Daily Tildes discussion - How's the current set of groups?
I'm going to start posting one "official" daily discussion topic a day in ~tildes to talk about general site things, plans for mechanics, feedback on specific ideas, etc. You're definitely all welcome to post other similar topics as well if you want to, I just want to have one sort of "focused" post going every day.
For today:
What do you think of the current set of groups? It's a decent mix, but there are also some obvious gaps (though ~misc is supposed to act as a catch-all for posts that don't really fit anywhere else).
Overall, it's a tricky balance—I think if there isn't a group where a particular topic seems to fit, it feels a little discouraging, like maybe you shouldn't post it. But I also don't want to create too many groups, where we end up with a lot of them just being inactive because it's uncommon for anyone to submit items that fit in there.
And on a related topic, do you think there's a particular way we should try to handle "group requests", or just treat them mostly informally in ~tildes?
Honestly I think you may have created too many already. ;)
At the start, I'd concentrate on the top-level hierarchy model a la usenet. That's what we have now, of course, but we're going to be rolling with that for a long time, I think. The trouble is, you also need to bring on a relevant group of users to begin building the culture and stewardship of each group, otherwise it'll sit there neglected and largely empty.
~music is a good example - the majority of the reddit listento*/music mods and top submitters are here and ready to give you a posting rate over 200 a day at the drop of a hat. For us that's no problem.
I think you need the same kind of stewardship for ~sports, ~books, ~science etc. Reach out to the potential champions of each group, and create the groups as they join the site. If you don't have that critical seed user base, don't start the group. A group needs to prove it can be active before being created.
If I had to suggest one that I'd like to see which is missing, it's definitely ~comp, as in ~comp.netsec ~comp.sysadmin and ~comp.dev. I have a feeling a lot of our early adopters are going to be geeks of one strain or another, and ~comp is their natural habitat. ;)
I'm really behind a hierarchy of groups, perhaps with the root level being curated, possibly with the option to get a snapshot from all sub groups.
Perhaps at a much larger scale something like this:
It allows a more narrow filtering without "fracturing" since you'd be able to roll up calgary posts automatically into alberta, and canada. But if you want to just post about canada at a macro level you could use something like ~countries.canada.national
Likewise for the comp ideas suggested by @Amarok
That's what really excites me, and it's a core failure of reddit that no one ever really talks about. There's more great content on reddit than you can read in a lifetime, but it's all lost in tiny corners that are impossible to find unless you know exactly what you are looking for. People love to talk about reddit's favorite myth (and one of my pet peeves), "The votes will sort it out!"
Like hell. That doesn't even make sense unless you've got a critical mass of eyes on every single submission, and that simply does not happen, ever. Combine it with the issue of upvote velocity and it's a recipe for hot garbage making the top all day, every day.
Still, somehow, inside each of these smaller communities, everything is peachy. Sure, it's a bit quiet, but there's rarely a need for a moderator to take an action a month... and everyone tends to be civil and interested in the content. People make friends, good content and discussions can be had, and they just sort of forget that the rest of reddit exists. They also create the most incredible places on the internet when left to their own devices.
So what do we do? That's where the hierarchy comes in. By keeping everything in groups/sub-groups, we maintain a topic-based relationship, where the smaller community's topics are still on-topic and appropriate for the larger parent community. All that's lacking is a mechanism to allow the posts that do well in the smaller communities to bubble up into the larger ones, appearing as a fresh submission there, yet still with all of their own comments and culture preserved and intact. That serves as a seed for the larger discussion, and it's far more likely to already contain relevant, interesting, and on-topic information.
What's the threshold and the time interval for that up-posting action? Who knows. Maybe it's based on submissions beating the mean in their own community, maybe it's an editor/curator user class' function to push things up, maybe both... and I'm sure there are other ways to do it.
Where this gets tricky is in the reputation flow and the grouping of the comments. Does your rep in the larger community carry down into the smaller one, or vice versa, or does it flow both ways? Are there community hierarchies where one of those three options is a better fit than another? It's unlikely they'll all work the same way. Off the top of my head, for music, I'd have the smaller community reps count up the chain, but not the larger counting down the chain - it's a music taste issue to go the other way. I'm sure that's not going to work everywhere.
Do we group all of the smaller community comments into their own little section of the larger crosspost up the chain? Or do we just have one overall comment section? There's a value in both options.
It seems whatever we do, it's best to be flexible with all of the systems.
I actually did a rudimentary attempt at that for @deimos to work out a hierarchy for ~ (back when it was called Spectrium) using Usenet as a base, the ISO standards where applicable, with top level shortform names, alternate/full names.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KK7J9PMJKC8OvMi0CXX-osZ9et9f_eoLFmL9nHN3R84/edit?usp=sharing
And a complete proposed sub-structure with examples as well E.g.:
It was a rough draft and obviously needs a lot of refinement, especially since ideally the communities will grow organically so can't be forced, but it's something to start with at least and a decent guideline for structure.
I like it, I think you're on the right track here, especially sticking to the ISO standards - that'll make a lot of things easier in the long run. Usenet did this in the 80s too, so when in doubt we can always look at the newsgroups master listing for inspiration. The creation of that list was a human-powered engine of chaos, there's much to learn from the result.
Thinking ahead to a time with more users, maybe keeping track of what non-existent groups people try to access and gauge interest from that? Susceptible to spamming, and may need some sort of filtering, but as long as groups aren't automatically created based on views it might be useful as input at least?
I just went through a bunch of options in my head (some based on that other website), and nothing else really strikes me. If ~ seeks to avoid low-effort content and fracturing, this severely limits the potential groups. Maybe I’m being overly cautious.
I think the most obvious gaps so far from what people have asked me about are:
The current set of groups seems pretty good for the moment, I'd suggest maybe a
politicsgroup.. as right now that'd just end up under news, where it doesn't really belong.As for group requests, informally in ~tildes is likely fine for now, but I can see that becoming unmanageable as more users are added to the site. Likely will need a group-request form somewhere at eventually.
I fear a
politicsgroup, mostly because I fear it turning into /r/politics (which has so many opinion pieces dressed up as news, not actual news about politics). By forcing it under thenewsgroup it makes it more clear that it's for news, not just thoughts.I mod /r/NeutralPolitics on Reddit (also /r/ChangeMyView which gets a lot of political content), and I strongly oppose creating a ~politics here until it is much better defined exactly how such a forum would be structured.
The principal problem with a politics forum is that it invites a particular kind of content which lots of people want to submit but nobody wants to read: rants. I cannot tell you how many quasi-rant like posts we get on CMV and NP where the OP is just wanting to push a political view on people, and it's like talking to a brick wall when you try to meaningfully engage them.
~tildes is small enough right now that it probably wouldn't immediately have that problem, but managing a politics-focused forum is much harder than almost any other subject, and should be undertaken with extreme care.
I just wanted to say that I am really glad to see the CMV, NeutralPolitics and various other DepthHub associated community mods on ~ already. I have consistently pointed to those communities as the ideal for how moderation of controversial and political discussions on ~ should be handled as well as just moderation in general. The CMV blog is fantastic and a great source of inspiration as well. ;)
Mods, plural, may be an overstatement. For CMV and NP it's just me here as far as I know. And I should add the proviso that I do not speak on behalf of the mod teams of those subs, just my personal experience as a mod.
Well... that's easy enough to change. @deimos ... some extra invites for @huadpe? ;)
I'm strongly in agreement with this. The kind of mess that will explode into ~politics is the kind of mess we can only hope to handle with vastly better tools and full moderation features - many of which we've talked about over months in slack. There are ways to handle the problem, but tildes hasn't got those features yet, and I wouldn't invite trouble until it does.
I think part of this is in actively preventing pairwise-opposed groups from forming - they only exist to antagonize each other, and fall straight into the two-minutes-hate trap. It's all fun and games when it's enlightenedbirdmen vs mudmen - but once you introduce politics into that equation, all rational thought gets shut down. Reddit can't prevent this since anyone can create communities like T_D and WayOfTheBern. The first troublemaker I remember was SRS, which existed exclusively to mock and attack other communities - I'll wager that was the genesis of a lot of reddit's problems because it was allowed to metastasize and spread. Tildes can prevent this sort of thing, and must. The only way you'll get liberals and conservatives to behave is to get them to share the same forum, so they can't create caricatures of each other to attack in private.
We need all the input we can get from NeutralPolitics and CMV - those places are impossible bastions of sanity in an ocean of bile. I'm sure their mod teams have had lengthy backroom discussions about what kind of features they could use to maintain civil discourse, and I'd love to hear about them.
There seems to be demand for a broader discussion around this, so I'll try to compose some thoughts from modding those forums later tonight and post it here as its own thread.
Edit: also thank you for the kind words about CMV and NP!
I've subscribed to NP almost since the very beginning and absolutely adore that place. Thank you for representing a forum for meaningful discussion.
100% agree. Until some moderator tools and the reputation system are in place I would advise against an ~politics. By relegating it to ~news with politics tag and maybe eventually ~news.politics, that at least sets the tone by implying we are not looking for purely opinion pieces or soapbox discussion but actual news articles that just so happen to be related to the subject of politics.
Once we are capable of actually moderating and relying on the rep system to help us then we can open the site up to purely opinion based groups about politics (or not), which will be a good test of if the tools/rep system can keep things civil even in this current political and social media climate.
I half agree.. politics is tricky because everyone has an opinion, and people are often very vocal about their opinion. By forcing it into ~news you're attempting to make sure that only news articles are posted, which is reasonable. However, at the same time it seems like you're trying to discourage opinion pieces.. which feels like the wrong approach to a community like this. People need a place to voice opinions and talk about them, and that content specifically doesn't belong in ~news.
Just to be clear, I personally don't care about a politics group as I don't have much interest in such things. It is just a gap that I see in the current group list.
So far so good.
Looks fine till now. Still digesting the features.