27
votes
Necroposting?
So I just posted a comment in a month-old topic and it shot to the top of the Activity tab. I'm still new here and forgot that that would happen.
Is there any stance for or against necroposting on Tildes? I looked around for a search feature but didn't find one, so apologies if this has been discussed before.
If it hasn't been discussed before, what do you think? My gut instinct is that it's bad, but only because I've been conditioned to think that way from long ago when forums reigned before social media. Are there any downsides? And if necroposting is allowed, will it indirectly promote a kind of "NO DUPLICATE THREADS!" culture?
Spot on, IMO. People should definitely not feel hesitant or discouraged from commenting on old posts here. The whole point of activity sort is to give topics more time to breath and to reduce some of the luck (and timing) involved in them getting attention, since all it takes is another user finding it interesting enough to make a comment on it (regardless of its age) to essentially “resubmit” it and hopefully help other people discover it as well. And anyone that dislikes activity sort or necroposting is free to change their default sort method and/or time period. The initial default setting is not mandatory or permanent, just a recommendation.
I do wish there was a better way to highlight a vibrant discussion. Votes seem to be still used as agree buttons, if you have a comment thread with not much agreement but a lot of back and forth it will still be buried underneath the most upvoted
postcomment thread in that post. So it is harder for users to find the new content added to the topic.*edit to make my meaning clear.
Don't worry, that is likely coming eventually: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/111
A means to automatically navigate to new comments is also coming eventually, but until then you can always use Crius' Tildes Extended browser plugin which has that functionality.
Only if you're using "most voted" as your sorting method. The default sorting method offered to everyone on Tildes is "activity". If people stay with the default (as many do), that topic with a lot of back and forth will stay near the top of their front page, while a topic that's getting votes but no comments will disappear quite quickly.
Sorry I conflated 2 terms.
To make it clearer, when going into a post the most upvoted comment thread will appear first, so you will not necessarily see the on going conversation. You have to hunt for it or change 'Comments sorted by' to newest.
This is a problem for any reddit like social media platform with nested comment threads.
A more flat structure like a forum does not have this issue as every post is just sequential.
Gotcha. Well, like @cfabbro pointed out, that feature is already in the "to do" list.
Correct, This is a feature not a bug.
It's fine - the default front page sort is "activity, last 3 days", so most people won't see the post getting bumped anyway. They can easily change their sort/time-period settings if it bothers them.
It took me a little while to realise that this means activity on topics which were posted in the past 3 days, rather than activity in the past 3 days on any topics. Silly me!
I did not realize this, and it seems counter-intuitive to me. I thought the date range was based on the actual most recent post, not the topic itself. As soon as I signed up I changed my default time range to all time, as the site is small currently, so I haven't run into any issues about posts getting new replies that I am not seeing.
Given that based on the rest of this post necroposting seems like a feature, I think it would make more sense to have the last 3 days be relative to any posted replies on the topis and not based on when the topic it was posted. At the very least add an option to the date ranges to be selectable based on post dates or latest reply dates to make it clear what exactly you're getting.
I strongly agree on this matter @Deimos. For me, I sort by Activity because I enjoy the old forum format where posts are bumped to the top by new comments. Recycling posts instead of senselessly regurgitating the same drivel in a new post should be a feature that separates us from Reddit. For that to happen, All-time Activity needs to be the default.
I don't see what's wrong with it. Isn't that the point of forum threads? To be long lasting to allow for people to add things that haven't been added already? As opposed to a real life conversation which is often fleeting. It's not uncommon to see forum threads spanning years. And I find it pleasant when I see a thread like that and the last comment was made relatively recently.
Reddit's 6 month limit actually bothers me. I believe it unnecessarily and artificially kills the discussion.
And a Reddit thread being old has never stopped me from commenting on it, if anything, it encourages me, since it will give me more visibility. I've also had several pleasant conversations in threads that are months old. Sometimes, when it's a community thing (with more than one person) it revives the thread, too.
So this new concept of “necroposting” and its perception of negative is news to me. I'd never thought of it as something bad nor had it occurred to me that some people would think of it that way.
I completely agree regarding the 6 month limit. Sometimes you just want a bit more information, or to continue a discussion, rather than try to start an entirely new topic on your own. A number of times I've searched for something on reddit and had relevant information to add, only to notice that the post is 8 months old and is therefore frozen in time with no chance for updates/corrections. I assume there are specific reasons they arrived at this format, but it can be mildly frustrating as a user.
In general the only times I've seen users actively deride 'necro' posting on other forums are when they post something that doesn't really add much to the discussion (e.g. 'I agree!') or clearly haven't read much of the topic before adding to it/haven't noticed that they are asking about something that would no longer be relevant given the time span.
It's to reduce server load and storage requirements. It takes less capacity to store a static archived version of the thread than a live one which might attract new activity.
Actually, Reddit posts and comments can be edited by their submitters even after 6 months. Only new replies and voting are no longer possible.
Okay, so I should have said 'little' rather than 'no' chance. That said, there is still no input from other users, no new discussion, and no real visibility for any of those changes. Original posters can edit, but nobody else can feasibly add to that discussion or correct the information in a post outside of pestering other users via PM (something most of us wouldn't bother with). It's not the end of the world, but it can be annoying.
I never thought of it this way, but unless there are some other reasons for reddit doing it that way, I think this makes a lot of sense.
I think a lot of that is that it's currently hard to search for threads currently without manually flipping through pages to find them. I think once a search feature is working, the duplicates will be showing up less often, as people will be more likely to add to or vote on existing discussions.
I've gone to comment on a few threads myself and hesitated because it was a few days old, just by reddit habit I stopped myself from commenting on them when I noticed. Not sure what the solution here would be, or if one is really needed.
I agree, I've often wanted to join a conversation on a reddit thread only to realize it is 3 months old. Being able to take it up again does not seem like a negative thing to me - I already am in the habit of alternating between filtering by 'activity' and by 'new' to get the complete picture, so to speak.
Definitely one of the worst parts of reddit. Not first or close to it = might as well not even be commenting in the first place.
Necroposting is often a problem on forums that centre on support, and often it's new people chiming in on "solved" questions with completely unrelated problems. This sof course is problematic, and they should have started a new thread. This doesn't apply to tildes at all.