15 votes

Linking related topics together - like a futher reading list

Could we have a feature where similar posts can be linked/tagged and showup somewhere obvious, so you can access both posts from each other, linking the two. Something anyone visiting the topic can do.

So there is a link from post A to B but also B to A. You then kind of get a chain of relevant posts, like a further reading list. Maybe only showing topics that are two-three links deep, idk that's just details.

I really like the way r/AskHistorians does it where because of the moderation it's always very easy to find the comment that links previous discussion, but again that solution is not reversible, from the linked topics I can't get to the current topic.

It encourages people to look over previous posts and engage in those discussions, and to participate in a larger discussion across the site. Potentially with one topic link you can get 4-5 other topics.

It should help with answering frequent questions or concerns as it's easy to connect relevant discussion. But also pretty much any other discussion, say nuclear energy is discussed extensively here, and follow the links to the other places people have discussed it, give readers the site context for a topic, and a convenient way to look for further discussion.

I mostly see it being used by a poster who has already answered a question in a previous post and will link the reply in a comment, but this way it's far more accessible to anyone viewing the topic and not lost in the comments. Or maybe someone was interested enough to look further themselves and I've got to believe they would feel generous enough to bother linking the two topics they spent time looking for. Making it just more convenient for everyone.

Take for example this foss topic, I posted basically a follow-up topic about specific foss software.

So a comment can be posted linking the relevant topic but that can easily get lost in the fray and does nothing to link the original topic to the new one. Yeah if someone was really interested they could search the foss tag and easily find it but it's much more convenient with it linked and only one person needs to go through the process of searching.

I kind of like the idea but can see how it's very similar to the tag system and groups. In practice though I just use tags and groups to filter out stuff I don't want to see and sometimes to help with searching.
This would be a feature that focuses to continuing the discussion, and making it more convenient to do so.

3 comments

  1. [2]
    cfabbro
    Link
    Deimos briefly mentioned something like this in a recent topic: https://tildes.net/~news/6sl/trump_urges_world_to_reject_globalism_in_un_speech_that_draws_mocking_laughter#comment-1wqi I do really...

    Deimos briefly mentioned something like this in a recent topic:

    https://tildes.net/~news/6sl/trump_urges_world_to_reject_globalism_in_un_speech_that_draws_mocking_laughter#comment-1wqi

    Ideally, I'd like to have a sort of "related links" feature where we could add additional links to the same post without needing separate ones for slightly different treatments of the same story.

    I do really like your idea of cross-linking related topics (A - B, B - A) somehow too though.

    6 votes
    1. [2]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. cfabbro
        Link Parent
        Yeah that's probably the easiest way to do it... though I would suggest having a related links section under the URL or self-text like on Gitlab too, instead of in the sidebar. edit: although that...

        Yeah that's probably the easiest way to do it... though I would suggest having a related links section under the URL or self-text like on Gitlab too, instead of in the sidebar.

        edit: although that may get over-crowded before long, so maybe sidebar is best. I dunno for sure...

        It could also even perhaps include some sort of user submission option so people can add related links as they find them.

        For the unaware, this is what it looks like on Gitlab:
        https://i.imgur.com/vfzkWJn.png

        3 votes
  2. hotcouch
    Link
    It would be cool to have a small sidebar in threads that have related threads. Maybe a bot-powered scrubber finds a x amount of similar sounding threads for you to view and on top of that, a...

    It would be cool to have a small sidebar in threads that have related threads. Maybe a bot-powered scrubber finds a x amount of similar sounding threads for you to view and on top of that, a section for users to link threads that are hugely similar/exceptional. That way there is an option for user interaction as well as making it a feature for certain ~ to always have the bot list.

    3 votes