21
votes
How about /r/all for tildes?
I finally signed up on tildes, and just as on the other site, I immediately proceeded to unsubscribe from ~news, ~lgbt and ~food, just because I like to focus on my interests most of the times. However, when I'm hungry for more content, my limited tastes aren't enough. On reddit, /r/all used to provide a wild west, all-you-can-eat-buffet experience, which I don't find here.
I understand the site is in early alpha and community is small (which is the main attraction for me right now), so what do you guys think about something like /r/all for tildes?
I can see the appeal of an "~all" as someone who regularly browses /r/all on reddit, but I'm opposed to an /r/all equivalent for Tildes.
Why?
If /r/all, /r/popular, and all the 'meta-reddits' didn't exist, it means users have to actively seek out the content they're interested in.
If you want to join a community about antiques, you have to consciously seek out /r/antiques. Same goes for sci-fi enthusiasts, sheet-music seekers, etc, etc. This means that there's a relatively steady stream of truly passionate people going to these communities. These new users have a chance to learn the existing subreddit culture and assimilate with the current userbase to produce a larger but equally rich community.
The problem with /r/all is that it disrupts that steady flow of passionate new subscribers. Now, if a subreddit hits the front page of reddit, they typically experience a sudden spike in subscriptions from people who are only casually interested in their content.
This is most problematic for small communities. If a tight-knit subreddit with 500 subscribers hits the front page, their numbers might explode to 5,000 overnight.
Now, that initial community of 500 passionate "antique lovers" (or whatever) is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the new recruits. These new subscribers have no knowledge of the pre-existing culture but their voices (and upvotes) will inevitably determine the new course of that subreddit. The most highly upvoted content generally determines what content will be posted in the future -- people will usually post content similar to what has been successful in the past.
The community is fundamentally changed forever, and there's really nothing they can do about it.
This is a good explanation of why it's a problem. I wrote a similar post about why /r/gaming being a default subreddit meant could never be a very good gaming subreddit (god, 7 years ago?).
Concepts like default subscriptions, /r/all-like views, and so on make it so that people that aren't members of a community can have more influence on its content than people that are, and that's harmful.
Every time you link one of your old posts on these subjects in /r/gaming the top comments are people disagreeing and basically saying "nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. Stop being difficult."
My favorite is the announcement for /r/Games, where it feels like most of the comments are basically, "this is a dumb idea and won't work, nobody wants or needs this."
I read your post over on /r/gaming back in the day, and I'm re-reading it now. TBH I don't think this is an issue specific to having non gamers subscribed to a gaming forum as it is just a sheer NUMBERS problem - it's not possible to have an open, engaged, relevant community when you have millions of people participating. It doesn't matter if they're gamers or not, the impersonal nature of that many people interacting anonymously is going to be, and still is, absolute shit.
It doesn't help that "gaming" is a very generic topic in and of itself - it includes boardgames, PC gaming, consoles, etc. The sheer mass of numbers subscribed to /r/gaming (over 18M at this point) guarantees that it will hit the front page regularly no matter how offtopic or awful the post is (and I've removed a few completely off topic posts from /r/gaming that hit the top of /r/all before I saw them) exposing it to more people, getting more users involved, and making it worse.
Thank you for posting that! I was racking my brain trying to remember the title of your post to no avail, so I wrote a paraphrased version from what I could remember.
There's some great detail in your original that I omitted.
What would happen if a topic could opt-out of the /all view?
I'm not arguing that there should be a /all view, but if there was, would an opt-out for topic be a way for niche topics to keep their nicheness?
I believe there is actually a method to opt out from /r/all on reddit, but it is a privilege seldom exercised by moderators, in my experience.
Although the Tildes approach to recruiting moderators should (theoretically) result in higher quality mods, many moderators on other sites appear to be more interested in increasing their subscriber-count than maintaining high-quality subreddits.
Aside from one of the "Two X Chromosomes" subs (I'm not sure which...), I can't even name a subreddit that has taken advantage of this option.
It's unfortunate, but I suppose it's human nature.
One interesting alternative, off the top of my head, might be a ~FindATilde community where people can ask where to find content they're interested in (e.g. "What are the best tildes for a comedy-fan to subscribe to?").
Given the way this site's groups are structured, that's more likely to be called something like ~Tildes.help.
There is, it's in the community options.
I'd suspect not many use it because 1. they don't know it exists in the first place, and 2. they don't want to exclude their community from hitting the front page and being exposed to new people. There's a weird obsession with "growth" and becoming a large subreddit for a lot of communities that I don't really understand and don't always agree with - some organic growth is fine, but the explosion a small community gets when they hit the top of /r/all is rarely a good thing.
On the flipside, having an /r/all analog (though I'd personally be loathe to see one myself) would help new topics or smaller groups pick up steam, and make themselves known to users who still may care enough to become 'good users' but aren't aware of it's existence yet.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution would be, but perhaps something similar to Reddit's 'trending subreddits' header on /r/home but based around new topics not in areas that have been filtered out, etc. or something similar may be useful further down the line.
One could make the argument that one could just read the entire tree of if it's made available somewhere (which is an interesting idea from one point of view), ensuring that visitors have made an effort to be there, but when starting out as a community and when trying to become known to new-to-tildes users that is slightly less important, especially when the standards for posting here would itself act as a similar barrier.
Trending lists have a similar problem to r/all: exposing the group to the whole site all at once. It would be much better for groups to have lower but more consistent exposure rather than super spiky exposure. Rather than having one trending list that the whole site sees, have each group show up on the "try checking this out" list of a small number of random users.
What I've seen discussed about the mechanics of group creation on Tildes would seem to make this redundant.
Groups will mostly be created when there's a demonstrated demand for them - usually because there are a lot of posts with a tag about the topic. For example, if there were a lot of posts in ~movies tagged "star wars", that would demonstrate a demand for a group about Star Wars.
Most groups will be created as sub-groups of existing groups. For example, a group about Star Wars would be created as a sub-group of ~movies, called ~movies.starwars.
The top posts of a sub-group will "bubble up" to the parent group. For example, the current top two or three posts from ~movies.starwars would be included in the current feed for ~movies.
Combining these mechanics, we see that new groups will usually not be hidden away: they'll be created as sub-groups in the groups where people were posting about them, and their top posts will rise up to the parent group so people will learn there's a sub-group they might be interested in.
I think it's important that it requires at least some level of interest/effort for people to seek out content they're interested in, so I don't want to have an actual "all" view and want to get rid of the subscribe-to-everything-by-default behavior soon as well.
However, we can still do a lot better than other sites in terms of discovery and having other ways to find new content. The groups being organized in a hierarchy adds a lot—for example, there's no way on reddit to do something like "show me the top posts from all the sports subreddits", but a hierarchy will make that much more possible. Having a proper tagging system for topics will make a big difference as well for being able to search/filter/etc. I think there are a lot of possibilities for good discovery without getting into a lot of the downsides of an "all" view.
Do you have an idea for what a public Tildes frontpage will look like for people who do not have an account?
Probably just something along the lines of "pick a subject (group)". There's not really any reason that there needs to be some sort of general, mingled front page. Users can create that for themselves with subscriptions if they want to, but I don't think it needs to be the default experience.
But what about non-users? When you make the site publicly viewable by people who don't have a Tildes account, what will those non-tilders see?
I'm not sure what you mean - they'd see "pick a group", and can view the groups individually.
So a logged-out user or non-user will just see a list of group names (like in the sidebar for a logged-in user) when they visit tildes.net. They won't see any posts unless they click on a group. Okay.
Very good. I found/find subreddit discovery difficult on Reddit and sometimes I used r/all to find new reddits to subscribe to.
For example, here is the related subreddits put together by the permaculture sub, if that wasn't there I wouldn't be able to find a fraction of them. Tagging and good searching of the content should be able to fill that gap.
True dat. You are right in the sense that tildes is still small, but Deimos wants to open the floodgates soon, and that will change things, fast. We'll have to plan things beforehand, which is what the daily discussions are, I presume.
I think the "opening the floodgates" was making the site publicly viewable, not opening up accounts to everyone.
Oh. I figured that, since context of Deimos' comment was low activity, he meant open account creation. It does make more sense to let more people view the site to make them want to join in, naturally increasing new users without taking in the flood of zombies.
Deimos will open account creation in the future, it won't be invite-only forever. However opening Tildes for public viewing will come before that.
An r/all equivalent will surely come when the option to create own groups is added or when more default ones are added.
Deimos has said in the past that default subscriptions are only a temporary measure while Tildes is small. IIRC he's not a big fan of them.
I wonder if it wouldn't be kinda neat to start with the same subscrption list as the person who invited you.
Perhaps that would have to be an opt-in option for privacy?
Have there been discussions on the possibility of invitations which donate reputation to the new member thus skipping some kind of low-reputation annoyance?
It would be neat in specific circumstances. The person who invited you isn't guaranteed by any measure to enjoy the same types of content as you, so it potentially would be an annoyance more than a convenience to many users. And it would probably end up being a 2-way opt-in feature, considering
Not as far as I'm aware. But just because the inviter has high reputation on ~comp, doesn't mean the invitee only interested in sports will be fit to potentially moderate the group. And the idea itself seems kinda antithetical (sp?) to the actual reputation system.
I dunno the reputation system seems a lot like Elo. It's going to be dynamic, people will through random noise get power that they shouldn't. The system has to handle that so it's not too bad if a mod has a friend come in with say the ability to vote meaningfully, lower rate limits on posting, the ability to post external links.... whatever (wild theorizing on what a no-invite account is default allowed to do above...)
Plus a stated design goal is that losing rep is actively painful in order for moderation to have teeth. So if I want a friend to join the community an ability to vouch them in at a less than default painful level seems handy.
They may be referring not to a website, but the to the Elo rating system
Oh sorry I mean't the Elo rating system I didn't realize how annoying to google that was!
If the current level of posting is available invite free on a very busy site I'd have thought you'll end up drowning in bots posting affiliate links? I admit my only evidence for this is seeing blogs with the comments full of bots posting affiliate links.
I'm talking about intentional spam so I wouldn't expect them to be registered.
What good does banning do? You're saying all fresh accounts would have the same right to post. No rate limiting, no control over posting external links. The botter can just spin up a new account.
Given the code quality & roadmap it's unthinkable to me that Tildes or a fork of it wouldn't have this problem eventually perhaps that's just my newcomer naivety! :)
There have not been discussions about this and I, for one, would be against this.
However, I think it's a moot point. I think that, by the time we get to the stage where reputation really matters, the site won't be invitation-only any more. New members will be creating their own accounts without being invited, so there'll be noone to donate reputation to them.
I think most people are just handing invitations out to strangers. At least, that's what posts on r/tildes lead me to believe. So I don't think most people would be attracted by that potential feature.
Given the docs talk about the invite reflecting on the reputation of the inviter that doesn't seem like the intention. Although perhaps needs must to grow the site for now.
Honestly I believe that a very good tag filtering system would be much better than an /r/all.
I'd even go out a stretch here and say that at registration, an (optional) step would be to have the user decide which tags he doesn't want to see, no matter what. So to set up it's home page as subscribed to everything but with tag filtering on the specified tags.
In the end, my home for reddit is /r/all with only a couple of toxic subreddits and tags filtered out by RES.
You can set your tag filters here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
Is there any way to search tags at this early point? I like the 'environment' and I have to find a post tagged it, click on it, and then I can find others. Am I missing a spot to find tags rather than filtering them?
There is a simpler way. I could bookmark/bookmarklet this or variations of.
https://tildes.net/~misc?tag=environment
And this is a better catch-all:
https://tildes.net/?tag=environment
As long as the tagging is good, this gets a significant amount of old stuff:
https://tildes.net/?order=activity&tag=environment&period=all
You're not missing anything. What you describe is currently the only way to find posts with a certain tag you're interested in.
It's a bit clunky for now, but I assume there'll be a better user interface for this in the future.
Tildes need more submissions, if anything else.
I'm doing the best I can! :P