26
votes
Why is ~comp not ~tech.comp?
I know subgroups are still a very new thing, but this seems (to me at least) like an obvious one, with ~comp currently seeming to act as "~tech, but advanced". The topics are very similar, with ~comp's most active post right now being about machine learning and ~tech's being about open source code, topics that could easily be swapped between the groups and still fit in.
I would say that computing is too broad to fit under technology. For instance, computing may include more science-oriented topics, like programming language theory, database theory, other ongoing research in computation, etc, that definitely does not belong to technology.
If it had been ~tech.comp I don't think I would have subscribed it.
I don't see why those don't belong in ~tech, honestly. Again, those seem to me like "~tech but more advanced", something that I think would be interesting to have bubble up into a group which is generally more surface-level.
In my view technology is more about production and inventing methods for production while research is rather aimless. ("Research is what we do when we don't know what we do." -- was it Feynman?) Computing covers both, but technology does not. Just my opinion, though.
This bothered me a bit as well.
I assume the practical reason is that the system for posts filtering upward in the hierarchy is not ready.
Imho there should also be a top-level ~culture group, which would encompass ~culture.music, ~culture.food, ~culture.tv, ...
On the other hand, some things are big enough to warrant being their own root groups, rather than adhering to a strict hierarchy because it would be purer.
Meh. Typing ~tech.comp instead of ~comp is not terribly inconvenient. Especially if you can bookmark it once for all.
The plan is that groups that are big enough get their own root group, i suppose as an alias of the "real" structure.
Having said that, ~tech.comp should display the same thing as ~comp and right now that's not the case.
I also have some issue with the way groups are displayed on the subscription page. Right know it shows everything but I think that it should display only the root groups and when you click on one, it expand to show its child.
Also I don't really know how I feel about the plan of groups having aliases:
~games.moba having ~moba
~science.space having ~space
How do you display them? Because they have an alias you show them as root groups as well? I hope not because It would feel cluttered imho.
I agree. Although there should be some indication of the number of subgroups as well, I think.
Regarding aliases, I also believe they should be distinct from root groups. Maybe something like ~.space (for ~science.space)?
I like this, although it could get out of hand depending on how deep subgroups go. Having ~.......name would be a little much I think.
Hahaha, yes, I was thinking of just having one dot, whatever depth. So you know it's a subgroup. It doesn't seem that indicating depth would be of much help anyway.
Nah that makes too much sense xP
Jokes aside this sounds like a good, subtle way to differentiate.
Now I feel like I'm ironyblind. xD
My initial reaction also was that aliases would be the obvious solution. Indeed they'll introduce a little bit of navigation confusion.
IMO the site should almost always display the shortest path because that's most convenient for humans. The expanded alias target can be displayed in the sidebar or something.
The subscriptions page could list both aliases and their duplicate full path, to help you navigate. Aliases would be indicated as such, somehow.
Discussions like this remind me of Usenet, we've been here before :)
https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_modern.htm
I've long thought this hierarchy might be a problem but didn't want to say anything because I figured it might sort itself out after all. Seems like there's already confusion.
A lot of top level categories make sense on their own but also as subcategories of others. Think ~talk. It could serve as a free form, gossip-y category and it makes sense to have ~talk.movies, for example. But it also makes sense to have a ~movies.talk group and that's honestly where I'd look first. It's hard to argue which is more "general" and should be higher in the hierarchy. There is also no real problem with both existing, except it splitting discussion. Maybe identically named subgroups should link to the same page? Is there any case in which ~x.y does not equal ~y.x?
One of my initial thoughts related to Tildes was that it would be better to do away with hierarchies entirely and simply rely on tagging, where you subscribe to (or block) tags you're interested in (or don't want to see at all). If I want to read about a certain topic, I'd search the tags repository to learn what tags are being used to mark those topics, then subscribe to those tags. "Cross-posting" is simply accomplished by applying multiple tags to a post ("tech", "programming", and "python", for example). No need to worry about maintaining hierarchical groups. I could subscribe to (+programming AND +python) to get only articles tagged as both programming and python. or (+tech AND -programming) to get tech articles but exclude programming, or (+programming AND (+python OR +R)), etc.
But I thought the suggestion would be poorly received on a site built around a topic hierarchy system.
Think of it this way: what if I'm interested in all programming topics? Do I need to subscribe to
pythonandcandgoandrubyand 100+ other tags? No, that's really annoying and I'd also miss anything from any language I didn't think to subscribe to, so we probably need a generalprogrammingtag that covers all of those. But now do submitters have to remember to always apply bothprogrammingandpythonevery time? That's annoying too, so to make it easier, we can probably just apply theprogrammingtag whenever people are submitting any of those tags.But now, what if I'm interested in more general computing topics outside of programming? Again, I don't want to have to subscribe to
programminganddatabasesandweb developmentand so on, so we should probably have a generalcomputingtag that applies to all of them, and it should be auto-applied for those topics for the same reasons as above, and...What just happened was building a hierarchy, which works better than individual tags would have. You'll be able to do things like "programming but not python" with the hierarchy as well.
I like it and that's how I was imagining topics and filtering being used in the near future when they get implemented. Though, I do think hierarchies are fine for now, sans tag system, but tagging could make it redundant.
Let us do a thought experiment: what is ~tech that is neither ~comp nor ~science
engineering? transportation? biotech?
Consumer tech.
I see this thought experiment went pretty well. Let’s try now what is ~comp that is neither ~tech nor ~science.
(I think ~science is different enough that we don’t need to do the experiment for it as well).
compsci, programming, software
I dunno.
Compsci could well be ~science.comp, programming ~science.comp.(programmimg_language).
As for software, unless we're talking about theory or programming per se (see above), I would expect it to be in the (sub)tilde of the topic that the software in question handles - e.g. ~creative.3d.software(.blender) and ~books.electronic.software(.calibre)
hardware, like drones, cellphones, and other electronic products.
I feel like these groups and subgroups are going to become something like those library classification systems.