My problem with the site at the moment
For the last couple of days I've been visiting the site several times a day and leaving after 10 minutes or so.
It's not that the site is bad or the discussion isn't good, but there's been a big lack of discussion I'm interested in. I don't like to take place in discussion of politics, or religion, or LGBT, or whatever. For me, the forums always were a place to meet new people to talk to, without it being a date or making friends or anything, just a friendly talk. Not that there shouldn't be a place for talking about world problems, but I get much more enjoyment from small issues or just getting to know other people.
Which is why I haven't been very active here for the last couple of days. There is all this LGBT talk and Trump and catastrophes. Even in the ~talk, there are 'Homosexual marriage legal or illegal?', 'Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?', 'It's a Piece of Cake to Bake a Pretty Cake: LGBT+ Discrimination'. There is a fair share of smaller conversations, but they are mostly things I'm not interested in: 'What's your favorite documentary?, 'Advice- Best Tablets for Interactive Training' ― or things I don't know enough about to discuss, like 'How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?'. This leaves very few posts I'm interested in, and I can hardly engage there because everything I could've said has already been said before I saw it.
Everything above is why I was mostly active in my own posts when I first joined as well. And I wanted to create this post to express this frustration(?) with lack of content, and I'm sure a lot of other lurkers will agree with me on that (whether or not they have different interests) ― I'm writing this post for them, too. I have no idea how you'd fix this problem or if it's even fixable, but I think it's important to state it so more active people can notice and so I have someplace to be active on ~.
I would like to point out that the person who posted the first two posts you refer to is now banned. He was being unnecessarily provocative, and discussion should hopefully settle down soon.
The systems that are supposed to enforce those decisions aren't yet ready.
According to the latest daily discussion:
Made controversial posts
Didn’t respond to comments, instead editing the controversial parts out
Rather than responding, made more controversial posts
In the future, yes. Right now, it's just Deimos. He hasn't built the tools yet that would allow him to add other "moderator"-type people, or for them to perform any moderation tasks.
If you want topics that you're interested in, you are welcome to start some. Perhaps other people will find them interesting, and discussion will result.
As far as the Homosexual marriage and school uniform topics, the site creator banned the creator of both of those threads, Hypnotoad, for trolling. https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/1wa/daily_tildes_discussion_banning_for_bad_faith_trolling_behavior
I've been creating topics, and I loved it, but I don't always want to do it, and being a commenter is usually more fun for me.
There's an old rule of the internet: the "90:9:1" rule. It says that
90% of users of a site will be lurkers, just reading and voting.
9% of users will comment on posts.
1% of users will post things.
Those aren't actual statistics, but they're fairly indicative. People don't post as much as they comment, and they don't comment as much as they read.
In other words... if you don't post, who will?
Some subs I’ve visited on reddit do a daily discussion thread specifically geared towards “just pop in, say hi, chat about your day or what’s on your mind.”
I always enjoyed those because there’s no “off-topic”, you get little snippets into the lives of people who are users here, and people will sometimes chat about articles and news that don’t necessarily warrant their own post but they’re still kinda interesting.
I feel like it’s a casual way of fostering a sense of community that I think people might be looking for here?
It feels to me like ~talk is almost entirely that type of topic. Right now there are multiple posts like "how's your week going?", "what are your weekend plans?", and so on.
Whoops! That’s what I get for not exploring all the ~ 😬
Feel free to ignore my suggestion lol.
That will be a nice to have when stickied posts get implemented.
Though, who will do the sticky-ing, I don't know; group agreement? Trusted users?
Sounds like that might be categorized as "fluff".
I disagree.
A cute image, a pretty picture with a sob story attached in the title: that's fluff.
Fluff is not just "not high profile topics". Let's not kid ourselves, having discussion online is just the evolution of having a chat at a café. None of this topics are going to "change the world", "solve a crisis" and such.
Having discussion that just let the people relax and bond with others can only do good if the community remember that they are people and not names on a screen.
Sure, but something interesting or engaging doesn't mean "solving a crisis".
I do think there's a fluffy line there. If I were at a café with some people and everyone was just saying how was their weekend one by one, without much interaction or delving into anything, to me it would seem like a "me, me, me" kind of conversation and quickly lose interest. If I'm talking to some people AFK and that topic is brought up, I'd expect that several people engage each other and ask some follow up questions, that they show interest to know each other, not just that each of them says something and leaves, which is somewhat common in those topics online. It can easily become too self absorbed or... I don't know, a "look at me!" type of thing.
I don't doubt some people enjoy that, and some interesting thought can be surely found. But I don't think they especially foster bonding or encourage a good conversation. And they're definitely not the only way of noticing someone is more than a name on a screen.
But again, I'm not opposed to those threads, I'm just not attracted to them usually and, in my scale, they not very high.
Those topics are absolutely a "me time" but it's quite different from how you depict it would be in a café.
I actually have this kind of discussion with my colleagues once a week. Every Friday we take half an hour's off, unless there is a close deadline, and we just have a coffee and talk about how things are going in our personal life.
No one is forced to talk and usually what happens is that when someone says its piece, more than once come up with variation of "oh shit, that happened to me too", "eh, maybe try this next time" or just "you know, that thing you said remember me that... " and we change topic.
It's absolutely not a "me me me" time but in the contrary a "that's me, how about you" time.
Also, I'm not suggesting that people create topics just to say "this happened to me, good talk" but maybe something like community topic, once a week or so, in which the community can form bonds.
Edit: I fucking hate my autocorrect
Exactly my point. Usually those extra comments you mention are rare online. As I said, there might be some interesting thoughts or subthreads here and there, but I wouldn't say it's the norm. Also, you talk about meeting your colleagues, people you already know and you see and interact with everyday, my analogy was sitting with a group of strangers, which would be slightly different. But yeah, I guess it somewhat works for colleagues at some level as well.
Take this thread for example. There are 19 top level comments, of which only 4 have replies...
In any case, I already admitted I'm not opposed to those kinds of threads. I just don't enjoy them because to me they are basically self-centered. Maybe some people will establish bonds through them, I don't deny the possibility, but they are not interesting enough for me (especially if there a lots of threads like that). Maybe having one once a week would be a better way, but I think they work best in common interest communities. I'm not sure if you object to me not liking them or to me calling them fluffy...
EDIT:
If there are no answers to most, it's more like "that's me, how about you, I don't really care". That's my impression.
Sort of a facepalm moment, I didn’t realize that my suggestion was already being done in ~talk. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
So what kind of topics do you want to discuss? We're all throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks
I don't have many particular topics I'd like to discuss, but some of them are things like linguistics, conlanging, languages I speak, essays, also tidying and general quality-of-life improvement, psychology, creativity, education, a lot of other things I don't see on ~.
Just a heads-up, in case you didn't see it, I did post an education topic that seems to have gone well so far. At least it went better than my other topic, so I'll probably post more about education (it is my field, after-all). Also, I will try to post some things about linguistics, too, as that's also one of my favourite things, especially second language acquisition.
Hey, languages are a tiny hobby of mine as well. I'm not a linguist, but find them very interesting. Let's start a few topics 😀
Why don't you post about those things yourself?
As some other comments have said, this is basically just what's it's going to be like while the site is small, and it will slowly improve over time as the userbase grows. There have been other people expressing a similar sentiment from a slightly different direction—when you see people making posts asking things like "why can't we create our own groups? I wanted one for [niche subject]", it's effectively the same feeling behind their request as your post.
The issue is that just creating a group for a subject won't make that community materialize. An easy example is the requests for location-based groups—sure, we could create something like a ~geo.europe.france, but it would probably have 1 user. It won't just start filling up with interesting content because it exists. We need the users before the groups will work.
Something that I think is really important to recognize is that if the site isn't very interesting for you right now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. This phase is difficult, and it's going to take a long time to build up to the point where there's enough varied content to keep a wide range of people interested. It's not something unique to Tildes though, and it just takes time. Reddit didn't even have user-created subreddits for almost 3 years, and before that point it had even fewer "categories" than Tildes already has (and they weren't very active either).
So like I said, if you're not finding yourself very interested yet, it's really not something to worry about. Maybe just check back in once a week or so, and see if the site's starting to look more like something you're interested in. You shouldn't feel obligated to keep checking, or try to "force" the site to have topics you want by posting them yourself. I'm confident we'll get to that point eventually, but it's a gradual process and is going to take a significant amount of time.
I think your problem might be solved when more people come to the site. Right now there is a small userbase, and I can also say that not all topics are of interest to me, but I join the discussions I'm interested in.
Agreed, but we're in an experimental phase at the moment. Can't hurt to try new things to engage more people
I agree with both of you. I think there's a sort of critical mass you need to reach, topics which draw in people interested in them which in turn lead them to stick around and add to the community around that topic.
That being said I think the risk is relative to rate at which new members join, if a lot are joining at once then more than likely interests will converge but for a small trickle of new members the chances of a community forming is less.
I sort of feel the same way. I go on Reddit for niche things like seeing what people are saying about Civ VI or Breath of the Wild. But I don’t really have much to start a thread with myself; I more like to jump in on what others are posting. Still, I want to contribute, so I’ve submitted some open-ended posts. But then people are like, well, that’s just fluff.
I’m considering not really being active until there are more specific groups.
Smaller communities will only be active on broader topics. If you want to talk about conlangs, you will need other people in the community with the same interest. And once you find them, you will still likely be limited to general conlang topics.
Subject drives discussion. Submitting articles, and hoping they get noticed by the right people, is the only real solution.
Conlanging is a niche topic, and I don't expect to find it here until the community is big enough. I just wanted to express what I feel about what is there, what the community that is here is talking about. And the lack of interesting topics aside from the more common ones.
I'm pretty sure there's at least one other conlanger here (unless you're also the person on reddit who asked about it), so you might want to post something on ~misc just to see who else here is interested.
I think there are a few different things that could improve this:
Sorry, I think my questions below sound a bit accusatory, but they're not intended to be. I'm just asking for input/suggestions:
How do you think the group could be made more obvious? It's already on the left edge, directly underneath the title of every post, which is about the most significant position possible. I could probably bold them or something too, but from a quick try of that it almost makes the group look even more important than the title, which is a bit weird.
How do you think unsubscribing could be easier either? It's already only 2 clicks from the front page, so other than adding a way to do it on every single post (which is a bit excessive since it's a pretty uncommon need), I'm not sure how it could be much more convenient.
I tried changing the CSS to make the posts bold, and I don't mind it, but I can see how it doesn't really solve the problem either.
Maybe color-coding each group could be something to try? Then you could quickly get a feeling for which groups you prefer more or less.
I think I was on my iPad when I noticed the unsubscribing thing; you have to open the sidebar to unsubscribe. This is definitely a minor issue though.
If this happens please make it optional, one thing I love about the site now is how simple and clean it is and lots of colour markers or text will look awful.
This is the kind of thing I was thinking of: https://i.imgur.com/dZkyIBY.png
Maybe that's a bit too subtle, though.
I like it, though it is very subtle, it took me a few seconds to find it. Maybe make the bar on all sides of the post? That way, even if it has another bar overriding it on the left, we can still see the bar designating the topic colour.
While I like the idea of colour-coding per group, perhaps, though, it could be subtle. Like a dot in the corner? That might be nice on the eyes and a quick visual identifier as to what group a specific topic fits into.
This is a solved problem that every subreddit puts into action almost immediately within their communities - unique page banners.
But, let's assume we don't have unique banners or users don't use them. What then? Let's compare designs:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/313005422523187201/454538485907456000/unknown.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/313005422523187201/454538564974149643/unknown.png
Take a close look at both of these and really THINK about how your eye travels across the page, starting in the top left.
Notice how the eye line of reddit travels straight through the subreddit name as you scan across the page?
Here's a crudely drawn mspaint to illustrate:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/313005422523187201/454539394032861194/unknown.png
It flows neatly and puts emphasis upon taking in the subreddit name as you move across the page. This is subtle subtle design, and it was either intentional or happened to work out great by accident. It makes readers take it in well.
Whereas over on tildes my eyeline moves more like this:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/313005422523187201/454539993168478209/unknown.png
Starts up there in top left.
Adjusts to where the correct top left of the page starts because it's not a full-width design.
Glides across the title.
There are a number of possible places to put the ~group name in order for it to be in the path of the eyeline as the user moves from top left across the title and then down through the rest of the page.
As for on the sorting feeds, I think if it's on the end of the title line and below the title it will be more noticeable. Currently people have to reset to the start of the line to take in the group name, however if your eyes reset to the start of the line you're more interested in clicking into the comments section than reading the next line, so you don't take it in as easily. Reddit has it on the end of the line typically just below the title, this draws the eye onto it immediately after reading the title. This strikes me more as lucky design than intentional because the positioning changes for every single post, but the majority of the time it's in a beneficial position to immediately be the next thing the reader catches after the title on reddit's frontpage.
This is really drilling down into the minutiae of how a user reads/interacts with something within a fraction of a second though and I am not wholly convinced that spending too much of your time obsessing over it would be a good use of time. It's something you could spend days working on to get just right and nobody will thank you for it despite the elevated comfort they might perceive without being able to properly articulate why it's more comfortable one way or the other.
I think you're talking about something completely different. I was talking about recognizing which group a post is in on the home page listing, not once you're already inside a post in the group (and I thought that's what @panic was talking about as well).
Being confused about which group you're in after you click into a post would be something different (and not something I think I've ever been confused about, but it's possible that other people are).
I talked about the home page listing in the last part. I just thought this depiction was more significantly obvious and that leads into the harder to interpret sorted link list version.
I don't think people get confused about what is what or where at all, but that it is just not in the most comfortable reading line for people. They have to scan around for it instead of it being on the scanning/reading path. It's a super minor inconvenience, but one that people notice every time it occurs.
It sounds like you just need more people to be active on the site. More people, more topics, better chance you'll find the niche you're looking for.