Not trying to start something I’m just curious because I’ve felt this way in the past but after being around long enough I believe this label is vital for the culture of the site.
Hmmmm that's a good question.
There's a part of me that....realises that I'm a noisy + loud person in real life, always has been, and maybe I take the existence of the label itself personally. I believe I've only been marked noisy maybe once....? But whenever I see it applied to anyone else I wince.
In real life, I'm one of those people who make a lot of sounds in a conversation like "umm, hmm!, uh-huh" to signify "I hear you, I'm listening, and I'm glad you said something". I the cultures I grew up with, they're also very common: そうですね (variations of "sou~" in Japanese), 哦 /係呀/咁㗎 (variations of "yeah/oh really/is that so in Cantonese) and stuff like 醬子喔？ in Taiwanese
I don't troll, I don't self advertise, I don't spam the same remarks and I don't make low effort meme jokes like "Frist!" here on Tildes. But I can also see a lot of the "I'd like to chime in to express support/agreement/gratitude for your comment" as being noise. I'm not contributing substance but I'm taking up character space / waves = noise.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I really appreciate it.
I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I used any given tag, and the only times I use noise are the exact contexts you expect. Those reddi-esque comments that will type "agree!" (and nothing else) instead of simply voting. I'm pretty Lazzeis Faire about comments to the point where I don't think I've ever actually used off-topic or joke, but I'll admit the moderation acts pretty quickly and early. So a lot of. Comments I may mark are generally sorted out.
On my side, I think I had 2 exemplaries, which always feels good, and no other labels. I'm not sure if I'm ever notified (so I could easily miss them), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still zero. I try to make sure I'm adding to a conversation with every comment, and I'd say I still end up not posting some 30% of my replies for various reasons, even if most of those are probably fine to post.
it should also be noted that misusing tags does punish the tagger over time, so you may have simply had a newer user hit you that is no longer here. You should absolutely not use Noise as a "TL;DR" button or as a dismissal of an argument.
I wouldn't dream of using Noise or Malice as disagreement buttons.
I end up posting nearly 120% of when I should, unlike your self reflecting 30%, so maybe the sensitivity to the "noise" tag is not out of nowhere....
The thing that I find annoying is all the news that just gets reposted here. I come here to find interesting sites or conversation about subjects, but in the last year there is just a ton of news reposting. I wish people would post more interesting stuff. The other frustrating thing is that many of the new sites are behind pay walls.
Good news is often paywalled, because it costs money. An Archive or gift link isn't far behind most of the time.
I like the news links though, sometimes I only see things because of a good tildes discussion about them.
The conversations surrounding news articles are the reason I'm ok with news being posted here. Additionally, we're small enough here that we generally have only one thread about any given story, instead of 30 across 15 communities, so I feel like I can actually engage with the story/comments/others. I can see a potential future where News on Tildes is in a similar place to Reddit, where I don't feel engaged and where I find it more of a distraction than a benefit, but I think we are a long way off from that point.
I can't see that future, only because we're so small and I don't see us ever being Reddit big, but while I really do like the discussion, sometimes it's just a really good article being shared too! And so I try to make sure I click through even those discussion-less articles and start a conversation if I liked it (or hated it)
Oh, I don't think we are anywhere near that future! We'd need some seriously exponential growth for that to happen. But, as a part of the larger conversation in this thread, it does appear that we are seeing more spam than we were a year ago, so there's also a chance that something could happen to the decent news posts we currently have. To awkwardly loop back to OP's premise, it might be nice to have a "spam?" label that just highlights the post for users who have the ability to change/delete things, even if we don't really see much in terms of spam.
Since that's just really Deimos, seems like the PM functions that way. But I understand the point.
Maybe you'd want to add some filters so that you don't get the news posts that much? I've got a bunch of filters setup (mainly to block out politics and sports) and if I see news things it's usually very niche (like, tech news developments that I actually want to read about as well as scientific advancements).
I have been wrong every time I have tried to predict which news article would catch interest and generate a deep conversation. A significant number do and a significant number don't. But most of the conversations here are actually in response to a news article.
I had to take a look but there is a news category that you could just unsubscribe from which should hopefully take care of your first problem.
I too wished more interesting stuff was posted here, like in the good ol‘ days of Reddit but alas this place is still small and I guess it’s on us to find interesting stuff to post. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve found something to post here…
If you hit an article behind a paywall and no one has posted an archive link try pasting the link into archive.ph or archive.org! It‘s kinda 50/50 but you could be the one commenting with that archive link and helping somebody out.