40
votes
Request for more visible group names
I've been noticing that people aren't really looking at the group name that a post is sent to. Most notably there's a weekly ~anime post asking what everyone has been watching or reading. Just about every time there's people that post responses that are off topic (not anime or manga).
Here's an example. At the moment half of the posts are not related to anime or manga. It shows that it is something that needs to be considered.
Maybe have a uniquely colored border on the top and sides with the group name in bold perhaps? Also having the same color as the background on posts on the home page?
I think there are two major issues that are contributing the most to this:
Especially because of #2, I think the other people that have responded so far are actually focusing a bit on the wrong approach. I don't think that changing how posts look in the listing will be very effective. I think it would probably be much more effective to figure out how to change the comments page to make the group more obvious. Since people have to go into the comments page to leave a comment, if we make it more clear that they've gone into a specific group, it won't matter if they didn't notice which group it was when they initially clicked on the post.
I agree. If we could have some sort of banner when in the groups that could help. Maybe open it up to the community to design some banners.
I like the consistency of tildes at the moment. If possible, I'd like it if banners and custom styling could be curated to keep the theme of minimalism.
If/when Tildes ever allows user submitted custom themes for groups I could definitely see a built in feature like in RES where users can disable them on a per group basis with the click of a button in the group's sidebar and further providing a global option in user settings. And I definitely think heavy curation of custom themes with enforced restrictions (e.g. no moving design elements around) would be a good idea too.
Then we're back to the same problem: how will readers who disable themes easily know they're commenting in a certain group?
I very much agree with @teaearlgraycold. The consistency of the current minimalistic design across groups is, to me, more important than making sure it's blatantly obvious where you're commenting.
Well, much like Deimos, I too think that won't be so much of a problem as more groups are added and people are no longer auto-subscribed to every group. But if it does remain an issue that needs to be addressed, the banner or some other visual indication could be kept separate from and exempt from the theme disabling settings.
The inevitable problem that brings to the table is that themes are never merely visual, but come with features they add. E.g. /r/languagelearning has language of the week threads, and I missed them every time because I didn't have the custom stylesheets enabled.
I'd prefer to decide a certain variable area (sidebar XOR the top banner) which can be stylised based on certain criteria (e.g. no JS, CSS <= 1kB, respect the colour theme choice, no images?), and that the style decided by the general community. Furthermore I really like the idea that we don't have communities here but a community of diverse individuals. It'd be sad if groups became separate communities in and of themselves, formally or not.
Actually I'd prefer to have one invariable style accross the website just like we have it now. Maybe a better approach would be to append the group name to "New top-level comment" which is just above the new comment form, and make it inverse colour so that it's like "New top-level comment in [~anime]" where in the part within brackets the background and the foreground colours are swapped for emphasis?
Yeah, having more settings granularity in regards to themes will probably help solve those issues and give more control to users to customize their experience here.
However I disagree about the separation of communities. I think not only is it inevitable but it should be encouraged and each community should eventually be allowed to diverge not only in terms of themes but even features, based on their particular needs. E.g. ~talk.debate having a custom comment section similar to Kialo, ~food.recipes given a custom embeded recipe viewer (perhaps even with a "save to my Tildes recipe book" function), etc...
I think one of reddit's greatest weaknesses is the invariability between subreddits so no really distinct cultures are able to develop. And I think one of reddit's biggest mistakes was /r/All, which not only encourages/facilitates brigading but prevents subreddits from effectively polling their most active and dedicated members.
I do think the group name in the "new top-level comment" box somewhere is a great idea though!
I disagree about divergence being inevitable. Certainly different people will have different interests and as more people come in that differences will be more pronounced, but if we don't grow instantly and excessively the current status quo can be maintained, which I'd be strongly in favour of. The custom features you list seem easily achievable with plain markdown and links, IMO.
I also disagree about what you perceive as one of reddit's weaknesses, I think that was a feature, not a bug, and a very useful one. I always disabled CSS for all subs, and think that having a common interface puts the emphasis on the discussion. If one curates a nice set of subs to follow and participate in, reddit can be a very nice place (for me it was /r/emacs, /r/istanbul, and a few others), not unlike what we have at present. And I think that anything that's not directly serving exchange of text messages is outside Tildes' scope.
Reddit didn't enforce any design standards on subreddit's custom themes, which led to an incredibly inconsistent experience... and many subreddit's css was overboard and incredibly slow. That likely won't be the case here so needing to wholesale turn off custom css is less likely to be the case.
Did you actually look at Kialo? That absolutely cannot be achieved with just markdown and links.
And separation is most definitely inevitable. Tildes as a whole isn't likely to remain a small tight-knit community forever. The plans are to open to public registration eventually, once the trust/rep system is in place and properly tested. However each individual group can still be a tight-knit community, especially if that is encouraged and those communities protected from brigading.
I definitely 100% disagree there. "In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important" but primarily doesn't mean exclusively. Videos are already a major part of the site. ~creative already has art sharing. ~music has music sharing. And more non-primarily-text content communities are likely to come (although not memes since that is not in-depth).
I agree the first paragraph, and have not really made my mind up on the separation part. But honestly I don't really think that Tildes will grow all that much, even to the extent of HN, and I don't know if it's possible to healthily do so (HN is not in a nice situation, I've gradually came to just stop participating in it and even don't view it anymore). But as I said, maybe I'm in the wrong, I've not given too much thought to this to be honest.
WRT the last part, I do agree that we need not limit ourselves to text content, but think that limiting what Tildes directly accomodates to text would be healthier. The rest can be just external links (and it's how it is ATM, no?). What I was referring to was the immediate content of comments here actually; I'd rather not have graphical or otherwise interactive/foreign stuff embedded in them. It should be fine to just link to stuff. And I'd oppose Tildes hosting anything other than text too (there was a discussion about hosting images which AFAIK ended with a similar thought).
For those people that despise custom themes and banners with an unholy passion, could those be opt-out like Reddit customer themes are?
I'm here for the text. Please just make the ~ bigger.
What does this mean? Is it a reference to making the website bigger? Or making the "~" character bigger? Or something else?
Probably the group name
Yes, sorry I meant the group name.
A simple fix might just be expanding,
into,
It's right above the comment box. Easily visible but not obtrusive. Probably simple to add in?
Replying to comments could be similar; just put "in ~whatever" next to "Replying to Deimos".
Maybe, but it's likely to hit the same "blindness" issue. After about the first 2 times of seeing it, people won't even look there any more. I'd honestly be surprised if anyone even noticed if that was added, because they've probably already learned that the "Post a comment" text isn't important to read every time they're going to comment.
Just having the group name next to the topic info would really help, all the other relevant info about that topic is their apart form the group name.
Yeah, it's definitely a bit confusing -- I've seen your thread pop up, and it's pretty similarly named to the threads in ~tv / ~books (for good reason). Maybe if the ~group was placed before the title to force the eye to be drawn to the group, e.g.:
The problem is that people very quickly learn which locations aren't "important" and just start ignoring them. This is why "sticky blindness" happens; people learn that the first couple of posts at the top are always the same and don't need to be looked at. Even though the posts are obviously in the most prominent spot and usually styled more distinctively, users still just completely stop paying attention to them, and won't notice when they change.
In the same way, if you put the group name in front of the title, it doesn't mean that people will always read the group name first, it just means that people quickly change their behavior to start reading titles a little more to the right and not even look at the group name. The group name is already in a very visible location—the left edge, right below the title, which is the most visible spot except for the title itself. Just changing the location a bit more won't (on its own) make people start paying attention if they weren't already.
Good point! Stickies definitely suffer from this phenomena.
FYI: one phenomenon, many phenomena.
Yeah that makes sense. The way it is now your eyes will read the title first before getting to the group name and tags which are a smaller text size. It's really easy to just read the title and click on it and not see the group name.
Maybe a stupid question, but how am I able to modify my theme like that?
This seems like an appropriate place to thank you for Dracula. I wish I could browse the entire web in this theme. It's easy on the eyes, important things are properly highlighted by really nice color choices—in short, it's brilliant. Thank you for creating it.
Oh, I honestly thought you'd created it! Good job "porting" it to Tildes nonetheless; without your work I'd have no way to use the scheme here.
Is Dracula built-in to that Firefox Colors thing? Or do you have to add it in some way? I don't see any on the samples that particularly look like Dracula.Edit: Never mind. You linked directly to it. I hadn't checked the URL. That's seriously cool; thanks again.
Why should someone have to re-specify the genre for their question in their title when they've already specified it by choosing which group to post in? Why make them do the same work twice?
I made the same mistake, and almost replied to last week's thread before I realized. I had no interest in anime and was surprised to see I was subscribed to that group.
It's a simpler fix, but naming the title "What anime have you been watching?" might solve the problem without any code changes.
I think that page should come up automatically at the end of the account creation process. "Welcome to Tildes, now customize your subscriptions."
Maybe some image or just the name of the group itself big and in the background?
Oh that looks really nice! I also noticed that ~anime is trash cans :P
Lol I had the hardest time finding a free, Creative Commons or equivalent anime image. ~misc and ~tildes are giving me a pretty hard time, too.
I suppose ~tildes could just be the wave part of the logo without the background maybe? I have no idea what could be used for ~misc though. That's a hard one.
Perhaps a simple ellipses? That is, "..."
I disagree... That many large images will ultimately be visual noise, and cause page load times to increase. I think that Deimos' point about selective blindness would apply here too; even after such a thing were implemented we'd probably still find that users ignore it.
At some point it's gonna have to happen, if it's happening right now with this small of a user group test imagine how bad it'll be with a much larger community. Visual cues in form of layout/style/image changes help a lot since you can associate certain colors (even if they're in the background) with certain communities. If everything looks the same you're just gonna shoot yourself in the foot.
I agree with the necessity of some visual cues, I just disagree that images like the ones in Diff's mockup are the way to go about it. I just posted my recommendation for how to solve this problem (place the visual queues in topic-specific locations only).
Good point, maybe tinting the colors or using ONLY colors would be a better approach. But I think even if you're not looking directly at it, images do help. Scrolling through forums, if I'm familiar with the area I usually know who's posting without actually looking directly at them just based on the avatar in the corner of my vision.
It would be nice if we could have some image at the top bar (next to
*logo* **Tildes** ~tildes) (or the sidebar, not sure how it'd look at mobile). The image style could be something like this firefox theme -> the stripes at the tabs panel (shape of tildes logo for ~tildes, or>for ~comp, everything grayscale).While that design you've created is nice and stylish and almost pretty... those images are just visual noise to me. If I'm reading the titles on the left, I'm not going to focus on each image on the right to try to identify: a) what it is; b) which group it represents.
One of the best features of old reddit is each subreddit had a very distinct visual theme. It's very easy to know where you are on the website.
But each sub is a distinct community that has nothing to do with each other except common users. Here AFAIK the approach is that there is one community that participates in multiple groups, and groups serve for grouping posts, not people. I personally like that approach over the subreddit paradigm.
That's how Tildes works now, when it's a private alpha-testing site with a small number of invited users. But the intention is to eventually open the site up to everybody. The current 7,000 users will grow to 70,000... 700,000... maybe even 7,000,000 users.
Deimos himself has said that the current practice of automatically subscribing every new user to all groups is temporary: eventually every new user will choose the groups and sub-groups they want to subscribe to.
There's no way this will be a small tight-knit community when it has many tens of thousands of users, each of whom is subscribed to a different subset of groups.
Don't be misled by the current state of Tildes. The website is still gestating. It's an foetus which has not yet been born. A foetus is nothing like an adult.
I would prefer that nothing change on the home page / aggregated topic list view. As Deimos indicated, users will ignore the indicator however it's presented, and I think that's fine in this location.
It's on the group-specific list view and individual discussion page that I would add indicators. These are the places that could benefit from group-specific branding and remind users where they are before they post comments. I have two suggestions, both of which are analogous to custom sub CSS on reddit:
Personally I think implementing both would be too much for the minimal design sense of the site. I'm not sure which would work better but I'm leaning toward #1 because it's immediately apparent where you are when the page loads, instead of only revealing itself when you're about to contribute.
Edit: Just saw Deimos' comment which is suggesting something similar. Credit where it's due!
So, a dickbar? Please no. It'd be sad if users had to fight Tildes JS/CSS with userscripts.
I can tollerate the image inside the textarea if it went away when clicked, but as I suggested elsewhere in the thread it'd be nicer IMHO if it was just some emphasised text in the vicinity of the textarea. It's 5-10 bytes instead of many kB, visually more in line with the current UI, and has essentially the same pros and cons with an image in a similar place.
I'm confused, when you say "dickbar" are you referring to any fixed-position element on the page? Tons of sites have these, which can be implement unobtrusively. I think the "sticky headers" that hide when scrolling down but reappear when scrolling up are a decent compromise between maximizing screen real estate and remaining easy to get to.
Alternatively a small glyph could be positioned in the corner, away from content. It wouldn't have to span the full width of the page or anything.
I dislike fixed-position elements in general. They are obtrusive, possibly hide stuff, and distractign. A fixed banner steals from the vertical screen space, especially on mobile.
If it's eventually going to be hidden, why have it in the first place? This sort of sticky header is especially annoying to me because it intrudes with scrolling subtly in a more distracting manner: when I want to bring a couple lines from the top into the viewpoint and scroll just a bit, the bar pops up and hides the actual lines I want to look at. This becomes especially worse in mobile because browser bars behave similarly too (luckily Firefox allows to disable hiding the top bar). Floating glyphs on mobile are easily hit accidentally when scrolling or just holding the device in the wrong way.
I think anything that fiddles with scrolling and cuts off parts of the viewpoint is bad design. On desktop, a sticky sidebar can be a better compromise, sloppy prototype:
IDK about mobile though, but I'd actually prefer a truly sticky header there to one that disappears and reappers, at least the viewpoint is consistent then.