9
votes
Merge ~tech and ~comp and create a separate ~privacy
The whole suggestion is in the title.
I find the split between ~tech and ~comp to be very overlapping. Such a vast proportion of the content both places is ~privacy -material anyway. Content tagged privacy is effectively rendering ~tech a semi-privacy board as it is now anyway.
I think the suggested categorization makes more sense than the current organization based on the content actually submitted to tildes now.
There's a pretty distinct difference between the two subjects. Technology is applicable or of interest to almost everyone—phones, internet sites, etc. are all things that are going to be understandable to everyone that has an interest in technology in general and deals with it in their daily lives (and if you're on Tildes, obviously you interact with technology regularly).
However, unless someone specifically works with it (either as their job or a hobby), something like the release notes for git or Rust won't be interesting at all, or even understandable. That's a much higher level of specialized knowledge, and mixing it into ~tech doesn't make much sense.
There are very few posts tagged "privacy" in ~comp (only about 6% of all topics with the privacy tag), and the ones that are in there are generally highly-technical ones like reverse-engineering a spyware app, where the article wouldn't be comprehensible to non-programmers.
Do you want to be able to filter out privacy topics (or only see privacy topics)? Is that the motivation for requesting them to be in their own group?
I've also noticed that posts about electric vehicles are popular in this group, and I personally include posts about rockets and aircraft in this group. I don't think ~tech is restricted to only computer-based technology. One could almost consider it a group about engineering: computer engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering.
FYI: @nacho
Neither.
My read of the tildes community right now is one where I'd expect privacy to take over /r/tech as that topic or US technology politics has taken over similar seemingly broad technology-related forums on most other sites. I would want neither, but discussion on hardware, software, gadgets, regulations, trends etc. relating to tech and computing to take place in one place.
With most of the large companies we deal with aiming for closed platform systems, the difference between hardware and software for tech products has been decreasing substantially as tech behemoths have taken market share, both in the consumer and the company markets. Enough about that.
I tend to believe privacy-focused tech spaces online chase away a lot of would-be users because their demand people take much more extreme steps to safe-guard their privacy than users actually do because they have different values to "regular people."
Therefore, I think it's much more healthy for the health of the communities to split the privacy discussions into a separate group where that orthodoxy reigns to make all the rest of the topics appeal to more people. The privacy minded will dominate privacy submissions irrespective of where they are placed anyway, unless the demography of tildes will appeal to a vastly different userbase than other more niche social media sites (they mostly have more tech-interested folks as early adopters anyway).
I think a lot of people write off entire communities that are dominated by privacy advocates due to the many stereotypes that (somewhat rightly) follow those users around the web. It would be a shame if that happened to tech and computing topics on tildes as well. Once a seed community is established, changing that course may prove very difficult. That's why this suggestion comes at this stage rather than later.
Either Tildeans are much worse at using subscription features to unsubscribe than on other sites, or /r/comp with its ~9300 subscribers is pretty much as applicable to everyone as /r/tech with ~9600 subscribers. ~comp has a lot less content as of now, so detailed, less accessible content won't dominate a merged group in any case, just like in-depth, complicated issues requiring a lot of prerequisite knowledge don't bog down ~lgbt or other groups.
I suspect that the site's current users are very, very heavily geared towards tech-savvy users due to the recruitment channels tildes has had from a tech and privacy-focused segment of redditors and users of even more niche sites.
I don't think it'd be smart for tildes to have even more tech/social media/computing/silicon valley-esque groups. Even though they aren't very active as of yet, I think groups like ~food, ~creative ~movies are extremely important in showing what this site is and isn't. If it's a tech site, but with some add-on topics that attracts a much less diverse and interesting crowd for having a longform, discussion-focused community.
I think there's a very specific and clear mechanism that leads some tech/comp topics to have strange discussions online. It takes a very special type of person to sit down and discuss phones or laptops or IoT fridges or whatever non-branded product online. Although these are topics everyone can engage with, in practice, only a very few people are interested enough in these things to follow the topics extensively.
And those who are interested in products generally care about a brand they own/follow and not the product category itself (think playstation 4 or Samsung phone). It's similar in comp: there's a reason computer/coding help forums are populated by very few people, and most places boil down to "I have issue. Never mind, I solved issue" or "I have issue. Here's solution. Thanks kind stranger!"
(For similar reasons we might as well just get rid of ~sports. Most people aren't interested in sports, they follow a couple sports or leagues. The community won't take off unless tildes somehow attracts a very specific subset of users. I believe ~hobbies is much more easily approached.)
Basically, tildes has been around for a while now, and some of the initial buzz has worn off, communities/cultures in the different types of threads are being established. The site's so small a lot of people seem to follow everything and that may not last.
I think several changes to the groups would make sense as tildes is now. I've suggested what I believe is the most impactful change for improving the split of tech-related topics, one of the areas with many submissions on the site now.
I think it's more that all new users are automatically subscribed to all groups by default. And, because Tildes is still relatively small and inactive, there's not really much point in unsubscribing from groups because one person can manage to see everything posted here in one day, so a Tilder won't miss any posts. As the site grows, and the activity increases, people will become more likely to miss posts they're interested in, and the incentive to unsubscribe from groups in order to remove those posts from one's front page (in order to see more of the posts one is interested in) will increase.
Correct. However, that will not be true forever. Let's not lock in structures now, based on the current demographics of the site, when those current demographics and interests don't reflect the future demographics and interests.
And, where would people make posts about their favourite sporting team or their preferred sporting competition if there were not a ~sports group? As you already acknowledge, the current demographics of Tildes skews heavily towards people interested in computers and information technology, and as you imply, we want to be more inclusive than that. Groups like ~sports and ~humanities are placeholders for future groups and sub-groups, to show people considering signing up to Tildes that this site is not all about IT. It is intended to be an all-inclusive site, with content covering a lot of interests.
There are a lot of options for posting about sports.
There's ~games and ~hobbies, ~misc and ~talk ,and ~news to cover different aspects of sports, from playing yourself, favorite teams, news and developments, discussion on sports in general etc.
I also want and expect Tildes to attract more varied posters than now. However, I think it's easy to underestimate how the layout of the site attracts the tech crowd more than other more visual sites and "modern" layouts.
The seed community is also heavily tech-focused. That makes attracting varied people harder than attracting more tech people who find more of their interests covered.
The reason I bring this up now rather than down the line is that I remember very well what reddit was like in its first couple of years, and how it and similar sites like Digg have been dominated and still are dominated by cultures that were established early on in the site's history.
The window of opportunity for tuning the culture of Tildes while it is plasticine is now before the site's more noisy about its existence.
Sorry I was unclear. The bolded phrase is in contrast to the group of topics referenced in the paragraph above:
/r/rust on reddit is geared toward a branded/specific product/language, and I'd argue lobeste.rs is even more niche than HackerNews (which in itself caters very specifically to the tech crowd) and therefore does cater to a very special type of person, not to folks on a general discussion forum.
I'd argue that is true for most sites/groups in these categories. You don't get a casual following who go to a site to check out their latest sports team stuff and then talk about phones in general.
I work in networking. Only a very special subgroup of people in networking browse /r/networking or do anything network related on their spare time that they'd ever mention at work. That's not part of their identity outside of the day job.
Maybe having ~tech as the main group, with tech.comp, ~tech.sec(urity) or ~tech.priv(acy) as eventual subgroupings.
EDIT: updated with ~ syntaxes... syntaxii... Hmmm...
I'm sure this has been argued to death elsewhere, but I agree that (within reason) a usenet style hierarchy is probably the way to go.
It's a part of the site (post-Alpha) mechanics, as I understand it.
https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#groups
Though it's worth clarifying that, while it's in place, it's very much not finished. Specifically, all post from subgroups still appear in their parent groups (instead of only some selection of best posts). So, as of right now, there's not much point to using those instead of tags.
That's right. The scaffolding is there but it's not finished enough at the moment to be useful. I'm sure we'll put it through many iterations as we work it out, too, so it could evolve considerably from the concepts we've talked about.
Oh, nice! Thanks Bauke!
Syntaxen is the A-S one?
Excellent. TIL! Thanks! :D
I need convincing, the "I have a suggestion and I think my suggestion should be implemented" argument isn't doing it for me. What is the current situation, what are the goals that are supposed to be met, how are they not being met, and what outcomes are you hoping to see from this change? And what I wonder most: why do you want to merge these two together because they have a subtopic that could overlap? They both discuss things that aren't related to privacy, but you're willing to ignore all that to be able to talk about privacy in a single place?
Even right now, the nature of both those categories on the subject of privacy are different. I opened up both those privacy tag links and they're pretty different collections. ~comp's is rather focused on the technology behind privacy, while ~tech's is more general news articles around privacy. These differences are in line with the general descriptions of both categories so, in essence, things seem to be as they're supposed to be. Both subs have a similar subscriber count, admittedly, but I'd imagine those extra few hundred subscribers in ~tech aren't all too interested in the much more specific nature of ~comp.
I mean, it's a matter of opinion.
I feel and believe ~tech and ~comp have and overlapping userbase and should be merged. I think splitting off ~privacy is an organizational change that would be better for the site as a whole.
To me this is an issue of community building and the seed community Tildes is attracting and will attract.
I think presenting the idea without a long hard-sell reasoning to convince others leads to a more interesting conversation on the organization of these groups than the thread mostly being a discussion for/against the OP's arguments.
I've elaborated on my reasoning in other comments and won't repeat those thoughts.
The site has other underused or non-deliberate groups too.
The set of topics the site is divided into strongly suggests who and what the site is for and about.
I think merging ~tech and ~comp without splitting anything off makes sense.
I'd be all for getting rid of ~enviro and letting those submissions be absorbed by ~news, ~science, ~health ~humanities ~books ~talk and ~misc
I'd be all for renaming ~anime something like ~cartoons or merging it into ~entertainment along with one or more of ~books, ~movies and/or ~tv (~tv and ~movies should probably be merged anyway)
~sports should get the axe. It could be split between ~games and ~hobbies
On a longform discussion-centric site, ~talk should be renamed ~discussions
If Tildes is to have groups they should either be active, or send very specific messages about who the site is for or is trying to attract.
Who is the site trying to attract? What communities would they want to immediately see?
I think the long-form, in-depth, analysis perspective is hard to see from the groups on the site. As it is, the groups that do exist don't seem like a deliberate selection. It should be.
Are you aware that some of the groups you want to rename or close, such as ~enviro and ~anime, are groups that we Tilders asked for?
As for ~sports, as I've just written elsewhere in this thread, it's a placeholder for the future. Not all groups have to be relevant today in order to exist today. They're indicators of future intentions.
Tildes is trying to attract anyone who is interested in high-quality content about any subject. It should therefore include groups which cover any subject - even the ones you personally aren't interested in.
I remember the thread on groups and suggestions well. [I made a comment about how I believe the topic of politics should be treated on the site in it.
I totally agree that groups don't need to be relevant today to exist today. I think they clearly show the intentions of the site and are strong indicators on who Tildes is trying to attract.
I still don't see ~sports ever taking off because it's a grouping that doesn't align well with people's interests. Again, people mostly follow a sport/team or two, not sports in general. Especially not in the scope of in-depth discussion.
I think tildes won't attract people who are interested in high-quality content about any topic by having a selection of groups that only caters to a specific group of people.
I like what a friend of mine called the "sister test" many years ago. Would your theoretical sister be interested in participating in this forum or not? Before getting rid of the concept of defaults, reddit as a site hugely favored traditionally male topics in the defaults with /r/twoxchromosomes tacked on. Right now Tildes seems to me to be geared towards tech-interested guys in a similar way.
My suggestions don't have much to do with what I'm personally interested in. I'm extremely interested in tv series, but completely uninterested in movies. I love non-fiction but read few novels. I listen to a lot of music, but generally I don't look to discover new genres or experiment much. I know what I like and don't in terms of music.
That's neither here nor there in my suggestion of merging those groups to ~entertainment because I strongly believe most people don't go on netflix or whatever looking specifically or a movie or tv series, but entertainment.
I think ~anime sends a message about who Tildes is for that's very off-putting to a lot of people. The name itself has strong connotations that many people steer away from.
I think ~lgbt steer a lot of people this site isn't for away from the site, and appeals to a lot of the people the site wants to recruit. Just by being there on the front page.
Those types of concerns matter a lot in the early stages of a social media site imo.
I think you're missing the future of ~sports:
~sports.football
~sports.basketball
~sports.football.nfl
~sports.football.soccer
~sports.football.nfl.neworleanssaints
~sports.football.nfl.losangelesrams
Also, it's ironic that you write in one line that you want Tildes to attract non-tech people, then in another line that you think we should remove ~sports because people aren't interested in it. If you want to attract non-tech people, you need non-tech groups and non-tech content, and sports is one of those non-tech categories we need.
I agree! Why do you think I requested ~humanities, and have been assiduously seeding it with content for 6 months? To attract the non-tech crowd when this site went public, and to build the foundations for future sub-groups/groups about history and language and religion.
I think you're over-estimating the push factor of a group like ~anime. Why doesn't ~sports have as strong a pull factor as ~anime has a push factor? Why will one push people away, but the other won't pull people in? Your argument is inconsistent.
And... to come back to your original suggestion... you won't attract a non-tech crowd by replacing ~comp and ~tech with ~tech and ~privacy. That's replacing two tech-themed groups with two tech-themed groups - nothing changes.
If your intention is to broaden the range of subjects represented on Tildes, to make it more attractive to non-tech people, you need to be suggesting that we increase the non-tech groups on Tildes. We need to add the sub-groups under ~sports and ~humanities. We need to add groups like ~socialscience (which I've been advocating for since that group suggestions thread). We need to create ~crafts, and rename ~creative to ~arts. We need to not merge ~tv and ~movies and ~books and ~music and ~anime into one mega-group called ~entertainment, thus reducing the number of entertainment-related groups from five to one, and thereby reducing the visibility of this type of content to newcomers.
Your intentions are good, but your implementation is flawed.
I don't think that "overlap" makes enough sense with regards to hierarchical relationships. After all, we have ~hobbies, ~food, ~health, and ~life, all of which could be considered as "overlapping" but which also have starkly different purposes. With regards to ~tech and ~comp specifically, the former is geared more toward pop culture discussions while the latter is geared more toward professional, technical, and scientific discussions. They could, perhaps, both be grouped under a separate top-level category altogether because they're certainly related as sibling categories, but neither of them could be considered a parent category of the other--they're just far too different to have a parent-child hierarchical relationship.
If you're concerned about the prevalence of privacy-related ~tech topics, then as noted elsewhere it would make more sense to include a new ~tech.privacy group instead. This ensures that the primarily pop-culture-style privacy-related content remains under ~tech where it's most relevant, but is both 1. easily filtered out by unsubscribing from ~tech.privacy, and 2. more easily located by the highly privacy-minded user base. It helps both sides--those who want a lot of privacy-oriented content and those who don't--in a balanced manner that operates within the site's intended future mechanics.
This is the answer that @nacho is looking for. This is what will (almost certainly) result from all those topics tagged "privacy" in ~tech.
While I see your point that creating a separate space for privacy discussions, I don't really see a reason for the merge.
Other than both of ~comp and ~tech having their fair share of privacy-related content, what is your argument for merging them? One is intended for the general audience, and the other for "programmers, sysadmins, etc." - how would replacing both of them with a single space help?
The groups available on the site are a clear indicator to would-be users whether or not the site is for them.
If tildes has ~tech, ~comp, ~privacy, and ~anime that says something about who the site is for or is trying to attract.
If the site has ~travel, ~outdoors, ~home, ~kids, ~workout, ~partying or whatever, that paints a different picture immediately the first time you hit the front page of the site.
Just having ~lgbt as one of 24 groups sends a very clear message on what values this site has (I think this message is a good and important message to send)
I don't think ~tildes should have more tech-related groups. It would send a very clear message to would-be users of the site that this is just another "tech-bro site" that's not for them.
I expect many people make that judgement after interpreting the design of the site as a retro-ish forum as it is.