When will there be a group for photographers?
Hey everyone!
I'm pretty new here, and I'm already enjoying this place, but I was wondering when there will be a group to post photos. I take photos and I'm sure some of you do as well, and I thought it would be cool to be able to share the photos we take and get honest feedback on them like we have honest discussions in the news articles, share tips and tricks, and generally have another way to connect.
I know generally photos are kind of taboo, as places like instagram have kind of ruined it and turned every single person with a camera on their phone into a photographer, so I get it if you have reservations. I have some myself, but I still want to take the chance.
Idk, I thought it would be cool. If not, then whatever, I ain't picky about this place I enjoy it very much.
There isn't a dedicated group for photography, but there is a ~creative group that you might use to house this sort of content. I have to imagine there are at least a few other photography hobbyists, but if nothing else, there are people here to appreciate what you might have to offer. I think talking about technique in particular would be interesting.
Also, I think the best way to handle it might be a photography feedback thread in somewhere like you mentioned rather than just posting photos outright.
Exactly. There have already been quite a few photographic submissions made in ~creative. I imagine that, eventually, when there are enough photography posts there, Deimos will create a ~creative.photography sub-group. However, realistically, I wouldn't expect that to happen for at least another 6 months. We need a lot more activity on Tildes in general before he'll start partitioning the site off into lots of groups and sub-groups.
FYI: @thejumpingbulldog
Understood. Thank you.
Tildes' general stance is against "fluff" content, which includes pictures. [0]
I personally wouldn't mind picture discussion if there was always accompanied text about the pictures, how they were taken, etc. aka discussion. What I don't want to see is a tilde that people just spam pictures in like in most of the picture subreddits on reddit.
[0] https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/jz/daily_tildes_discussion_why_should_we_allow_or_not_allow_fluff_content
Photography is an art form, I don't see how it's any more "fluff" than someone sharing a story they wrote or a song they composed. As far as I can tell, no one is advocating bring /r/pics-quality content here.
It invariably devolves into it. The problem is that quality text, discussion, and stories do not get upvoted as much as pictures, because they take time to digest. A picture or gif takes ~5 seconds or less, boom, upvoted. Even music takes longer time to process and upvote.
I don't want just pictures–reddit already exists for this. I come to tildes for substantial discussion and learning new things. I would be fine with no music tildes existing also. I unsubbed from /r/listentothis because it was just random, and no substance usually. /r/jazz also had a lot of fluff content.
Discussion of images invariably devolves into /r/pics-style fluff? This seems very difficult to defend, as one can easily imagine a space dedicated to discussion of the visual arts where only discussion of the technical side of the art is allowed, or relevant and striking images of protests and political events are shared to discuss the events those shed a light on. I think most of us can agree that if "The Terror of War" (obvious warnings on that) was a photo taken now, within the lifetime of Tildes, it would be a desirable thing to discuss from an artistic and political perspective, so finding rules that allow this or have a way to highlight particularly good pieces of original work through the hierarchy much like what (I believe) @Amarok has discussed at length in other places.
Tildes is aiming to have a massive number of users that oversee the platform that they use to keep it high quality rather than straining a small mod team, so we can imagine a future with nuanced rules that hit the perfect balance and keep the site both varied and high quality. In the short term, that might mean requiring (or at least having some social pressure for) submissions of this kind to be accompanied by a conversation starter or comment by the author, or it might mean some arbitrary line for "high quality" submissions that might rustle some feathers for being vague but would function just fine in these early stages.
Outright banning certain classes of content without consideration for either the value of that content or the discussion value of that content is something Reddit communities aiming higher might have to do because their platform gives them little in the ways of tools to have a different approach, and we don't have to think of things and plan as if this place will be Reddit. Solutions can be a bit more elegant and have more nuance, as we should not ever encounter a point where systems have to take the wheel and work things out without human oversight.
Being tough on fluff is great, I'm perfectly fine with recognizing that Tildes is not the place for memes and the picture you just took of your cat, but we really have to be careful that we don't overextend into excluding things that should not be excluded because we overshot a completely different problem.
Then we wouldn't have the chance to do this. I know how to mostly automate that, and turn it into auto-updating wiki charts and auto-generating playlists on other services. Five years ago reddit was getting 3000 track submissions a day in all the music subs and I'm sure it's far higher now, probably well over 10k. We can slice and dice that into the best music charts the web has ever seen, easily - which I pitched to reddit many times, and they of course ignored. :/
I do get your point, though - a single music track is a kinda low-effort post. The value of them only shines in the aggregate after voting, and I think we can find a better way to handle streams here. The discussions usually tease out much better stuff than just a stream post. I almost wish there was a collaborative winamp in the sidebar for that stuff, click to play, toss streams in there, keep it separate from the main content of the music group.
No one is talking about a reddit style /r/pics.
We're talking about a photography group. Sharing photographs that tildes users make.
Photography not memes/photos of cats/fluff.
Photos of cats are also photography. It's just the quality of the image that decides if it's fluff or not. Same goes for some absolute beginner taking a fuzzy iPhone 4S picture of a flower in their garden and submmitting it to ~creative.photography, the quality is probably crap and on reddit it wouldn't get many upvotes, but is that fuzz? Drawing a dividing line here seems pretty difficult imo.
That's a question that comes with having quality rules, not the medium of the content. It's equally rough to make those judgement calls for text articles, that's no reason to give up on other things :)
i feel like it's literally just a judgement call, and that's going to be one of the big problems with things like photography on tildes (and most art-adjacent content that hasn't been well established yet) in the future. one person's low effort fluff content might be another person's genuine effort and vice versa, and there's no really objective place to draw a line between the two after a certain point. like, you could nuke most context-free photos and memes and that'd most likely cause no problems, but after that i think it gets fuzzy because artistic works period just don't lend themselves to the sorts of rigid standards that you can apply to shit like writing or audiovisual works.
Generic photos of cats and memes downloaded off the internet has no place in a Photography group. Original content, absolutely. Photographs from other photographers that can be genuinely discussed and debated would be welcome too.
Yeah, I'm kinda torn here. The fluff has to go - cat pictures, no thanks, there's the rest of the internet for that.
Someone's hand-tooled magic the gathering cards? I like that. Professional photographers, especially in a creative context in a forum of other photo pros? Of course that's good content.
I don't understand the "fluff has to go" stance here in tildes. I hate memes and pictures as much as the average guy here, but why avoid it all-together?
Those who like to post pictures have also important contributions to make to this community. Reddit has great content (also bad content, but still), because it is an "all-in-one" site. As an example, someone could be de-stressing after a long day by watching pictures and, suddenly, comes across a more serious post regarding his area of expertise. He comments with his expertise knowledge, leaving everyone the richer. If there were no picture content, perhaps that thread would've just gone by without him noticing.
"Fluss content", as you call it, is only just a problem if the entire community revolves around it and there is no way to block/mute it. If one could block/mute a tag/tilde, then, what would be the problem?
This idea that you are too good to see a low-effort post is fascinating.
You might be interested in some of these old discussions about this, which provide some history and context:
Daily Tildes discussion - why should we allow (or not allow) fluff content?
How do we ensure the site stays un-fluffy?
What groups and subgroups should we allow before there's too much fluff on Tildes?
What's Wrong With Fluff?
Daily Tildes discussion - quality concerns
Somewhere else (not one of those threads), Deimos made the point that allowing fluff content, even in a silo, will eventually lead to spill-over. The people who post memes and gifs and jokes in the fluff-only area will continue that behaviour even in other parts of Tildes - and will inevitably get pissed off when someone tells them they can't do that outside their little playroom.
And, someone doesn't have to be "too good" to see a low-effort post to simply not be interested in those posts.
Low-effort content is cheap to produce, consume, and share. It overwhelms more substantive content. You can see this experiment in any subreddit that has opted in to allowing memes. Their frontpages are quickly dominated by it.
Oh, I agree. The best subreddits are the ones that are highly moderated. I, however, feel that tildes should have a space for more "quicker" content. I believe that if the tools to block/mute tags/tildes are there, then it shouldn't be much of a problem. But apparently this discussion has been already discussed and it was decided to not allow it at all.
The main reason that convinced me was simply avoiding the temptation. If it's here, we're all going to get drawn into it from time to time. Fluff is omnipresent. Substantive content is getting its ass kicked by it almost everywhere online. If we care about making a site with a more quality-oriented focus, having that here is at best a tempting distraction and at worst a guarantee of failure.
That said, we do have one kind of fluff that everyone has stood up for: ~talk. Let our version of fluff be casual conversations.
I think there's a pretty clear division between photography as an art and regular old fluff. Photography often focuses on how you set up the shot, the settings used, the inspiration, etc. Fluff is usually a cheap joke with text overlaid on the low-res image.
I'm not completely certain, but I think most people could tell the difference. Guidelines could be written up as well.
As for myself, I've trimmed all my "fluff" subreddits but still love the /r/AstroPhotography subreddit.
I remember seeing a shitty, slanted, noisy, smartphone-taken, low dynamic range picture on r/earthporn being highly praised and upvoted as high quality by the community. The reason being it was taken by OP's elderly father, who was so happy with the positive reception of r/earthporn, that had decided to become a photographer.
Photography as an art can also include pretty low quality content.
Nevermind all those pictures whose only praise comes from portraying a nice looking touristy landscape.
Are you calling it fluff because it is a grandson exploiting his grandfather for no real reason other than to score internet points, or because of the quality of the photo?
While I can certainly agree that the range in quality can go from one extreme to the next, beauty is a subjective thing. Just because it might not win any awards, there's possibly still something to be admired/commended there.
Everyone starts out at a novice level, and finding a community to share with and learn from is what Tildes is all about. I can get on board with keeping low-level and/or sensationalist content at bay, but on-face, I don't see anything wrong with sharing smartphone-taken photos if it is original content and they're trying to improve.
If it is a shitty photo with little to no text attached, sure, that's fluff. If it is sensationalist and has no real value, sure, that's fluff. I just want to be sure we aren't going to be gatekeepers where subjective views of what constitutes art come into play.
Because of the quality of the photo. Noisy, slanted, low dynamic range... Just very low effort in general.
But within this group, there's people who put in some effort, and there's people who didn't even try.
Fair enough.
I guess my problem with that photo wasn't so much that it was low quality, but that it was praised even though it was objectively very low quality. But the praise was only because of the context of the photo. A sob story of sorts.
I think I can see myself being okay with low quality photos as long as they're judged on their quality within the context of Photography as an art, a job, a passion, a hobby...
Many of the pictures that are praised on r/earthporn and r/pics aren't really being liked because of their photographic quality. But rather because of their emotional context.
Very nice, high quality pictures are ignored because they're presented in a sober, matter of fact way, while low effort low quality ones get all the spotlight, only because of their emotional appeal. This is something that deeply bothers me.
I will admit that I am pretty unfamiliar with /r/earthporn as a whole and have only a passing familiarity with it seeing it mentioned and maybe visiting briefly a couple of times.
I'm in agreement with you that this is something I'd like to avoid, and I'd much prefer the high quality photos, generally. As the site grows, ~creative will have a number of photography related topics that will be seeded into ~creative.photography once there's enough content to warrant a subgroup. It seems reasonable to assume that there would be tags such as
beginnerandfeedbackthat you could optionally filter out if that wasn't someone you personally were after, where it still allows for those sort of submissions/conversations to be had.When was this? I just (re?)subbed to r/earthporn a little while ago and the content has been pretty reasonable. Sure, there's rarely any meaningful discussion, but I'm okay with that. A lot of it is good quality content. A number of other subs in the terribly named "SFW Porn network" have similar content, and the same applies to the Imaginary network (e.g. r/imaginarylandscapes, r/imaginarycastles). Again, there's no discussion, but I see it as valuable. I use some of it as inspiration for a fictional world I'm presently building. All of my ideas are still very incomplete, so it wouldn't really be appropriate to post something about my ideas yet.
Certainly, photography as an art will include low quality content. But my current experience of r/earthporn, and of other subs on both that network and the imaginary network, is that it's pretty consistently good. Much better than r/cyberpunk, anyway, which has a fraction of the subscribers and has so much non-cyberpunk generic scifi / random real-world present-day photos posted to it that I unsubbed.
As for those touristy landscape shots, they are, again, useful to a silent group of users who use them as inspiration for their own work.
Edited to add another point: if someone is genuinely new to photography and trying to improve, where should they post? By definition their content will be low quality because they're new. Should we forbid the newbie from posting and improving?
Maybe a year ago?
Well, the other day I checked out r/pics to see that [progress] pics aren't allowed there anymore. That doesn't mean that a while ago it wasn't unbearably common to see mediocre pictures of initially overweight people and their normal weight results. Happy for them, don't get me wrong. But I seriously doubt those are interesting pictures on their own without the sob story behind them.
I unsubscribed from most of the major subs due to the lowest common denominator (LCD) content that was posted to them, highly upvoted by people with no respect for sidebar rules about the relevancy of the content to the subreddit.
This is subjective. I see a lot of extremely oversaturated, full of jpeg artifacts, very recycled, noisy, shitty HDR pictures on r/europe getting massively upvoted a lot. Obviously, the people who upvote it think that is good photography. But I don't think anyone with a slight knowledge of photography agrees with them. There's always a few people in the comments complaining about them. I haven't been subscribed to r/earthporn for a long time now, but I remember it used to be the same.
I don't know about you, but I think this is just painful to look at: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/89xtlc/spring_has_arrived_to_timisoara_romania/
And that's just one example of thousands.
So, people upvoting and liking it doesn't mean it's quality content. One of the major problems with Reddit is that people upvote what they like, not what is relevant or good content. And if the community gets big enough, then you will have people who don't really know or care much about the subject upvoting and downvoting content. Which leads to most content being LCD interests that are, at best, mediocre, and at worst, completely irrelevant or flat out inappropriate for the subreddit. Reddit voting democracy is, in my opinion, a poor system because of that.
Not necessarily. There are many types of low quality content.
I'm okay with an amateur that has read the sidebar rules and posted something that is adequate for the subreddit, even if the picture itself is not particularly good.
I'm not okay with people who just come to the subreddit for the first time and start posting asking for advice without reading the rules (rules which would give him/her the advice they need without wasting other people's time and cluttering the front page).
I don't think this is me being a gatekeeper trying to keep “noobs” away. It's just me talking from the perspective of someone who has been subscribed to several communities for a while and has seen the decrease in quality as they grow, due to the LCD factor I've already mentioned. You let new people in and post whatever low quality content, so they stay, and start upvoting low quality content further, and it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over and over and over on Reddit, where the original users of a subreddit always end up leaving it for a newly formed one due to the massive decrease in quality with time.
Most people are just copying the same picture over and over again: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/9lt06o/average_photo_of_moraine_lake_submitted_to/
It gets upvoted because it's a really beautiful landscape that everyone likes, not because of the quality of the picture. You take a half decent picture of a beautiful place and this gets far more points than an objectively good looking photo of a more mundane place. I think that, if we're judging things by their photographic value and skill, it should be the other way around. And I think a community formed by people with knowledge in photography, that has control over what is posted to their community and what gets popular in it can prevent that community from being overriden by LCD posts.
I'm not opposed to them posting. By all accounts I am an amateur myself. I just want people to read the rules and try to keep a high quality community instead of a LCD one.
Again, not all LQC is created equal.
I think a photogaphy Tildes group would have a sidebar with a couple of links to a wiki and some YouTube videos that teach you basic things; which if you bother to read, will prevent you from posting low quality content. It's just a matter of getting people to read the rules and put some minimal amount of effort into making a post, rather than just arriving and start posting without any regard for the community guidelines, as it often happens on Reddit.
Some Reddit users do have the excuse of being mobile users on apps that don't make the existence of sidebar rules obvious, I'm aware of that. But the vast majority of them just don't give two shits about a community they're not a part of, and thus aren't bothered by diluting the quality of it, much to demise of the long-term users and helped by the indifference of the moderators.
They can ask questions about their new hobby in ~hobbies.
They can post their creative output in ~creative with a "photography" tag.
And would this be meaningfully different from ~creative.photography? I was trying to argue in favor of the subgroup with my comment.
As I've already said elsewhere in this thread:
Deimos is not going to create a thousand groups right now. He's going to wait and create groups & sub-groups organically, as the site grows and as the need arises. The way to demonstrate the need for a ~creative.photography sub-group is to post topics in ~creative with a "photography" tag. That's how to argue in favour of this (or any) sub-group: post the relevant material with an appropriate tag.
Fair point and understood, thank you. :)
In a feedback loop of fluff and votes, these texts will dwindle into "I woke up at 2 AM and climbed a 6 mile high maintain on broken legs to take this magnificent picture".
Yes, I meant longer form text that broke down the technical how's/behind the scenes. That would considerably harder to abuse, but still possible.
As it is, those sorts of titles are common in reddit now, just emotional/pulling at heartstrings clickbait titles in the more popular subreddits.
Depends. r/worldbuilding has a rule very similar to this and the photo posts get some decent discussion. That said, r/worldbuilding is also a fraction of the size of r/earthporn in terms of subs, so it may just be a size problem.
If a group is made like this, it must, must, must be centered around critism, discussion, questions and feedback.
There shouldnt be fluff on tildes. Any pet photos, non oc photos or /r/pics style stuff shouldnt be allowed.
I think that's a great idea, actually.
I agree
I would be interested in being part of a photography and/or a photo critique group.
i think one of the best ways to do this until tildes has a large enough community to support a ~photography section would probably be a weekly or monthy photography thread, sorta like the weekly "what are you listening to/watching/reading" threads that other groups have.
The problem is I think the current method of community divergence is (intentionally or not) inhibiting the platform.
There are a lot of topics that technically fit into something like ~creative or ~tech, but at the same time just don't.
Now, someone can spam sub topic related things into the larger topic, but that hurts their cause rather than helps. So people end up sitting and not posting.
I think topics should be able to "vote" on the creation of subtopics/related topics at minimum, if not just letting people make topics arbitrarily.
Because the longer it takes for topics to diverge, the less community interaction will occur. When out of alpha, there will be no point in joining if the topic doesn't exist, and in alpha it limits people's posting.
Hell it's the reason I lurk.
The idea is that if there are a bunch of photography posts in ~creative, it would become obvious that ~creative.photography should exist. Just voting on it doesn't mean those who voted will participate by posting or commenting. That's been an issue on other forums; they become so fragmented that there's a bunch of sub-groups with very little participation. Keeping it general gives a chance for groups to organically form, to the point where they may eventually require a sub-group.
Right, but the problem is there's a decent chance that the reason why there aren't a lot of photography posts in ~creative is because people are too afraid to do so since they find it off topic.
Organically forming groups and subgroups have the problem of an endless feedback loop stopping groups from being created.
If anything, perhaps arbitrary groups should be able to be created, but if the participation (via some score) falls under some percent for the first X time of its creation of the parent group's score, it becomes merged.
Deimos has said that he doesn't want to fracture Tildes into a multitude of groups and sub-groups before it's ready, as that's how Imzy died.
I know full well that's what he said, but at the same time the feedback loop argument still applies.
Which again, is why I think groups should be able to be created, and when deemed unnecessary, merged. Rather than people being wallflowers on the platform.
It might be worth an experiment here just to determine if you're right. Next time we add some groups, we should look into adding a group like that, just one, to see what happens. If the presence of the group teases out that content which was absent before it's creation we'll know you're on to something. If it remains a ghost town, we can fold it back in to the parent, no harm, no foul.
Speak for yourself. I ain't no wallflower! I'm extremely active here (as anyone will tell you). Two of the existing groups were my suggestions. And, I'm planting seeds everywhere to influence the future development of this site - including the future creation of groups and sub-groups. This is open to anyone to do. I'm not special in this regard.
You can. You can vote on the creation of sub-groups. To use the example which started this thread, every tag of "photography" applied to a topic on Tildes is a vote for a photography-related group.
Yes, but this kind of voting requires a post of the material, which won't exist as much because of the lack of acceptance to posting that material in the first place.
So, rather than wait for a post so you can tag it... make it yourself! If you want to see photography here, or the latest recipes, or articles about the tiddlywinks world championship... post them! Lead by example. Show people that photography (or whatever) is welcome here by posting it. Use the "monkey see, monkey do" principle to your advantage.