What's the (aimed) lifetime of a discussion on Tildes?
It's somewhat of an unspoken rule on Reddit that replying to a comment that's more than a day old is a faux pas. The conversation naturally settles within that period – or, less often, within two days. After that, the only appropriate thing is to either reference the conversation, or quote parts of the comments in relation to a similar issue in another post.
On Hubski, conversations could go on for days. It's explicitly stated in the guidelines that it's completely okay to reply to a comment of any age. I've never seen a year-old "revival" do any good, but the fact that it isn't prohibited or frowned upon adds no burden to the user.
How does Tildes handle this? Is there an unwritten rule already? Should there be a written one? What would be the factors?
Today's Feb 13. I've found a post from Feb 2 that was on a subject of interest of mine, where comments were insightful, but I feel like not all questions that need to be asked have been. Surely I won't go about creating another topic just to revive the conversation against only my own commentary to show for it.
There's also the matter of important, (semi)official topics on Tildes. Suppose a new issue arises that concerns an earlier public discussion held, say, half a year ago. It's a minor issue, but one that requires a discussion to settle. Does one comment on the old official topic, or does one create a new topic for this purpose?
Reddit automatically archiving posts after 6 months is one of the biggest contractors to reposts. On Tildes, there is the
NewandActivitysort. Making a comments on a post from weeks ago is encouraged and will rise up the timeline as if it had just been posted.So definitely feel free to comment if you feel there's more to add to the conversation 😃
edit: to specifically answer your Q: indefinitely or when the topic is completed, whichever comes first
Yeah. Why should we limit our timelines or our thinking? There's a galaxy of possibilities out there for longer lived threads. They'll happen when they happen, however they happen - that's how communities grow and build. When we see an interesting phenomenon, seize on it, build for it, harness it, and turn it into a real feature.
The activity sort was just there because forums have always had that and for a smaller quiet place like Tildes, it makes things seem much more active. Originally I think the plan was to remove it, but that was simply never necessary. Changing the default view to activity 3-day stops really old stuff from showing up, and if that's ever a real problem, there's the concept of 'sage' mechanics to deal with it. Meanwhile, activity sort is a boon to any new/young group that appears on the site before it becomes really busy.
Threads being dead on reddit after a day always bothered me. The bestofs on listentothis got 90% of their views and votes in the weeks after they were posted, not the day they were posted. Reddit's focus on the 24 hour lifecycle seems kinda myopic.
It was supposed to be the "Front Page of the Internet" so that seems fine to me. It was never designed as a platform for discussion or conversation, just an aggregator of the days news. Everything else is a kludgey add-on and it shows. It's core functionality revolves around showing you what the buzziest headlines of the day are. That slowly got eaten by rage-comics and advice animals because they're easier to do, digest, and vote on than actual articles or journalism. But nothing about that site is geared to facilitate discussions.
One of the challenges with that is that longer lived discussions, especially about wide-ranging, evergreen topics, tend to mutate and evolve over time and peeling off into new threads instead of having discussion persist in one place allows that to happen without bringing all the baggage of the last discussion on the topic to bear.
Let me pick gun control as a particularly grim example. You might have one big thread about the issue where people keep coming back to discuss it. You might also have someone post That one Onion Headline each and every time something happens. In a situation like this, discussion of the subject will be happening in two places at once. Letting older content lapse out can prevent this from happening.
I think this really gets to what the purpose of discussion here is. Is the point to have long-term discussions on weighty subjects, or is the point to discuss specific links or articles? The design pattern you want to go with will have to depend on what kind of interaction you want to focus on. I'm not sure if there is a good way to do both.
I'm sure there's no good way to do both at once with the same code. I'm also sure there's a way to create a type of thread that works well for each according to its needs, and a way to help those types of threads get along with each other in a group. If we look at a 'thread' as an object that contains comments, but consider making different kinds of threads that operate differently, we could support rather a lot of interesting experiments.
Polls, surveys, AMAs, megathreads, self posts, link posts, each of these is a 'thread' but each of these could operate differently from each other as well. I'm sure there's more types to discover. It'd be nice to be able to be flexible and support more than just link/text and specific life cycles.
I was honestly wondering this myself as a new user to Tildes. After having read through the docs, it seems like there's a similar philosophy to Hubski in the type of discussions that are to be fostered. The exemplary content label serves a similar role to badges on Hubski in that it is meant to point out merit, but with a few differences in actual use.
Badges on Hubski were earned based on participation elsewhere on the site, and so someone could bank up multiple badges to hand out within a small span of time, where the exemplary label is much more limited in regards to its use within an 8 hour time frame. Additionally, Hubski has a page specifically to monitor content that was given a badge, where here on Tildes, it actually affects the order in which a comment might be displayed when sorting by relevance (default upon signup).
I found this topic enlightening in what I feel is related to this one. Going through the comments, you might gain better insight into the thoughts of what appear to be some regular users here. There are certainly some names there that I've already begun to recognize in my short time here.
Personally, I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is that users can make their own minds up on what they'd like to see. Through tag filtering and the various sorting methods available, there are tools available to those who wish to only see new material.
Speaking as an individual, I welcome anything that might further a discussion I might be interested in, no matter the length of time that has passed. If it doesn't interest me, it's easy enough to move on to something else without it being any real hindrance to me in the process.
We've discussed giving people more exemplary tokens to hand out as their trust increases. Probably, that'd take the form of being able to save up a couple extra ones rather than earn them faster... so maybe some users could save three, or five. it really depends on how many comments you're getting, and if you're handing out enough exemplars to cover the good stuff. These exemplary tokens apply a multiplier to the vote weight, so the more of them you get, the more the votes on the comment/submission count. So far it's pushed quality replies up the page in a big damn hurry.
Someday there will be an exemplary vote for submissions as well with similar effects. We don't really need it yet, not enough content here for there to be much in the way of competition.
Basically, tags (on submissions) and labels (on comments) can apply effects that change things about the submission. An AMA tag on a self.post for example might send it up the page a lot faster than anything else, so that time-sensitive content gets more exposure. These tags and labels can all work differently, be visible or invisible, and each have their own little systems (like Exemplary's private reply to the earner from the giver). The tags and labels have counters too, and thresholds, so for example x number of 'offtopic' tags has no effect, y number triggers an effect, and z number triggers yet another different effect.
It's as if the tags were miniature automoderators and the users put them into play, rather than algorithms. They are a tool for humans to use directly, rather than being some bot locked in a closet that only a couple people have access to and control. Much more democratic/meritocratic this way.
I appreciate the information here, and I'm interested in gaining more insight into past discussions and the general direction of where Tildes is heading. Presently I am making my way through the issues section of the git repo, as well as some of the past topics in ~tildes.official. It's certainly a lot to comb through, but the issue log hosted by @Bauke is certainly helping.
Should I be aware of any other useful locations outside of those mentioned (and the docs/blog subdomains)? Are there any particular topics which leap out in your mind of things to read through as priority?
The content of ~tildes.official is the lion's share, but there's plenty in ~tildes as well. We are very, very bad at organization here, most of the discussions are splattered all over Tildes and even some reddit threads, and as of yet the docs pages on the Tildes site are the only 'official' source of features for the future. They are more conservative/fundamental than the discussions on Tildes have been. We need an integrated wiki just so we can get the conversational record straight. Most of it'll wind up in the ~tildes group wiki. I think most of the big stuff is covered in the topics linked in the intro post. Also of note, I did a lot of explaining with examples in the original tildes /r/truereddit thread.
Any time any change is going to get made it'll be announced ahead of time in ~tildes.official and we'll all discuss it ad nauseum. Those discussions will define the shape of the features, with Deimos as the final arbiter of what gets done (and trust me, he's the best Vulcan for that job, as he's proved on reddit and here for several years running). That's the reason we want lots of users here while the site is developed. This would never work out if it was just the plan of a couple people that was created in a vacuum. The community discussion of all the features is critical to getting them right. Working through the comment labels proved that - nobody had thought of using tags and labels like we are now until after we tried, failed, discussed, tried again, and then tweaked.
I've noticed that bumping has an effect on Tildes. I'm a bit curious how that works. Do threads always get bumped right to the top, or does it just influence the sorting algorithm by introducing another factor?
AFAIK a new comment will always bump a topic right back to the top of the activity sort, if it falls within the timespan the user has set, that is.
The system may need to be refined as activity increases over time though (e.g. maybe only new top-level comments bumping a topic and/or no back and forth replies between two users constantly triggering it, etc), but for now I think it works great. Activity - All Time has been my default sort since the site launched and I love it... especially seeing super old topics come back around again and new discussion take place in them.
Same here. I don't mind seeing old bumps in the least.
If this were a 5000 daily submission sort of place, that'd probably get out of hand - and spammers will abuse the bumping capability someday. File under 'nice problem to have, we'll deal with it then.' ;)
I think tags could work really well in combination with the various sort methods, namely with activity. I'd personally enjoy the ability to keep various sets of topic tags saved once this place grows and the combination of increased activity and broadened interests necessitates more of the hierarchical group system. Something akin to multireddits.
It's not a fully fleshed out idea at all, and I don't know if I've even talked about it publicly at all before, but I have this general concept in my head of allowing users to create a bunch of different "views" that they can easily switch through and support any combination of things like only showing topics from particular groups, only showing (or filtering out) topics with particular tags, from particular domains, etc., and setting up different sorting and time periods for each view.
Like you said, kind of like multireddits, but even more customizable. That way you'd be able to have a bunch of different views like "most upvoted news from today", "newest game deals", "most active ~talk posts today", and so on.
I like the idea of more robust customization. I think it would be neat if something like this were to ever be implemented to allow users an opt-in setting of displaying their "views" publicly on their profile.
Yeah, they'll be incredible for flipping the views of the content. I've talked a bit about how these tags could be turned into a ribbon across the top of each group. It'd make for an amazing navigation element to sort the content within groups, and it'll all run off a simple tap/click mechanism, can't get easier to use than that. We certainly don't need it yet, and probably won't for some time. It's a tool for when the volume of submissions to a group goes past the point where one can easily keep up with them.
I certainly think it would be useful in the future to have something exists providing more organizational/navigational function, but I'm not sure the top is the best place for it. The sidebar seems much more natural to me, and there's a ton of unused real-estate there where it could occupy.
Certainly requires users (and moderators?) to be stringent in the way they tag things though to ensure it remains most effective. I know the AutoModerator on many subs will hide a post if it doesn't follow certain syntax, but I'm not sure something automated like that fits the atmosphere of Tildes and how users ultimately will want to use tags.
I'm not particularly wedded to the mechanism, but I love the potential. I'd be happy with it in the sidebar or anywhere, really. Eventually the sidebar is probably going to fill up with lots of stuff for each submission. There's already the mod log for the topic and a tag cloud, but we could do so much more. A lot of it will probably be very community/topic specific. There's so much free information out there now for the site to look up and import.
Agreed: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/126 ;)
p.s. It's really weird finally noticing a typo 8 months later and fixing it. :P
Look at what sort you have selected. I believe the default is 7 (3?) days activity sort, where any bump puts anything right at the top as long as it's from a post made in the last 7 days.
I would suggest turning on All Time activity sort so you see anything that happens anywhere you're subscribed to and haven't chosen to filter out.
Mine seems to be set to All Time. I don't think I've changed it from the default.
For anyone else looking, it's at the top of an index page (eg. ~tildes). Not your user settings.
You can set it individually for each group, as well as your home page. Currently, the default on the home page is Activity, last 3 days. The default inside a group is Activity, all time.
Good to know, thanks.
Unfortunately now I will be paranoid about changing just one group's setting so that it's inconsistent with the rest.
Actually, it works for me. I'm using "Activity - All Time" as my default sort for the home page and all groups - except one. I have ~news sorted by "Activity - 3 days" because I think that's more appropriate for a group where content is supposed to be current and transient.
Yeah, at some point in the future a tildes.net/settings/group_sorts page might be in order to help people manage that.
Just to add another perspective: I have never experienced this the way you described. True, it might be unusual to go through older comments, but never have I seen a complaint about new comments in old threads. The worst thing that happened is nothing more coming out of a new comment, but I'd hardly describe that as a percieved faux pas. But I guess it depends heavily on the subreddit.
I agree. I don't think it's really a faux pas, but the reality is that if you reply to an older thread, almost nobody will see your comment except the person that you were replying to (because they'll get a notification). Once threads drop off the "hot" page due to being over 24 hours old, they effectively stop existing for most users and people usually won't go back to them unless they're personally still involved in a conversation.
That's fair. I think my using "faux pas" was off the mark there. I meant to say it wasn't common or usual to do so.
Personally, I've always felt like replying to a day-old comment on Reddit is wrong, somehow, but I can't put my finger on the reason.