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I want to use tags. But everyone's always so on-topic, serious and helpful that I haven't found any occasion to use them appropriately.
Just that, basically. Didn't know where else to post it, so I figured I'd post it here.
Most of the time I've found similarly, but I have seen some more... controversial topics where I've had need to flag comments. I think I've used noise, flame, and troll each at least once. I try to avoid it so that I don't start using it as a downvote or dismissal button, and I lean toward not tagging when a comment is on the border, but there have been times when something is just so clearly across the line that I can confidently tag it.
That said, I really am quite happy that in most topics I have no need for comment tags, and it gives me faith in the community. With any luck, we can keep that quality as we grow into a larger community.
They will be used that way if we grow to fast or hit a certain critical mass of people
I assume you're referring to Lynndolynn's remark about not "using [comment tags] as a downvote or dismissal button".
Deimos and his coterie of advisers keep telling us that moderation abilities like tagging comments will be restricted to people who have earned "trust" and "reputation", and will be removed from people who abuse them. In other words, a newcomer to Tildes won't be able to tag comments straight off the bat, and will have wait until they've accumulated some as-yet-undefined "reputation". Think of it like a computer game, where you have to acquire enough points to unlock the next level. Then, when they get the ability to tag comments, there will be higher-level moderators reviewing and confirming the tags applied by these lower-level moderators. If someone is found to be misusing or abusing comment tags, they'll have that ability removed from them.
I believe this will greatly reduce the risk of comment tags being abused.
This has been my understand of how things will work moving forward as well.
I don't think the system will be overused by high level Tildeans, even in heated situations, and we shouldn't have to worry about new users until they have beat the tutorial levels.
I still believe, that this can go the way of Digg, w/ power users having out-sized control. And those desiring out-sized power gaming the system to use it for their own ends.
Understand I want it to work, but currently I am pessimistic on Tildes ability to work at scale.
Trust decay, action auditing and severe punishment for anyone caught abusing their powers should help considerably with those issues as well. Not to mention the fact that Deimos also has a pretty storied history of detecting vote manipulation, shill/spam networks and various other coordinated efforts to game the system on reddit, even before he was an admin there.
“Trust decay”. Is that a system that will make users lose “power” if they start being less active?
You got it! Trust levels will decay with time, so if you want to keep your trust levels up you have to stay active in your boards.
Yeah, I don't think there's much information about it yet but the idea is that if you quit Tildes for a while your account loses its privileges. If you return, you regain them quicker than a totally fresh user would, but it makes sure that anyone with power has earned it.
Yeah there isn't much written about it yet because it's all still just theorycrafted ideas at this point and the trust system is potentially a fair bit away from implementation so nobody has bothered to write all the specific details about the ideas down yet. The intention with trust decay is as you say though, and also to help prevent "power mods" and "authority squatters" by having decay set high enough that someone can't be a high trust user across hundreds of groups on the site, only those that they are actually actively and continually participating in.
I like to think of the Tildes trust system as similar to the Discourse trust system. Since they're not yet implemented here, this is only my speculation, but I feel like this kind of implementation would be what Deimos goes for.
You have level 0, which is like a restricted user mode. It's kind of like how many subreddits restrict posting until you have a certain amount of karma there. You just have to read a little, then you graduate.
Level 1 is for basic users. You've unlocked all basic site features at this point. By continuing to participate on the site, you move up to level 2.
Level 2 is for advanced users- you get a few bonus perks, but nothing a basic user would really miss out on.
Level 3 is where it gets tricky. There are requirements that you have to continue to meet to attain this. If you get too many administrative actions performed on you (this includes validated user flags), you can never attain this level of trust. This includes a base activity level-- you can't just forget about the site and keep your status. This is where you start to unlock your moderator powers.
Finally, level 4 is manually given to highly trusted and reputable members of the community. This is essentially a moderator, with the exception of seeing information like user IP's.
If we can get something like this to be the foundation of Tildes (obviously with ~-centric changes, including comments tags and such) I think we'd be very well off. Only people proven to be invested in the community can reach these moderator capabilities, and people who have repeatedly broken the rules are automatically denied this permission.
I've been on Tildes for about half an hour today and I've already found two sub-threads that I deservedly tagged with "Offtopic". In one case, one of the commenters even asked how to tag their own comment as "noise".
I have used comment tags once, a moment ago, to tag a trollish comment as such. I got my lesson, though: I'd rather avoid a topic where I'd tag someone negatively, rather than tagging anybody. Such a discussion is inherently low quality anyways, not worth reading or participating there. Other than this, I doubt comment tags are useful, I don't think I'll use them ever again. An off topic or noise thread is generally quite obvious anyways, and one can easily collapse it and go on. Personally, I do like off-topic discussion, they are often really interesting or fun side-discussions that are worth reading / participating.
I like the occasional joke thread and off-topic/meta discussions too, but IMO there is absolutely no denying that they tend to clutter up threads and reduce the signal to noise ratio in comments sections. You say you doubt comment tags are useful, and while I agree that is somewhat true right now, I don't think that will be the case for long. As the site userbase and comment volume grows, if you let those types of comments go completely unchecked with no system in place to mitigate them, you wind up with a situation like reddit where the vast majority of comments are just shitty low-effort jokes, memes and off-topic discussions and the high quality, valuable, longer-to-read and on-topic comments get harder and harder to find since they cannot compete with low-effort, easy to digest (and upvote) comments.
I don't think anyone is advocating off-topic or joke comments be outright banned or auto-removed, but IMO the way the noise tag currently works, where when a comment receives several of them it's auto-collapsed along with its replies, is the ideal for handling those types of off-topic and joke comments too. People who want to participate in them can still do so by un-collapsing them, it just makes them take up significantly less space so the quality, on-topic comments don't get drowned out by them. And because they are identified as such by the tags, anyone who doesn't want to even see them in their auto-collapsed state will be able to filter them out entirely eventually as well.
That's good to know.
I really wish @Deimos would add some sort of action for the other tags as well. I know he wants data about how the various tags will be used, but I believe that having only one of the tags result in an action being taken will distort the usage. Specifically, when I saw some off-topic discussions today, I was tempted to use the "noise" tag instead of the "offtopic" tag because I know the "offtopic" won't actually do anything. I believe that some people would use the "noise" tag instead of a more relevant tag for that reason.
I think the intention is to quietly add these features to the tags and change as needed. Obviously there is going to be a little different math for each tag, but it's easier to test with a single controlled tag. I'm willing to bet there'll be an announcement when most of the tags have functionality.
I get that. I just wish @Deimos would add even a simple action to each tag now, to remove any possible distortion induced by having some tags work and some tags not work. Even if it's just a placeholder action like the original version of "noise" (two tags = hide), while he works on something more complex.
I've got more effects ready to go, but I haven't been around much this weekend so I didn't want to deploy them yet when I wouldn't be available to monitor or fix things if it was necessary. I'll enable them tomorrow.
Good to know!
Off-topic, but do you check out every username mention? How many do you have on a daily basis?
Of course, there aren't really that many. The whole site's only getting about 500 comments per day at this point, it's not overwhelming yet.
I assume you mean comment tags, rather than topic tags.
You're discussing the use of a Tildes feature, so ~tildes ("Meta discussion about Tildes itself, including questions, suggestions, and bug reports") seems like the most appropriate place. I've moved this post for you.
Just wait until ~politics becomes a thing. @Deimos will need at least 5 mods in each time zone to keep that civil.
I sincerely hope a general politics tilde is never created. From what I’ve seen so far, almost everyone on Tildes is incredibly helpful, and for the most part, kind. It’s the kindness I think that really helps a community, more than civility—consider kindness a superset of the latter.
Although nothing is really off topic on Tildes, directly encouraging submissions to fill the void of a tilde, especially one as intrinsically unkind as politics, would be disappointing.
Why does there need to be a ~politics? If someone wants to discuss political news, that could be done under a relevant ~news topic post.
My point is, without a clear set of rules and a team of impartial moderators to enforce them, any political discussion in a diverse online community is destined to become a crap-storm. It doesn't matter if it happens in ~politics, in ~news, or in ~videos.funny.cats. The discussions will become ugly, and people will be forced to ignore certain topics completely, creating echo-chambers both for themselves, and the ones that decide to stay and "defend the cause" in these topics. The only escapes are professional communities, that outright ban political discussion as off-topic.
Pardon me, but your arguments seem a bit all over the place. On the one hand you're saying ~politics should be a thing, and then on the other that all political discussion is going to devolve, even in ~politics. So then why not aim at having that clear set of rules and impartial moderators (for as much as that is possible).
I didn't say that ~politics should exist. I am actually against it. @Algernon_Asimov above said that a political discussion could arise in ~news, and my point was that that means we might need stronger moderation there.
We agree on that then, but I think in general Tildes would benefit from strong moderation. The people discussing politics are going to be same people discussing other topics elsewhere so it would stand to reason that the standards of discourse are universal across the site and not ad-hoc on a per-group basis.
I think a politics group could potentially attract users that are only interested in discussing controversial topics in an agitated way. And this kind of behavior could quickly metastasize to the rest of the site.
Much like the presence of r/the_donald affected Reddit in general (allegedly*).
*I stay away from such subreddits, communities and topics, so I didn't really see it for myself. But I have no reasons to believe it's not true.
BANANAS!