Isn't the number of groups too restrictive?
I know that tildes is still a small community (sub 9k) but I find the number of groups too restrictive. I am mainly a redditor so I am used to subscribing to many subs, most of which are not "main" subs.
For example, shouldn't there be a group for "countries", so one could post in countries.germany or countries.finland in the future? Also, how come there is no videos? I can understand the reasoning that a video is (almost) always about a given subject but where should I post, for example, a video of "ASMR"? Should it go to health? Should chess posts go to "games" or "sports"?
I find this idea of groups a bit too comfusing, perhaps because I am used to subreddits..
Maybe it is not a bad idea to create some kind of map, with an handy link in the site, so one knows in which group one should post a certain something.
Did you ever try Imzy? There were many things wrong with Imzy, but one of the biggest problems is that it allowed willy-nilly subgroup creation, so the site had a really low ratio of groups to users. Everyone showed up, said "neat, a reddit clone, I'll recreate my favorite community from reddit over here" and the end result was thousands of ghost towns.
Restricting the number of groups prevents that particular issue from happening here.
In my opinion, one of Imzy's main overall mistakes is that they didn't seem to consider that you need to be a small site before you become a big one. They did so many things that were clearly based on the assumption that they'd have millions of users and need to manage things on a similar scale to reddit, and they just didn't work out at all with a small userbase.
The community-creation was definitely a big mistake that came from that mindset (and they even tried to stop allowing people to create communities towards the end, but it was way too late by that point). Dan made a post in /r/startups after a year, and it included these stats:
They were framing that number of communities as a good thing, but I think it was actually a huge problem. With that ratio, it would have been like Tildes already having 1000 groups.
Honestly, that could have worked despite skipping the small-community phase. Their funding simply didn't last long enough. What killed them was their VC-based business model.
It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation where it's hard to say exactly what caused it. I mean, over the long term I'd agree that the VC doomed them anyway, especially since they didn't seem to have a plan for a viable business model at all. But it isn't really what killed the site directly.
They still had lots of funding left when they shut down (something like $8M if I remember right), but they decided (or the investors told them that's what they were deciding) to just stop trying, because the site wasn't growing fast enough at all. There were various reasons for that, but a lot of it was just that the mechanics and organization of the site didn't work very well with a small userbase.
There are a lot of reddit clones or reddit alikes. I've thought about making a comparison post about what went wrong with each, because it would be interesting to discuss the potential implications for Tildes.
It seems to be that many experience a surge in growth and then die off for various reasons within a year.
My theory for the general cause is that people slowly realize that platform x or y is no replacement for Reddit and/or forget why they left anyways. Then its just a handful of the most active users posting to a ghost town as you said.
Yes, there aren't many groups yet, but like you said, the site is still small and doesn't need them yet. There are only about 30 topics posted on most days between all the groups, we don't need to split the site into hundreds of highly-specific, inactive groups. Reddit didn't even have subreddits for years. The hierarchical group system will allow us to expand the groups pretty easily as needed.
Should you post a chess post on reddit in /r/chess, /r/games, /r/boardgames, /r/sports, /r/chessplayers, /r/onlinechess, etc.? It's not any less confusing, you're just used to the confusion.
I don't know if this would prove to be more of an annoyance than something useful in this context, but I like Stack Exchange's process for site creation, Area 51. Users submit proposals for new sites, it then goes through three phases: Definition, Commitment and Beta. All phases depend on the users, meaning that if they can't define a scope for the site, show commitment and then keep the site alive in beta, it doesn't get to become a community.
Maybe something similar, but less complicated, could work to make sure new groups don't become ghost towns while still giving users the power to create them.
Oh cool! I wasn't around yet back then but I should have searched a bit before making that suggestion haha.
I still think it could work if it was more automated, but account age/activity of the voting users should be taken into consideration then, so people can't just use bots to create new groups.
Trust/reputation would be better for preventing that than simply relying on account age. However it's probably a fair ways off from being implemented yet.
See also: https://tildes.net/~tildes/n3/so_thinking_ahead_how_do_we_stop_bots
Agreed, a trust system would be ideal.
Thank you for replying Deimos!
I don't mean to be argumentative but couldn't one make the point that adding more groups would actually create more content and more activity? Since all groups are subscribed by default and since pretty much all new posts on a given day appear on the frontpage, wouldn't adding more groups make it so new users are more likely to post something in a group that sounds/looks/feels familiar?
Example, if a user joins tildes and notices that there is no obvious group to post about ABCDE, he might just give up and not post it whereas if he notices a group in which ABCDE would be right at home, he's more likely to post and increase the site's activity..
Yes and no. This is something that we've discussed a few times in the past, but there's definitely a difficult balance between having too many groups and the "chilling effect" that can happen if people feel like there isn't a group for the things they want to post. However, I really don't think it's much better if there is a specific group, but it's extremely inactive. A group that gets one post a month really isn't more welcoming in any way than just needing to post it in ~misc with a relevant tag. It's also not a very welcoming experience to the site to find that they've been auto-subscribed to 200 groups, most of which are inactive, and now they have to spend a huge amount of time picking through all of them.
One thing to keep in mind as well is that part of the reason reddit needs so many subreddits is because it doesn't have any sort of tagging system (flair really doesn't count, it has almost no functionality), and really the only way to categorize anything properly is to put it in a different subreddit.
Alright, fair enough. The tagging system is interesting but since adding tags is optional, I wonder if it will be useful. I am sure you already thought of making it mandatory to add X (x=1 or 2) tags but decided against it.
Thank you for the replies and great site you have here. Very responsive!
EDIT: Have you thought about aliasing the URL to search for a given tag to something simpler? It would be nice if, instead of having to type "tildes.net/?tag=horror", one could type "tildes.net/t=horror" or the all familiar "/t/horror" or something to that effect.
Imo tags are already useful (though the necessity of using them becomes a lot more clear once you pass the point where every user can read every post, which is pretty far from where we are at the moment), but just in case you didn't know, the OP isn't the only one who can add tags. There's also a number of regular users who have the ability to tag things and move posts between groups when needed. This is supposed to scale so that there's always a much better ratio of people who can fix and moderate things to regular users than somewhere like Reddit.
So you shouldn't have to worry about things getting tagged. Obviously it would be optimal if the average user understood that they should add descriptive tags, but it will be rare to run into the problem of having no tags.
The site will also do a lot of the tagging for us, eventually, as part of the submission process. Almost everything out there we'd link to is already tagged. If all submissions of links also import those tags for the submitter to proof/edit it would save everyone a lot of time.
There is a better option than making them mandatory... See the topic log in the right sidebar. ;)
So I had the tag editor up as you must've been adding things, because just not doing anything removed your "ask" tag. Never noticed that it did that before.
Hah, weird. We must have had the tag editing interface open at the exact same time for it to have done that? Our tag edits were only 6 seconds apart too. @Deimos, do you mind chiming in on that?
Yeah, there's not any protection to prevent that right now. From the site's perspective, you sent a request to change the tags to a certain list of tags, and then @Whom sent a request to change the tags to a different list. That is, functionally it works like "set the tags to this list of tags", not like "add tag X, remove tag Y".
I guess the simplest would be some sort of check to make sure that the tags weren't changed by someone else between the time that you open the editing interface and submit it, but overall it should be pretty uncommon.
Ah, that makes sense. I had assumed it actually worked like the latter example, given the language used in the topic log:
X user added tag 'Y' and removed tag 'Z'But like you said, it's really no biggie and probably pretty unlikely to be a major issue or frequent occurrence. Plus, it's easy enough to re-input the accidentally removed tags anyways.
Eh, we'll want it to take the list back from users at some point and check/update based on their changes, just not wholesale import a list the user sends. It's not a problem now, but someday when there are thousands of active users all sitting on a new queue somewhere on Tildes it'll start to become one. I'd suggest creating a very low-priority ticket for it in the tracker, basically just a reminder for the next time someone dives into the tag mechanics to do some updating.
True enough, and done: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/357
Oh, I didn't know about that. Look great.
No problem at all, thanks for the feedback! Sorry if I came off a bit dismissive, this is definitely something that I've thought about a lot though (and it's been brought up by a lot of people over the time the site's been running as well). I've avoided adding any new groups for quite a while now, but if the site's activity starts picking up again I'll probably look to add at least a few more soon.
Are there any particular subjects that you think are hard to place? ASMR was a decent example, so far it's only been posted about in ~misc and ~creative. I vaguely feel like it might fit in ~hobbies, but that also feels a little off, so I'm not sure.
In a small community, you don't want people spread out all over the place. Interaction is the most important thing to have in a growing community, and you're more likely to have this interaction with fewer "barriers." This is true even in the real world.
Imagine going to a convention that had 15 different sessions at once, even though there were only 50 attendees. Sure, you were able to cover more topics of interest to attendees, but maybe only one session was well-attended with 25 people, while the other 14 rooms had less than a handful or even no attendees. What good is a session with no/few attendees and no ability to discuss/network? It's not good. It's a bad experience and those attendees may not come back the next year. Because without interaction (the reason why people go to in-person conventions), people aren't coming back. Same principle applies in online communities, whether it's a forum, discord, reddit-types, etc.
Sorta related, there's precedence for this. I think a lot of users are used to reddit as it is and as it has been for the last several years. But early reddit, I believe, didn't have subreddits. There was just reddit.com and you submitted everything there.
That's correct, originally reddit only had one "section", there was no way to subscribe or unsubscribe from anything. Here's an archive.org snapshot from December 2005, about 6 months after the site launched - there's no indication of subreddits anywhere.
Subreddits (which were just called "reddits" originally) start showing up sometime in mid-2006, but I think there were only two initially for science and programming. You can see them in the sidebar on this snapshot from early 2007.
By late 2007 there's still only a handful - you can see 8 in the sidebar here, and they're just displayed after the titles like "[politics]", the whole "/r/politics" notation hadn't come up yet.
March 2008 is when user-created subreddits really started, here's the blog post about that. That's about 2 years and 9 months after the site launched.
No, one could not make that argument if the website is too small to support it. Both voat and lmzy had issues because people immediately got fragmented. Tildes isn't big enough yet to where niche groups can flourish. A user posting in a niche subreddit only followed by a small percentage of people will not boost the sites activity, only a bit for those people.
Right now the tildes are fairly diverse imo. You have to remember that tildes != reddit, which has been around for over a decade. What you're saying is that tildes should run before it should crawl, and fragmentation really would kill tildes off quickly.
Plus, if we take it slow and let the tags show us what groups to create, we're giving Tildes the opportunity to evolve differently than its predecessors. That to me is the real goal. Doing a wholesale import of communities from other websites is selling the communities here short on their possibilities. Tildes shouldn't just end up being a copy of other sites.
Submissions here will someday be able to travel between groups, mostly up their own group's chain but also possibly sideways into other hierarchies as we experiment with what a 'crosspost' can become. That alone is going to make the community structure different to those we've seen on any other website before. I don't think we can really jump-start that, it has to happen on its own over time.
Agreed. That was the other issue with voat at first, because everyone just rushed to recreate their favorite subreddits/popular subreddits. It wasn't organic at all. Man, voat had so many issues.
I'm really glad tildes does not have open registration. The absolute worst thing to happen would be a huge influx of redditors coming in.
I did the same thing, created /v/listentothis over there very early on. Got bored with Voat and handed it off to another user to manage, and they did a pretty solid job, but it's still a ghost town. Sidebar there links to dozens of other musical ghost towns. They were trying to recreate the reddit music multis we made ages ago. Doesn't do any good if everything is empty - nobody wants to post in a place where they think no one will see their submissions. It's a perfect example of everyone trying to copy a structure from another site, and the ghostly activity levels that make most people leave immediately.
On Tildes a ~listentothis shouldn't even be necessary since we can just tag and filter all the music submitted to the entire site based on popularity with an automatic lookup during submission. Here all ~listentothis would be is a search of ~music.* that keys in on certain ranges of popularity tags, or maybe a static view accessible in ~music somehow if it's useful enough that a lot of people want to see it. A lot of reddit communities only came to exist because their parents were doing such a shitty job at something or other, and listentothis was one of those.
On Tildes we have the option of doing things differently, and better - with the ability to build systems into the site code and evolve the concept of what a group is and what it can do. That's something reddit never gave us - control over the evolution of the site and its systems. With Tildes being AGPL it's impossible for anyone to ever take that away from us here.
What's "AGPL"?
It's the GNU Affero General Public License and arguably the strongest of the open source licenses. What makes it distinctive is that if Tildes is running the code on its servers, you have the legal right to download that exact code for yourself. It's basically a legal guarantee that everyone will always have access to the exact same source code that Tildes itself is running live. That makes what reddit did (closing up the source) pretty much impossible. It also means if anyone creates a fork/alternate version of Tildes, we'll all still have access to their modified code because they'll inherit the license.
This license is so hardcore 'open' that most businesses (even open-source ones) wouldn't even dream of touching it. Frankly it's the perfect license for a website/technology platform like this.
From what I understand, it's because there's such a small userbase here compared to Reddit, and it'd be a tad unsightly/annoying to have a bunch of splinter boards with 3-6 users on it. I think there's a good amount of boards at the moment and it isn't too hard to glean what kind of content should be posted on any given board. Countries could just go in ~talk, with the title prefacing who you want to hear answers from. Personally, I'm against having so many fragment boards like on Reddit. The size doesn't warrant it, and a good chunk of the 9k users seem to be inactive, considering none of the posted threads ever get above 100 votes. It'd just create bloat and confusion
The long-term idea is to use tags for this. If you want to see all content related to Germany, you would filter for posts tagged "germany". Other than that, the content is posted according to the subject it relates to: German news goes in ~news, German sport goes in ~sports, German history goes in ~humanities (tagged as "history"), and so on.
Because "videos" is only a format of content, rather than a subject. If your video is about something scientific, it goes in ~science; if it's about sport, it goes in ~sports; if it's about gaming, it goes in ~games. The groups here are set up for subjects, rather than formats. You subscribe to a subject you're interested in, and you'll get all content for that subject, whether it's text or video or pictures. A ~videos group would just be "miscellaneous" under a different name - but we already have ~misc for that.
What is the video about? Is it used for health reasons? Then it's ~health.
There was a great big discussion here a while ago about whether chess is a game or a sport! (Sorry, I don't remember exactly where it was, so I can't link it.) There was no final decision. However, ~games includes computer games and board games, and chess is a board game - so a post about chess belongs in ~games with a "board games" tag.
Eventually, tags in a group which get a lot of use will be turned into sub-groups. So, in the future, we'll have a ~games.computer sub-group and a ~games.boardgames sub-group.
I (really really) like the system as it is now (maybe with a few more topics, but not many) and love the idea of tags being used to drill down further, especially with the way other users can add tags to posts to help us casual readers find them. I think it's a great setup.
I do wish there was a way to follow/subscribe to tags though. Maybe by subscribing on the /~tildes?tag=ask page, or just being able to subscribe to tags in general site-wide, eg so us Aussies can subscribe to #Australia and see all Australian content on our homepage.
Is there a way to subscribe to a tag? I.e. if I want to subscribe to any and all posts that are tagged with Korea/Korean. If not, is it planned?
You can essentially do that just by going to the specific tag pages, e.g. https://tildes.net/?tag=korea, https://tildes.net/?tag=north_korea, https://tildes.net/?tag=south_korea
However, I am unaware of any plans to allow specific tags to be subscribed to so they show up on your front page (even if you're not subscribed to the group they were submitted to), but I don't really see why that wouldn't be possible.
p.s. Added a Gitlab issue suggesting it be investigated:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/359
What would people post in ~germany? Like I said when this idea was suggested before...
What would you post in ~germany if you had it?
(A group for German speakers might fit under ~humanities.language.german.)
Firstly, I didn't say there should not be a ~germany group. What I'm saying is that I don't see the need for it. That's a subtle but important difference. If there's a need for country-based groups, then I'll agree that these groups should exist. But, so far, I haven't seen a need for country-based groups.
Secondly, my opinion is only one opinion among many. Deimos is the only person who can actually decide what groups and sub-groups are created here. His opinion is the only one that matters.
Deimos doesn't create groups often. The last time any new groups were added to Tildes was 7 months ago, when Deimos added 4 new groups (bringing the total to 24).
As I said in the comment you're replying to, and as @Amarok has also said elsewhere in this thread, the long-term plan is for groups and sub-groups to arise organically. The first stage is to create a top-level group, which will be few and far between. Then people post in that top-level group and tag their posts. For example, in ~science, there are posts tagged "biology" and "mathematics" and "astronomy"and "physics". The next stage is to see what tags are being used most often. These will indicate where there's a need for a new sub-group. At that point, the moderators of the group (which is only Deimos for now) may decide to create a sub-group for that topic - and we'll get sub-groups for ~science.biology and ~science.mathematics and ~science.astronomy and ~science.physics, and maybe even a new top-level group such as for the social sciences.
So, the long-term answer to your question about how we decide which things should be tags and which should be groups is that tags will determine groups. If you want a group, start tagging posts with the name of the group you want. If you want a ~germany group, start tagging posts with "germany". If you want a group about 'The Lord of the Rings', start tagging posts with "lotr". Eventually, someone (Deimos or the future hypothetical moderators) will take notice of those tags, see that there's a demand for a group/sub-group for Germany or 'The Lord of the Rings', and create it.
The short-term answer is a lot simpler:
if it's already a group, then it's a group;
if it's not already a group, then it's a tag.
I do think OP is right, though - someday we'll want a community-finder tool here. If there were 30 hierarchies with a couple hundred groups each, it could get pretty damn daunting trying to eyeball where a submission would be appropriate - certainly enough to scare off new users.
The good news is, it's not that hard to create one. The tags do the work no matter how crazy the hierarchy itself gets over time. All the user has to do is provide tags (or we look them up for the link) and then locate the specific point in the hierarchy where those tags congregate together on submissions. That'd be the suggested community for the submission.
As an example, say I want to submit a music album that's progressive death metal. The site can fish the genre out of the link, or failing that the name of the artist and album which can then be looked up using services like musicbrainz and discogz to provide the genre tags. The tags will be "music metal progressive death" which right now would stop the lookup at ~music. In the future if ~music.metal exists, it'd suggest that one, if ~music.metal.death exists it'd suggest that one. If there was a ~music.progressive.metal as well it could suggest both to the user and let them pick, which would narrow it down from thousands of groups to just a couple so the user isn't left in ferret-shock mode due to all the choices. It'll never be perfect but it should be good enough to simplify the choices.
I do like your short answer there, though. Consider that stolen. :D
I agree. Given that we're looking at a top-down tree-based structure, with groups, sub-groups, and sub-sub-groups, it shouldn't be too hard to have a high-level page showing the overall group structure. I mean... we could just turn the existing "groups" page into something like the old Windows File Explorer, with users being able to expand each group to see its sub-groups, and expand the sub-groups to see the sub-sub-groups. A "Groups Explorer" page, if you will.
This might be an intermediate solution to help users navigate Tildes, before we can implement your "bells and whistles" solution, where the site automatically grabs and tracks tags for users, and suggests groups - which is probably not going to happen any time soon. This "Groups Explorer" page would also be useful for people to find groups to subscribe to, because not everyone will post content (90:9:1 rule).
You're welcome to it.
And, I was just thinking... when Deimos does get around to making Tildes publicly visible, we're going to have an influx of newbies, all asking the same questions. I reckon a few us will be busy copy-pasting and linking to old threads! :)
Is it too soon to create an FAQ page? :D
I have been thinking an updated 'intro to tildes' post would be a good idea before we open it up to the world.
I wonder if we can convince @cfabbro to share his early (like, before Deimos started coding this place kind of early) mockups of the tildes design. Those had the same sort of tree-explorer you're describing along with rather a lot of other design ideas that we are nowhere near ready for/in need of yet.
I may work on one over the next couple of days. I have a little bit of experience with FAQs and teaching people how to use social media-type websites... ;)
I've seen your wiki work on reddit. We can use the help. :D
When I write an "Introduction to Tildes" post, I would hope someone would put it on a wiki somewhere! That would be a lot easier to link people to than a post.
I may even have to teach myself how to use that wiki so I can write there directly, without having to rely on other people updating it for me.
I've created an account on GitLab. And it turns out I have no idea how to create a wiki page, or edit it.
Under the heading "Contributing to Wiki Articles", it says:
Later, it says:
And:
I don't understand any of this. I'm not a programmer, not even close. I'm used to Reddit's wiki. It's very simple. You just create the page you want, and start typing. These instructions make it look like I have to install a whole lot of software on my computer locally just to get started. And then I have to learn how to become a programmer to make it all work. I really don't want to do all that. I just want to make a wiki page, and type content into it.
This looks overly complicated for me - a total non-programmer.
I need help! @Bauke? @cfabbro? @Amarok? How do I do this?
Maybe someone else can create a page for me to type in?
Or can we use a wiki software that doesn't require someone to have a degree in programming?
Thanks to you and @cfabbro and @deing.
I'm busy for the next couple of days, and won't have time to look at this. I'll come back to it on the weekend.
I know I'm being ignorant, but I honestly don't even know what that means. What files? Where do I get them? What do I do with them? How do I edit them? And, most importantly, why do I need them? Why can't I simply create a wiki page and edit it?
I don't understand the process. I don't have any context for this. I'm only used to Reddit's wiki, where creating a wiki page was as simple as typing a new URL and a new page appeared. Then you clicked on 'edit' to edit it. That's my level of experience.
Remember: I'm not a programmer. The most complicated code I've ever written was some Visual Basic for a university project about 15 years ago, and then never again. I've never used GitLab. I don't understand how it works. I've worked with people who've used GitHub, but that's the closest I ever got.
That doesn't look like a repository - not that I know what a repository would look like, but that page doesn't seem to hold any text files. It has a couple of ".md" files and a folder called "src". I don't see anything that looks like text files.
Which starts with "1. Open a new terminal" - which, as I already said, means nothing to me. I don't have a terminal. I'm working on a PC. I haven't used a terminal since the 1990s, when the company I worked for had a mainframe computer (like all large companies at the time).
We seem to be going in circles. Even your easy "non-git" method is too complex for me.
I downloaded that .zip file and had a look inside. I don't see any text files. I see "woff" and "sass" and other such unrecognisable file types, but I see nothing I understand or can edit.
I really think you're overestimating my experience with these things. I honestly don't understand what you're talking about.
I think I'll just have to give up. This is totally opaque to me. I can't work it out, even with your help.
Guiding someone through this over Tildes is a bit awkward because of the long pauses between responses but I can do it in your chat program of choice if you want. It's not really as difficult as the guide may make it seem and in fact you can even do everything (fork, text edit, merge) through Gitlab itself, if that makes it easier for you... rather than having to futz around with git, zip files, etc.
I don't have a chat program of choice, because I generally don't do online chat. I just use whatever other people (usually Reddit mod teams) tell me to use if they need me to chat online. To that end, I've signed up to IRC, Google Hangouts, Skype, and probably something else over the past 6 years. I use them for the short time someone else needs me to use them, then I drop them when that need is over.
But I suggest you look at my conversation here with @deing before you try to help me. I seem to be unhelpable in this area. I simply don't get what's supposed to be happening. I'm missing a shitload of context and background.
I read all that already. I think you're just getting a bit overwhelmed with all the new terminology and such, which is understandable, but fundamentally it's really not as difficult as you may think it is despite that. You only really need to do 3 things, essentially:
And that's really all there is to it. You can do all that using the command line, git and/or a local IDE (not recommended for absolute beginners) but you can also just simply do it all through the gitlab interface itself, even the text editing (which is much simpler but a bit slower because of the web interface).
I would be more than happy to walk you through it all (whichever way you wish to try and do it). But, again, I think doing it in real-time chat will be much, much easier so I can answer any questions you have along the way and clarify anything that was unclear, without either of us having to wait so long between responses.
Thank you.
Presumably if you had a thread for, say, casual conversation with other people who live in Germany, that might take root through posts tagged "germany" in ~talk. The long term vision there is that groups can grow out of tags, so you might eventually have ~talk.germany (~talk.germans?) if it becomes such a regularly used tag that it makes sense to expand it.
For a generalized space that isn't about news, casual conversation, or any other current group specifically...that would likely require an entirely different top-level branch in the hierarchy for different nations, which there currently isn't anything in place for. Really, this would be some combination of how Deimos envisions the future top-level groups on Tildes and how much demand there is, which likely wouldn't come along unless Tildes grew a lot.
On reddit. Tildes is not a place for fluff content.
Ok, thank you.
p.s. In case you're interested in reading the discussion that was had on ~tildes.official about "fluff":
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/jz/daily_tildes_discussion_why_should_we_allow_or_not_allow_fluff_content
Thank you for the link. I read most of it. I still don't understand why "ASMR" is classified as "fluff". Why is ASMR "fluff" and not music? There are as many things to say about ASMR as there are about music.
And ASMR is only an example, of course. I don't even watch it.
Is there? With music you can talk about the band, the artist, the album, the song itself, the genre, instruments/instrumentation, production, make recommendations for similar music people might enjoy, talk about your experience seeing them live, etc. etc. etc.
But what is there you can honestly say of consequence about your typical ASMR video of some breathy voice whispering in your ears? "I enjoyed that" (which is meaningless noise) and maybe recommend some similar videos; that's about it. And https://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/ shows that mostly being the case. 99% of the comments (when there even are any) are just variations of "I enjoyed that" or "X creator is my favorite!"; There is no depth to the discussions at all. And the only submissions that do have some in-depth discussion are not ASMR videos, but articles about ASMR... which IMO actually would be perfectly acceptable here.
p.s. I would be more than happy to be proven wrong BTW. I don't really know enough about ASMR videos to really judge the potential quality of the discussion they can spark, however my intuition tells me they don't have a whole lot.
I too think that groups could be a bit more granular, but it is better than just random subs. It is confusing sometimes, but a certain set of users can fix it when a topic is in a wrong place, so it is not a huge deal. It helps to think why you are posting something, and what are some other attributes of your topic. If none helps you place it somewhere, then maybe it is off topic here, possibly "fluff". E.g. an article about ASMR can go to ~humanities or ~tech depending on other attributes of it, and a thread for recommendations or questions about it to ~talk, but ASMR videos themselves are fluff, IMO, and shouldn't be posted here.
I'm curious how a whispering video would fit in ~humanities. Which of the humanities - philosophy, theology, history, linguistics,
arts- does it relate to? (I consider the arts to be covered in ~creative.)Not a video, but an article on the phenomenon. I don't really know much about it, but it can be studied psychologically, sociologically, etc.
I don't think such a video in itself could be on topic anywhere on Tildes.
I misread your comment. @user2 asked about 'a video of "ASMR"', and I assumed you were following up on that.
I agree that an ASMR video isn't appropriate content for Tildes, but I was also curious how it connected to the humanities.
I fail to see why an ASMR video is "fluff" while a music video is perfectly on topic. I was under the impression that everything is welcomed here, as long as it is not hate-speech and whatnot, but alright.
That is, unfortunately, a mistaken impression. However, it's only natural considering that people can't see what is - and is not - on Tildes before they sign up. People can't see how Tildes works until after they've signed up, which means they make assumptions about what they'll find here and then meet the reality afterwards.
That's why Deimos' next main step in Tildes' development is to open up the site for public view (but not unrestricted sign-up). I believe he's ready to pull the trigger on that any day now. That should reduce the misunderstandings about what Tildes is for. I'm sorry this didn't happen in time for you, though.
The entirety of Tildes docs, as it is now, would take at most ten minutes to read through. I suggest you read them. Tildes is mainly a community for constructive discussions.
A music video is something open to discussion. An ASMR video is not so.
Edit: see also https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/jz/daily_tildes_discussion_why_should_we_allow_or_not_allow_fluff_content
I did read. Your view that a music video is open to discussion while an ASMR video is not is very naive to me. What makes a music video open to discussion and not an ASMR video? They are both videos, they both have sounds, instruments, they both drive emotion to the listener, they both have different levels of video/sound editing. Music videos can engage an ASMR response in the listener.
Music has intellectual depth, and social, cultural and otherwise backgrounds. Things like ASMR are principally appreciated or not, not discussed.