12
votes
Show username along domain on link posts tagged "original content"?
Something I noticed on this post was that relevant context to the post was obscured from the listing page - the username of the OP.
Something I noticed on this post was that relevant context to the post was obscured from the listing page - the username of the OP.
It's intentional. Relevant ~tildes.official topic from when usernames were removed from the front page with discussion on it:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/a2e/experimenting_with_some_changes_to_information_thats_displayed_on_topics_and_some_other_tweaks
I did think at first I wouldn't like the change—but actually thus far, I feel like I'm focusing on the content more and the user who posted it less; which definitely allows my preconceptions to be slightly more unbiased. For me, it's now a 👍.
My two cents at least; but consider this an opinion swayed.
I'm having a thought here, so bear with me while I work through it.
The change away from usernames on links was I think a good one. That said, there are other considerations at play here and perhaps we can be a bit sneaky and score a win in a different area. I don't see 'original content' and 'self promotion' as being all that different. Perhaps someone could expand on the difference and educate me.
We've talked about the self-promotion problem before, and how that content usually ends up reviled by most of the communities that host it on reddit. Usually it's removed and treated as spam. That's part of why we have ~creative as a group here, to give people who make something a more welcoming place to share it.
Part of the problem with self-promotion is that since it's usually frowned on, people doing the self promotion get into the habit of being sneaky and lying about it, constantly deleting and reposting links to it, and generally making asshats of themselves. There's a lot of bad behavior surrounding this content type.
Honesty in promotion may be part of the solution. We tell people who want to self-promote that they need to be open an honest about it. That means everyone doing self-promotion should be tagging their submissions with self.promotion so that everyone knows what it is. At least that way when some of them don't, that's a concrete benchmark for disciplinary action. That may help push them towards participating better. Users who don't want to see self.promo can filter the tag out and everyone's happy.
Another thing that might help them make a better choice is exactly this suggestion. On any posts tagged as self.promotion, have the username displayed instead of the domain link. It seems more appropriate than the domain link in that context. That adds some value to the self.promotion tag.
Of course we are talking about changing elements of the display based on the tags present, which is probably going to complicate the code, however... I can imagine we might want to do that sort of thing for other tags in other contexts, so it's not necessarily a one-off. It might have other uses.
https://tildes.net/?order=activity&tag=self_promotion ;)
p.s. I think tags activating the visibility of a username on external links on the front page is a pretty good idea. self_promotion, original_content, recommendations, etc... basically all the content types where a username is actually relevant could all do it. That might be a nice potential middle ground.
p.p.s. I still really think ~music and ~creative should potentially just be exempt from that no username on the front page rule though.
I remember applying one or two of those tags myself.
I didn't realise that Topic Logs disappeared after a period of time. Interesting.
I didn't realize that either. :P
Part of the privacy policy, scrubbing data after 30 days? @Deimos, can you clarify your thinking here for us? I'm curious. :)
Kind of, I'm wiping out all log-like data after 30 days, and the topic logs are included in that.
I could keep it, but it's just really not necessary. Is it ever really important to be able to look back at very old topics and see exactly who changed some tags and how? At worst it's going to be a rare, minor inconvenience, and overall I think it's a lot better to try to get out of the "just keep all the data, it might be useful someday" mindset. That's what got us into this mess of keeping everything and never deleting it. If we don't need it, let's try and delete it. It's better for privacy, and better for the site's resources.
I agree. Any actual abuse should be detected and dealt with within the time frame where the logs exist and the topic is active. Not having those logs around for an eternity is a deterrent to the witch-hunting behavior that sometimes crops up. Any trust-related data will be gathered and saved separately, it doesn't depend on the logs.
One caveat, though - what about topics that are bumped semi-regularly and longer-lived? Is there a mechanism that keeps those particular logs around longer, for some of the longer lived content/thread types we've discussed? Or does the older part of the log age-out and disappear, while any newer moderation actions remain in the log? I'm not sure that's even a problem, just curious about the implications for longer-lived content.
This is correct - the deletion is based on the age of the individual action, not the overall topic.
Groovy, I'm quite happy with that system. Thanks for clarifying everything!
Firstly, let me acknowledge that this is just my interpretation here and I'm sure that others might disagree. I'm also of the mind that there's nothing inherently wrong with self-promotion if it is done in moderation, with tact, and it will actually be of interest and to the benefit of the users.
Self-Promotion
Original Content
I think with self-promotion, you could see this in topics or comments. For original content, it's almost always going to be its own topic. The fine line being that the original content should be the focus and not the creator as a whole.