40
votes
Could we get a ~politics.us?
With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into one corner so it can be hidden.
While Tildes is quite US focused, there is still a lot of us non-us people here.
Go to https://tildes.net/settings/filters and add on separate lines:
In addition to tag filtering, any topic on Tildes can be ignored and it will be removed from your feed.
From the main feed:
Actions ▼Ignore this PostThe post will not immediately disappear, but on refresh it will be gone.
From the topic itself:
Ignoreon the row of options above the comments.This is a more granular approach for people who don’t want to filter an entire tag but might want to clear up some specific ones from their feed.
Given the presidency, that sounds like it will filter out most political news period for the next 4 years.
That seems to work for what OP wants, but I imagine many users would want to know the difference between "Trump raises tariffs 60%" and "Trump sang at a rally for 30 minutes". One of those actually affects everyone regardless of politcal affiliation. I'm assuming we don't have complex tag filtering yet, right (e.g. block donald trump, but NOT block u.s. policy. where the latter takes priority)?
Yep, that's basically why the weekly US politics megathread exists:
It is ideally supposed to serve as a way for one set of users to post and discuss weekly political minutiae in a single, contained place, while allowing everyone else to basically ignore US politics until a major piece of news is released and inevitably gets posted as its own topic.
Obviously right now, during an election week, that policy isn't being followed very closely, and that's okay. Things will ideally go back to normal in the future.
I do think Tildes needs much more powerful features for filtering topics. I think if the tag filtering system was more robust, and allowed users to set up rules (like you described) to allow tags to conditionally break through the filter, then the weekly US politics thread wouldn't be needed as much as it currently is.
The megathreads worked in 2018 because @deimos quickly nuked "Trump sang at a rally for 30 minutes" threads and said they should be reposted in the megathread.
Is that even feasible now? There are so many more new users and the cat has been out of the bag for so long.
I think the megathread system is still working. Like yeah, these past two weeks, because of the election, have seen quite a few topics "break containment", but that's okay. If you look at the past 100 topics posted before November and tagged
politics:https://tildes.net/?tag=politics&per_page=100&after=1jsh
I would say very few of those topics are so insubstantial or purely US political news that they should have been posted in the megathread instead.
So like I said, I think the megathread is still working. As for whether Deimos can, or wants to, keep enforcing usage of the megathread with so many users on Tildes now, that's up to him. Personally, I hope he does.
I don’t see why not? Tildes was busier for a while but it died down. There are only a small number of people posting topics and not many per day.
For philosopical reasons, Tildes doesn't have a politics group. The idea is to discourage posting politics as much as possible, because it has a tendency to cause arguments. US news in particular is supposed to go into the megathread. The past few days have been a bit of an exception because there is an exception to that rule of belonging in the megathread for very big news.
You'll need to follow the instructions others gave you to set up a tag filter.
I just want to reiterate that this is not a policy, however much a small group of people would like it to be, based on their personal interests/non-interests.
Anyone can post any appropriate link they want to the groups they want.
Some people want to deter others from posting about the issues they care about, and would rather these contributors have bad experiences with much fewer interactions by leaving their submissions to die in megathreads.
(I'm not saying this is something anyone in this thread wants)
Users are completely free to post things they want to post. It's up to users to filter tags/groups they are not interested in.
That's how tildes is built as a site.
I mean, the weekly US politics megathread is an official recurring topic, created by the site's administrator (Deimos, for anyone unfamiliar). It, and its rules:
Are about as official "policy" as anything on Tildes can get.
I went over why the US politics megathread exists very cleary in my comment back in September, so I'm not eager to reiterate that here.
I do want to say though:
This is such a disingenuous way of framing things. You acted like this when you made your argument back in September and you're doing it again today. Frankly, I think even just the way you approach these meta discussions about US politics serves as evidence of how toxic the subject is for Tildes, and why it should be contained in the megathread.
No-one is having their US political submissions removed for being "too trivial" to deserve a stand-alone post.
That's because there is no policy that these threads must be made to megathreads rather than as normal submissions to their relevant groups.
There has been no announcement of such a policy, because there is no such policy.
I know a group of users wants such a policy, based on their interests and tastes. They can filter topics or words. I'm much more interested in users making contributions to this site having good experiences than people who choose not to use the site settings to match their interests.
You're perfectly fine to hold a different opinion to mine. I don't have a problem with that.
What I do have a problem with is that you feel the need to characterize my view as "disingenuous" and assume bad faith on my behalf. That's not in line with the basic ideas that underpin tildes.
I don't understand how you can view me having a different view to yours on politics megathreads as evidence of "how toxic" US political discussion is on tildes. Can you not respect users having different views to yours?
If those reading these exchanges find my views toxic or denigrating the ability to have discussions on tildes, then clearly a lot has changed since we were brainstorming the ideas in the chat channels that led Deimos to create this site in the way he chose.
If that's how others read these exchanges, I'd love to hear about it.
Except this one.
I stand corrected. There's been at least one removal.
Stuff like an Onion piece on the election results has reached the minimum bar for a stand-alone thread this week.
I really don't think it's a small group of people who want to remain subscribed to ~misc and ~news but don't want a third of their activity sort to be US news and politics when people forget to tag it, or if they want to see the massive headlines, but you're welcome to disagree with me.
That's exactly what tag filtering is for. The submission rate is low enough and the tagging crew are pretty good at rounding out fast enough.
we could definitely use a more complex filter. Maybe an allow list that takes priority over the block list so you can get the massive stories but block out most drama.
In addition I'm sure most users don't want to do that themselves, so it'd be nice to be able to share your list and let them apply it in a few clicks.
I would really like this, thinking about the next 4 years. Tags might be able to cover this, if the tagging crew is on board with trying to standardize their use (which would be hard, it's subjective).
eg:
politics.us.trump
vs
politics.us.trump.drama
I propose 'fluff' vs 'news'
Yeah I like Fluff. It’s a good term that’s been used by @deimos before.
A long time ago, I thought you could have three variants of Tildes: stuff (the main one), fluff (pics, jokes), and muff (porn), linked only by a landing page.
If the reason that you want a new group is to hide that group, then that's not what groups are for on Tildes. That's a reddit-ism (that doesn't work particularly well on reddit either, but I digress).
The way that hiding things is done on Tildes is by filtering using tags. This is generally much more effective once you get a handle on filtering this way, because it works across multiple groups. This is absolutely an upgrade from how reddit does things.
Groups are made when there is sufficient interest in that specific topic to merit breaking off into that group; they are not meant as a method of quarantine.
I originally posted this as a response to @donn, but it is also in support to @Interesting's comment about not having a politics group.
Do you know how to block topic tags?
We tag things as “politics” and “usa” but I’m wondering if there is some benefit of combining them (“politics.usa”) or if having two independent tags is enough for filtering.
It'll die down when the shock wears off. The first two years of the site were under the Trump administration and news & politics were threads were somewhat rare back then, just like they were before July.