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What exactly belongs in ~creative?
Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?
Then again, unless we have rules against this, maybe you could post to both, and talk about different aspects of the subject with each group
I imagine we could do some pretty interesting things with crossposting as well. Sometimes a topic is appropriate for more than one group - the tags will tell the tale. Crossposts don't have to be as primitive as they are on other sites, either. They don't have to be a mere copy of a link starting again from nothing.
If you're publishing your own music and just starting out, you probably don't want to put it in ~music. When that happens on reddit, we end up with hundreds of submissions that are ignored and a new queue that, frankly, is mostly full of amateur music that most people have no interesting in listening to. Nobody starts out as a music superstar with their first attempts. Honing that craft is a long road.
The history of the listentothis melting pot tells the sad story of how this content is received in a musical critic/listener oriented community. Spend some time in those threads and you'll see that while a hell of a lot of people have music they've created that they want to share, almost no one is interested in actually sifting through it all to find the gems. No one is interested in commenting - they all want to share, and none of them want to listen. It's borderline spam, in a way, without the malice. We had to move this into the melting pot in listentothis because people were complaining every week that the content of listentothis' new queue was almost complete garbage. The users kicked this content out of every place on reddit that it ever appeared, and even places like /r/thisisourmusic and /r/theseareouralbums remain relative ghost towns despite having existed for years.
So how do we solve this problem? That's kind of what ~creative is intended to be, a 'hey I made this' sort of place. Perhaps there a community can form that actually takes the time to foster positive feedback and constructive criticism of the content that people create and share there. It's no exaggeration to say that even minuscule amounts of early constructive feedback can make or break any artist's career.
Since ~creative is an entire hierarchy of its own, that's also joining all of those creative people across all artistic disciplines into one place where they will interact. Perhaps it'll finally reach the critical mass necessary for it to become a vibrant community, something such places never seemed to achieve or hold on to for long on reddit. That's the kind of place you can share your creations and find an honestly receptive community.
Say a great track shows up in ~creative.music. The editors of that place might choose to re-publish that same thread into ~music, creating a sort of highway for the tracks that rise above 'amateur' work to reach a larger audience of harsher critics. That crosspost could have more than one comment section attached - the one from creative, and a new one started when it was crossposted. That thread could start above zero or highlighted in some way, to let people know it's a crosspost that's already sparked interest elsewhere (and so people not interested could filter these out).
This idea of having multi-homed submissions that exist and foster simultaneous discussions in multiple places at the same time, and travel from one community to another over time, is an evolution of crossposting beyond what we've seen on other websites. I'm not sure what the final form would be, but clearly there's an avenue here worth exploring, and as we play with the idea and create systems to manage it, we'll find out what works.
This seems over-engineered and complicated. Why not just put music in ~music and be done with it? Don't make people have to guess whether their particular music post is amateur enough for ~creative or professional enough for ~music - just give them one place to post music. Don't make people search in one place for amateur music and another place for professional music - just give them one place to find music.
If necessary, you can categorise the types of music within ~music, with tags like "amateur" and "professional".
We have a home for music. Let's put all music in ~music.
As Amarok said, that's not what people in these kinds of communities typically want, and it ends up being more like spam.
The only thing they'd have to know is if they made the music being posted themselves, which I think we can reasonably expect. It's not complicated: Post your music to ~creative, and if the powers that be (whatever that is at any point in time) think it rises above other original work, it might be crossposted to reach a general music-listening audience.
Now, having it work like this doesn't necessarily require that place to be ~creative, it could easily be a group below ~music depending on how that ends up working, but I personally find it much simpler and accomodating from a usability standpoint if there's a place to see what creative projects Tildes users have been creating themselves. The point of interest if I'm looking for that kind of thing is the fact that it's made by someone here who's trying to get some feedback or attention, not necessarily the kind of media that it is.
And I personally find it much simpler and accomodating from a usability standpoint if there's one place to see what music is available on Tildes. The point of interest if I'm looking for that kind of thing is the fact that it's music for me to listen to.
You and @Amarok are categorising posts by source (who made it), I'm categorising posts by type (what is it). They're both valid methods. It's all subjective, after all.
Oh, totally. My bad if I made it sound like I thought Amarok's suggestion was objectively better or something.
You weren't making it sound like Amarok's suggestion is objectively better. I'm pointing out that there is no objective basis on which to make these decisions. It will only ever come down to people's subjective opinions.
The only reason I bring it up is because we tried rather a lot of things to help this sort of content (specifically, people sharing music they made themselves) and all of it ended up ignored into oblivion. The melting pot is the most successful incarnation we've managed. It never worked out well as groups of its own and that failure has always fascinated me. That effect has to be a human social networking quirk that we've just never quite managed to unravel. Something about how people react to this class of content is peculiar.
Tildes is taking a rather bold and very different approach to the problem by having ~creative as a top level community. I don't know if that's the right way, but at this point, anything different is good in my book. Time will tell as we see what sort of community grows there and how their social network effects manifest in that hierarchy.
That's rather how I imagined the 'mod' backroom would work, ~groupname.gov or something like that. I think it's important to give trusted group members their own communication space. They always build one so we might as well facilitate that tendency. It didn't occur to me to set something up like this for the 'knights of new' crowd as well. I expect those two sets of users would have a lot of overlap.
We have the group/subgroup 'bubble up' concept for sorting quality. I think that'll draw casual users to the tops of hierarchies (to see the 'best' stuff in each) and more interested/focused users will go for the smaller subgroups. This has a similar effect - most content will eventually be submitted to the smaller groups where it'll be voted on and discussed by them before it levels up into the more general parent group (if it levels up at all). As the largest parent groups age and grow (to millions of members) they'll naturally become more focused on promoting from below than having people submit directly to the root levels. That should help keep the crowd at bay. It might flip reddit's 'defaults are all crap' on its head, if the only things that make it to the root have already had this quality vetting phase, possibly multiple times if something has to go through five groups to get to the top.
If I was the type of person who searched for music on a forum-type site, I would go straight to a group called "music".
I am the sort of person who would search for books on a forum-type site, and I would go straight to a group called "books".
I'm not going to see any self-published music or books hidden away under ~creative.
It's like... "There's this music shop over here, but if you want to find off-beat music, you have to go that arts collective over there." I'm not going to go to both places, and if I'm going to pick only one place to shop for music, it'll be the place that specialises in music.
I know you're talking about cross-posting from ~creative.music to ~music, but there's a filtering process in place: only a subjectively selected subset of music posted in ~creative.music would be visible in ~music. Why does everyone else's music get excluded from the place where people are most likely to look for music?
It's more like "That's the music shop over there, and it's a tough crowd. If you're making your own music, though, head over to this public studio where everyone who is trying to make music can help guide you and show you how to improve. Then, when you're done and have a finished product, head over to the music shop and share it."
The mods of l2t didn't get it into their heads one day that we had to demarcate amateur music from professional music. The users demanded it, repeatedly in many threads, and with a tone of 'this is going to turn into a riot if you don't do something about the music quality'. The reason given was 'everything on /new sucks, why do we even come here' and as someone who listens to a lot of music in a lot of styles, they had a point. More than half of it was drek. There is such a thing as objectively bad music - amateurs make a lot of it before they find their stride.
I see no reason that exact dynamic won't replay here, or on any other forum that's focused on music streams.
You're the music expert. I'll have to bow to your experience in this area.
I'll keep my eye out for other instances of people trying to split one type of content across two groups.
I've been wracking my brain and the only other parallel I can see is how some people feel about self promotion - aggressively fighting it as spam like some communities do. I think the two are related - we've never really seen a good solution to the 'self promotion' problem. I'm hoping over time, ~creative can find a way forward there too. That hierarchy might end up teaching us a few things, maybe even surprising us.
If I'm looking for music, I will go to ~music. I therefore probably won't find your music if you post it in ~creative.
Why do you make music, if not for other people to hear it?
Discussing a piece made by a third party and giving/receiving critique on work are different forms of engagement though. A lot of the discussion of recent albums on ~music is likely not going to be requested by or directly addressed at the creators.
As I recently wrote in a slightly different context, I think of a "music" group as a bucket for all music-related content. I wouldn't separate it into music-for-professionals and music-for-amateurs. That seems like an artificial and unnecessary division to me.
That's a good answer. It's a fine line to walk, huh? If you get too technical, or just not technical enough, it may completely change which group it belongs in. It's still hard to say, I think, especially because mods might disagree, and then be fighting over which group something belongs in. I think some official word from @Deimos on the matter might be useful, but overall I agree with you and think now that it probably does belong in ~music.
Very true. For right now though, it probably isn't a big deal, and the user can more or less post where they want and the moderators can more or less adjust as they want without hindering discussion or anything, really. Crossposting would be a nice feature, but it might not be necessary until we have more content and hierarchical groups. Personally, hierarchical groups are something I am really excited for and would love to see.
I especially think ~comp could use some subgroups, though I may be biased because it's my favourite group and a topic I'm interested in, but I do believe that a ~comp.nix, possibly in a ~comp.software and such would be nice. Again though, it's probably not really a priority until more discussion takes off and such. It'll be cool to see though.
Oh hey. Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure, but I believe ~creative would be more for sort of handy, craftsman type stuff. Like, making a bench or a door would belong in ~creative while showing off your song would belong in ~music. I think eventually, we'll probably get the ability to crosspost so you could post in both ~creative and ~music, but until then I think ~music seems fitting.
Makes me wonder what will become of the main groups like creative if/when Tildes becomes big enough to support independent craftsman groups and other such creative endeavors. Will we evolve beyond the need for a catch all group and just shut it down? Or will we decide that it's worthwhile to keep it going?
Thanks, I hadn't actually read those yet but I've now since read them and I have to say it's all very interesting. I'd kind of hoped for a system like this, it just seems natural to let communities break off as tags become more common.
I've been treating ~creative as a combination of ~arts and ~diy and ~crafts: it's for anything that people have made themselves.
However, as @hungariantoast rightly points out, where there is a a more specific group, it's better to use that - and we have a group for ~music.
EDIT: Oops. Usernames are not groups!
Yeah, fair enough. By the way, did you mean @hungariantoast? That would be a weird group name.
Vim btw. No but really, I think user groups is essentially what Reddit did, and that didn't prove to be great for discussion. It sounds like you'd be better off posting those on ~games, ~comp, etc. Reddit also has pinned posts, where you can make a post you shared appear at the top of your profile. That might be what you're looking for.
As far as I know, this is on the "to do" list.
Just post these guides in the relevant groups: ~games, ~comp, ~sports. Like the "a layperson's guide to..." posts that some people have been making.
Why hide these things away in your own personal group, where people won't think to look for them? Why not put them in the relevant groups, where people can find them?
I've wondered about this too. I don't think there's any harm in giving users a bio/wiki or some kind of a profile so they can do this stuff... however, at what point does this start making the site about the individual users, rather than the groups/communities? Do we let users follow each other like on twitter? How far do we go? Is there a 'too far' point where the groups end up taking a back seat? I think reddit's aiming in that direction lately and I'm kinda curious how that all plays out.
I'm in for the bios and users having their own wiki pages for sure. That's not even a hard thing since integrating a wiki is on the todo list for the future. I'm only worried about what we tell everyone when they inevitably get the bright idea that users need to follow each other, or start requesting other user-centric features on a group-centric website. I think we need to be careful - Tildes should put the group/community first.
We can attach a Mastodon instance and other external open source services to the Tildes identity system for the rest. ;)
Why can't you just use the "a layperson's guide to..." tag like other people have? Or we could create another tag for everyone's "how to" guides.
Why do your "guides" posts need to be kept separate from other people's "guides" posts?
This is where I fail to understand the need. If you and other people are writing guides, such as the group of people who contributed to the "layperson's guide to..." posts, why do your guides need to separated from other people's guides? If you've all written various "how to" guides, why can't your guides be grouped with everyone else's guides under this "how to" tag? What's the need for your guides to be singled out and treated differently?
In wider terms, what you're proposing seems to be edging towards having people follow users on Tildes, rather than putting content first.
Are you planning to publish a whole book on Tildes, with each chapter being a separate post? :P Maybe you need to find a different platform if that's your intention.
However, if you need to link people back to the first post in the series, just include a single link in each post to the first post in the series. And, after completing each new post, you can edit the immediately preceding post to include a link to the succeeding post. So, all posts (after the first one) would have two - and only two - links: a link to the first post, and a link to the next post. That allows people to jump back to the beginning from any post, and then read them all in succession.
There was a previous attempt at creating an informal wiki. I've just checked and it has since been closed. Would a wiki suit your purposes?
I've fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out.