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How do we ensure the site stays un-fluffy?
This seems like a tricky one to me, as it largely depends on the community as a whole deciding to go with a particular tone.
One example of a site that has an expectation of serious conversation is Hacker News, and this makes it a great place to get thoughtful discussion without snarky comments (but with its own biases and echochamber effects of course).
What I don't want to see Tildes become is the meme-posting, reference-laden, low quality noise of some subreddits, or the content-free fluff of Imzy.
How can we strike this balance?
It's a tough question. I personally enjoy a lot of thoughtful content with a few well-crafted jokes strewn in here and there. I don't think it should be 100% all-srs-all-the-time or a meme-infested free for all. Hopefully this is something that the community can naturally balance over time by rewarding content they enjoy and ignoring or actively speaking out against content they don't want.
What bothers me about Reddit is how 90% of the default subs, you look at the top comments in a r/all post and it's all just jokes. Nothing else
My least favorite thing about Reddit is the jokes. The worst part is that it's always the same exact jokes over and over again. Maybe the first time I read "not all heroes wear capes" I chuckled and I know I laughed out loud at the first time I saw "doing the lord's work," but I was tired of it by the second time. Repeat about a dozen different jokes with hundreds of tellings each day and you have Reddit in a nutshell.
And there's multiple layers to the problem. Because if you point this out, then you're complaining about reposts. (Reposts were actually considered a bad thing until some time after the digg exodus.)
And if anything, the rate of reposts is increasing rapidly.
I don't mind reposts unless they are meme reposts
I don't mind reposts if they're useful or interesting. Reposts done solely to gain karma are not okay, in my book.
For every time you see a joke you've seen before, someone else is seeing it for the first time.
The issue is proportionality. I try to come into communities with an awareness that what's new to me isn't necessarily new to the people already there, as part of my efforts to be a positive participant in the community. I know there's the XKCD thing about the "lucky ten thousand," but I guess that makes the rest of the community the unlucky 990,000.
I agree with this. I get annoyed sometimes with repetitive jokes but I don't think it shouldn't be a thing because new people still find it funny. Setting up filters on reddit was pretty trivial to avoid running into them and condensing the comment threads into better discussions too.
From my experience on Reddit, every old Joke I see thousands of people are seeing it for the first time.
This.
hah see what i did there
I generally feel like Rule 1 of reddit is to unsubscirbe from and avoid default subs.
I think Reddit's default subs have the problem of being too big to facilitate real discussion, so instead people end up looking for and upvoting jokes instead. Just a theory anyway.
Pretty much.
Yeah, definitely. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, tagging should help, and it is ultimately down the the community as you say.
The thing is, without intervention I suspect the overall trend will reward fluffy content as it requires less effort to read and has a wider appeal than longer form, thought-provoking content. The wider appeal here is the important part IMO because it's pretty fundamental - more people getting a generic joke leads to it rising above other comments.
Fortunately, the site is in a unique position right now in that it could be anything. It's up to us and Deimos what it becomes and how that social aspect is shaped by the tools the site offers.
This is a middle ground where I think tagging would be super helpful. I think you can tag often reused posts or jokes or comments without it necessarily being abused or stigmatizing the way "noise" and "troll" and "flame" can potentially be.
I'm curious to see if the lack of visible points (ex: karma) attached to a profile will help to prevent this from becoming an issue. People do tend to reward fluffy content, but will people go out of their way to post low-effort fluff without some sort of digital value applied to it?
I think the answer to that is a clear yes. People will post jokes or other low-effort content just for the recognition in that thread, because a funny response popped into their head and they need to share it, or because they don't realise it's fluff.
Just look in this thread itself - people are listing their woes with reddit, which I would consider noise here, as it's not in the context of how Tildes can avoid these problems, just sharing frustration about them.
The idea is for the tagging system to allow the community to label comments with fluff, jokes, etc. Then you could have those comments existing but give users the ability to filter them.
The implementation of this is obviously a tough one, getting it right so it can't be misused easily is hard. It has been disabled right now because it was being misused.
I don't think you can stop fluff, jokes or fun. People are going to do them. Trying to stop it is a losing battle. Working with it so you can mitigate their effect on the more serious conversation you want to see is definitely the correct although harder approach.
I see what you mean, but I think Hacker News comes very close. The site's guidelines and culture run against joke comments, and they're usually only seen nested deep in a comment tree and/or with a low score. Frankly, I'd much rather Tildes be like this than Reddit 2.0, culture-wise (not even CasualConversation, but maybe ChangeMyView)
That's only effective for as long as you successfully keep the userbase small and maintaining those voting habits.
I do not think it is realistic to successfully maintain that forever. At some point a critical mass will occur and the voting practices will start to favour what is easy to consume vs what is high effort to consume.
Once upon a time Redditors actually did use the vote buttons to vote up content because it "contributes to discussion" and vote down content that does not. That changed with size.
HN is ludicrously small compared to reddit. It's probably around 5% of reddit's size. Reddit was pretty good too when it was 5% of its current size.
Yep.
But not having growth-at-any-cost doesn't mean that it won't reach growth thresholds that change the user voting behaviour. It will grow and it will reach the threshold that changes that behaviour, therefore hoping that users use votes appropriately is not a valid way to plan for the future.
You're absolutely right. I suppose the question is how big Tildes will become and how fast it will grow. I think I remember Deimos saying it might stay invite only for a few years, so there is some hope on the Eternal September side of things.
I do wonder what other ways there are to tackle this, though. Tagging is the one that has been put forward (though its had a rocky start). Another idea is taking a more deletionist approach to low quality content (again stealing from^H^H inspired by HN).
I am very excited about the tag system, but also concerned that it may not be sufficient, as it'd be a filter over the site rather than before the fluff is posted in the first place. Culture is a tricky thing.
Another concern is that it could lead to the site getting multiple personality disorder - the Joke side and the non Joke side.
Also, it looks like tags and filtering might not come for a while, and it might be too late.
All that said, they sound great as an idea and I can't wait to see how things progress.
"Another concern is that it could lead to the site getting multiple personality disorder - the Joke side and the non Joke side."
This is an interesting point, though I'm not sure I agree that it would be problematic. Is it not ok for different topic threads or sub-communities to have different tones from each other? For example, I'd expect to have lighter discussion and more in-jokes in communities about games than those about politics.
Different communities, sure, but I'm talking about two users seeing the exact same thread in very different ways. I guess it's not exactly wrong but strikes me as a little weird at least.
Maybe we could have some way to designate the tone of conversation that the OP was going for with their post? Similar to how in AskReddit they have [Serious] tags to avoid joking around about serious issues. On the flip side, if you just want to have fun, you could make a [Fun] or [Fluff] post and encourage that kind of tone.
And this might be way too much, but here's an idea: the same way some people subscribe to adblock filters, I would love if some busy user wanted to make updated tag clusters, or even updated comment filters that block reposts or that gather and promote deep, information dense comments. Kind of like multireddits, but for comments.
The way I'm framing it is a bit half-baked, but I think there's something here in terms of putting tags to constructive use.
I believe this is planned as a site feature (Filtering out certain tags, that is).
Reward and encourage discussion over pointless links to images with nothing to add.
Yeah that's certainly a part of it, and something only the community can decide, but I think there's more to it than that. Copying from another comment:
The thing is, without intervention I suspect the overall trend will reward fluffy content as it requires less effort to read and has a wider appeal than longer form, thought-provoking content. The wider appeal here is the important part IMO because it's pretty fundamental - more people getting a generic joke leads to it rising above other comments.
Fortunately, the site is in a unique position right now in that it could be anything. It's up to us and Deimos what it becomes and how that social aspect is shaped by the tools the site offers.
Don't sell the product to a major corporation is a good start.
I think proper use of the voting system by the community to naturally curate the kind of tone that we want is important - if we set from the start, establish a tone to the sub groups that this site is aiming for it’ll make it easier sustain as more people join the site. People are used to having to understand what’s valued in a community before becoming active in it, so let’s set that baseline while we can.
I doubt it's possible to prevent the fluff from being a major component. Humor is popular; popular items will always rise to the top. As others have suggested, the tagging system will work well.
I'd like to see something like Slashdot to combine the voting and tagging - indicate why you are voting, not just a vote itself. That way you can put "Funny" on the short list of options to classify the posts, which allows others to filter them neatly.
Make ~talk.fluff and keep it all there.
I don't think this would work. Fluff comes up in every community - every topic, even.
Agreed, and I think the fluff of each community is something we want to preserve. Each group has its own quirks and in-jokes that make it unique. The key is to not let it run wild, just sprinkle it where appropriate.