'politics.usa' tag proposal
I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.
I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').
So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. Thoughts?
I support this. For a time I was feeling the same way and added the
donald trumpandelon musktags to my filter list which acted as a de facto blocking of most topics on US politics. My time on the site and my mental health were better for it.I’ve since unblocked them because my throughput has increased, and I’m more willing to engage with those topics now, but I’d still like an easy option to toggle them off in the future if necessary.
Also, for anyone who’s feeling that fatigue, I encourage you to post non-political topics in addition to blocking (provided you have the personal bandwidth for it, of course).
I’ve been trying to be much more regular in posting non-political discussion topics mostly because I want people to have a place to interact and talk that’s separate from those issues. US politics has a way of taking all the oxygen out of the room, so I consider my topics to be a way of planting trees to get some of it back.
I also think it’s vital for the health of our community that our topics don’t become a monoculture and, left unchecked, US politics has a way of dominating and overtaking everything else. (speaking as an American: I’m genuinely sorry for that, Rest of the World)
If it sounds like I’m assigning homework, I promise I’m not! I’m not trying to add one more thing to anyone’s to-do list or create obligations. Instead, I’m trying to share something that helped me out. I mentioned I recently had more throughout, and that’s in part because of the topics I’ve submitted here. Reading and thinking about people’s responses to those was way more valuable than doomscrolling the news.
Furthermore, because they weren’t focused on current politics, they helped me keep in mind that we’re all still trying to live our own complex and interesting lives right now — a point that often gets flattened by political discussions. This might sound unbearably lofty, but I genuinely mean it: those topics have helped me stay connected to other people’s multifaceted humanity, and that’s something I think we need a lot of right now.
So, when I say that people should make topics about things that are interesting to them, I mean it not as an assignment but as an encouragement. It might help you out the way it’s helped me.
I think I saw your suggestion to filter out donald trump and elon musk awhile ago and meant to go back and thank you but kept forgetting to look back in the older threads for it. Being an American living abroad, I get asked by a wide variety of people about current US political events, as I'm often one of the few Americans they interact with regularly. I don't really keep up with the news as much beyond broad headlines and with my work being real busy the last few months I got tired of keeping up with even that much since there's always something happening. Your suggestion was great as it made Tildes even more of a place I wanted to come hang out and spend my time without seeing US politics posts every time I open the site.
I also appreciate the topics you post and have been trying to post topics occasionally myself. With the community being smaller and us not having enough users for dedicated areas for niche hobbies (those being the few places that I still find value in on Reddit) the only way those get brought up is if someone (me) posts about it and starts a conversation.
Agreed, my guy reaction was that there's just not enough topics for me to care. I might be more addicted than others but I find myself running out of content here quickly. I submitted a thing to try to help out, and will continue to do the same!
I usually take that as my cue to go ahead and read an article someone posted that I'm not really that interested in -- that usually turns into something wonderful that I didn't realise was interesting before.
Recently, I had the pleasure of overhearing a couple of teenagers talk over video chat. The second hand awkwardness was overwhelming, as each try to talk about something they're interested in and meeting dead air. But they kept going and eventually found something in common, and ended up talking for two hours.
I want Tildes to be a community like that: we're not just here to scroll for hot takes and provide endless variations of "cool story bro" I can flip through without engagement. I want us to ask the question, "how can anyone find this interesting?", dive in, and discover new interest, and engage with each other to say "wow that was interesting and a new thing for me". I want folks who already found something interesting to further engage with their thoughts.
So yeah your submitting a thing was great! It'd be great if we all engage with each other more like that
As a (primarily) lurker (who doesn’t filter anything…) I think that makes sense to me - for the reason you stated that the filter settings don’t allow for an “AND”.
I feel like this would be the most straightforward solution.
I think having a dedicated tag probably makes the most sense at this point. I just had a quick look to see if adding "and" support for tag filtering would be relatively easy, but I don't think it's trivial.
Can I help with a mass re-tagging of existing topics somehow? Would it be reasonable to do something like add the
politics.usatag to everything that currently has bothpoliticsandusa, or would that be too broad?Tagging all topics with
politics.usathat currently have bothpoliticsandusatags would probably be fine. It would likely include a lot of stuff that isn't US-centric politics, but going forwards we can always refine how it gets applied a bit more. And regardless, it's trivial to temporarily turn off filters by clicking "View unfiltered list" at the top of the front page (or manually typing?unfiltered=true) for anyone that wants to make sure they don't miss something that got retroactively tagged withpolitics.usa.Edit: Tagging topics with
politics.usathat have bothpoliticsandusatags but that don't also include any other country tags might help reduce the initial overreach... but I suspect that would be far more difficult? Since you would need a list of every country tag to start with.I've done this now: all topics that had both
politicsandusatags have now had thepoliticstag replaced withpolitics.usa(but still retaining theusatag).(@mycketforvirrad)
Many thanks! I definitely want to keep myself informed on US politics despite being European, but I do need to ration my intake to avoid overwhelm. Being able to turn the filter on and off makes it frictionless.
While I'm at it, thank you for this lovely, lovely forum.
Thanks a bunch!!! Added to my filter.
It appears the "flood the zone" strategy is working very well, considering even this small, niche corner of the internet now has too many USA news headlines relative to the rest of .politics content.
Good to filter via that tag... A skim of Drudge is enough US news for the day, don't need more here.
Hey, I posted some disappointing but misleadingly generalized British news just yesterday!
Hey, I posted some disappointing but misleadingly generalized British news just yesterday!
We know!
(sorry, just to make a joke)
Lol I was so confused by this comment and what joke I was missing when I saw how many votes you had 😂
You also managed to triple-post the comment, which I suspect was the original joke; maybe you had spotty internet when you submitted?
Yes, I did. It was probably my fault for not noticing. I used to always check that when I had issues on reddit, but this seems to be the first time it's happened to me on Tildes.
I guess so. If tildes is tired of us politics then we truly are in a bad shape. Seems like there will just be no sensible place to talk about these important issues between this and HN simply flagging everything off the front page.
I’d like to put my hand up here that I’m not tired of US Politics
Given this is a thread about people who are sick of it, I was hesitant to offer this opinion in case it came off as too close to “well I’m not sick of it therefore we shouldn’t...”
But I’ll add it here to let you know that tildes isn’t a monolith, and while some people are sick of it (and I’m happy to support an easy way for them to filter it out) I still find it valuable to see discussion here which helps me have a more nuanced opinion.
I’ve already used tildes to be ahead of the curve and not only read an article before my mum shared it with me, but also got to read considered discussion here which defused some of her anxieties. I value that so I hope it doesn’t go away completely.
I keep posting articles.
I do however support people's right to filter content.
I don't want to stop them either. Especially since many are probably not US based and aren't as affected by the insantiy.
There is just that "selfish" thought in my head that the last thing we need is more nuanced participants opting out of the conversion. I don't like hearing all the news either but I feel some duty to keep aware above all the blatant propaganda being spewed by my "elected officials".
Hey, I posted some disappointing but misleadingly generalized British news just yesterday!
Makes sense. Feels weird to make a topic just to propose a new tag, since anyone can make them on-the-fly, but I get the need for critical mass to make this a useful convention. Or more practically, to get @mycketforvirrad on the same page since they're usually the one doing tag munging on most posts. I think it's a good idea.
I assume it would be followed with tags for various other political jurisdictions:
politics.uk,politics.nz, maybepolitics.au.nsw.sydneyif we're talking about a lord mayoral race in that specific city or something — is that too granular?Very likely. Even politics.uk, politics.nz, etc would likely be a bit much since this is about filtering and not categorization. And how many people are likely to honestly make use of any besides politics.usa?
p.s. I made this topic because I have actually tried to introduce 'politics.usa' in the past, but it kept getting reverted back to just 'politics'. So I figured this would be a better way to gauge interest/support in the idea, and also potentially help cement it. ;)
Perhaps you should change the title to "An Open Letter To @Mycketforvirrad: 'Politics.usa' Tag Proposal". Keep the capital letters to make sure you get his attention 😉
Heh, yeah I could have done that... or just PM'd them, which I have done plenty of times in the past.
But TBH, I wasn't actually entirely sure my proposal would be considered acceptable to the wider Tildes community. So this topic allows others to express their own opinions on it. And if a bunch of people had said it was a bad idea, I would have backed off and simply gone back to using a shit ton of other tags in my filter... like 'donald trump', 'republican party', 'elon musk', 'department of government efficiency', etc etc etc until I stopped seeing any US politics topics. That is a PITA to do though, especially since I do still occasionally like to read about US politics when I have some spare emotional bandwidth.
Yeah, I've done the same thing before. mycketforvirrad said the current system was basically a workaround because changing past tags would be too much work and then deimos came in and magically updated all of the tags. So public posts have advantages beyond just starting a discussion.
Good question, I really don’t know. We have an international user base. There probably wouldn’t be much demand for others on day one, but who knows how that might change in the future. No need to get ahead of it today, of course.
Hopefully by the time we get enough volume of topics about other countries' politics that people want to filter them out, we will have a more granular (AND/OR/NOT, filter tag only in specific group, etc) filtering system. But I am certainly not opposed to adding other 'politics.country' tags for now if there is actually a demand for a few specific ones.
I feel like it's a straightforward categorization, and sticking with the scheme for everywhere would be easier than remembering there's one exception when submitting stuff.
Political topics often involve multiple countries so if this were purely about categorization we would have to, for example, start including 'politics.usa', 'politics.canada', 'politics.mexico', etc for every single US Tarriff related topic that mentions/impacts those other countries... which requires a lot more typing than just including 'politics.usa' alongside the already included various base-level country tags. But since this is not really about categorization but merely intended to help with filtering, 'politics.usa' (along with the already included base-level country tags) should still be perfectly sufficient tagging for both filtering and categorization.
And easier for whom? :P Switching to including 'politics.country' for every single country would create a LOT more work for @mycketforvirrad, who does the vast majority of the tagging. And my goal here is not to dramatically increase their workload. I personally just want a way to filter out US politics, specifically... and I doubt I am alone in wanting that ability.
A filter for allowing
politics.caorpolitics.whatever, but blocking the baselinepoliticsmight be less work intensive on the dev end? I don't know enough about Tildes to say whether it's an easier fix than going in and labeling each politics thread with the country code.That might be true (not really a dev so can't say for certain), but that solution doesn't lessen the workload for topic taggers. And unfortunately development on the site has basically stopped ever since Deimos went back to working full-time. So until development resumes again, and a more granular filter system gets implemented, we still need to find solutions that work within the current system.
I think different politics subgroups for each country is reasonable. Not that I'm seeing much of it here, but I usually stay out of Canadian political conversations because I know next to nothing about their political system. (I do know enough that everyone in a group chat I'm in gets annoyed at the guy who automatically thinks Canada's conservative party is 1:1 with the far right in the US. But that's about it.)
I also respect that the mods/admins may prefer to only create groups and subgroups once the demand is actually there.
I’m in favor.
I see the second Trump administration as a special case, sort of like the pandemic. There really is a lot of news to share. There are worldwide effects that cross categories. But the temptation to doomscroll is high and sometimes the news is overwhelming.
Mostly a lurker, US based, and I agree.
Dont let perfect be the enemy of good. Politics is messy, and always changing underfoot. I don't think there is a perfect filtering solution. Tagging by country seems like extra work, and it is, but that's not quite the proposal here. It's distinctly about tagging USA politics from the rest. We're at a point where USA politics posts dwarf posts about all other countries combined, so it makes sense that it get its own tag.
It's messy, in that other countries can be involved in USA politics. Which is perhaps a good indication that something shouldn't be tagged to a particular country. The
politics.usatag should be reserved for USA centric posts, not necessarily all posts which involve the USA. It's sometimes hard to draw that line, like what's happening with USA/El Salvador. Does it have global implications? Or is it of primary concern to USA citizens/residents? I feel this is a decent litmus test for applying the tag. I'd say it falls on side of USA centric and should be tagged as such. Tariffs on the other hand, have global implications, not limited to just the countries involved.But back to the topic at hand. Were we to consistently get an influx of political posts from a variety of countries, we'd almost certainly want per country tags. Right now that distinction isn't necessary, but the USA/non-USA distinction is. Tagging USA centric posts
politics.usais forwards compatible with a future where other per country tags might be necessary, and serves the current need.I think this is particularly timely, as those following USA politics know this weekend is probably going to be generating a bunch of news//tildes posts and it's probably just the tip of the ice berg.
On board with this. I find myself getting drawn into a lot of the discussions, and it’d almost definitely be better for my state of mind to disengage from the topic, at least temporarily.
I've actually used both
politics.usandpolitics.eubefore, but it's always been changed back topoliticsand maybe a separateusaoreutag. As far as I understood the tag system anything taggedpolitics.usshould also show up under its parent tagpolitics- so I'm not really sure why these differentiations have been removed in the past. Politics is a very common tag after all, so having some subcategories for it makes sense imo.I've been using the tag Donald Trump to try to do something similar.
I am in favor.
How do you want to handle tagging local US politics topics going forward?
For example, if I posted a topic about politics in Houston, the topic previously would have been tagged with
politicsandusa.tx.houston.If we start using the
politics.usatag, then I see two options for tagging local US politics topics:politics.usaandusa.tx.houstonpolitics.usa.tx.houstonI honestly don't think it needs to be that complex since this isn't really about categorization, it's just meant to help with filtering out US political topics in general until we get more a granular filtering system. And how many people are actually going to want to specifically filter out ONLY Texas or Houston politics?
So just
politics.usawith the standardusa.tx.houstonlocation tag should be more than sufficient, IMO.I agree! As a non American, I don’t want to see any US politics, even at the local level. So this helps a lot!
Although a Trump filter has done wonders for me already!
Maybe
politics.usa.nationalorpolitics.usa.federalor something similar?cc: @mycketforvirrad, @Deimos
/offtopic, since I only made this comment because user mentions/pings don't work in topic text