14
votes
Can we have a dedicated ~econ group?
Hi, simple request here, can we have a dedicated channel group for the economy & related financial topics? It is an important enough field of topics that deserves to be on its own and not just labeled via tags, IMO. Especially with interesting developments and happenings which may be driving political and other news, it would be nice to have them easily in one place.
Now that I look again, ~politics probably deserves its own too, although I can see how that might turn into the most raucous part of the Tildes community. Economics is usually a bit more dry though--it's nicknamed the "dismal" science after all--so hopefully that would be less of an issue.
Thanks.
This reply from Deimos sheds some light on why there's no ~politics currently.
I get a feeling they would say the same about something such as ~econ, as economy can easily fit into several other groups, but I may be wrong.
Actually, economics is one of the social sciences. If and when we get a ~socialscience group (which I'm still waiting for), I expect that ~socialscience.economics will be one of its future sub-groups.
FYI: @Open_Thinker.
I'm anticipating a separate ~socialscience group merely for the practical reason that otherwise the ~science group structure will become too complex:
~science.natural.physics
~science.social.psychology
~science.natural.geology
~science.social.economics
I'm looking to remove one of those layers:
~science.physics
~socialscience.psychology
~science.geology
~socialscience.economics
That's all.
It's definitely not consistent, I don't see how there can be a ~comp, ~tech, and ~science, yet ~econ and ~politics would be entirely merged into ~humanities or even just ~misc.
First of all, I'm not angry at all, and didn't intend to seem that way. Just thought it would be nice to have, because to me (and many others, I'm sure) it's a uniquely interesting and important enough topic. If it's too early at this phase as you wrote, that's fine too, I understand; although I'm glad that just asking seems to have triggered the discussion, as it was inevitable. Also, I do think that relying on tags is an inferior method.
But let's be real, these sorts of organizations are almost entirely subjective, no matter the foundation or what people say. To the specific examples above, they could very easily be bundled into ~STEM (which could arguably also include ~econ and ~politics, but again it's subjective).
Tags for subjects are a temporary workaround, and a marker for possible future sub-groups. Eventually, popular tags will become sub-groups of their own. For example, topics tagged "astronomy" in ~science will eventually become the core of a ~science.astronomy sub-group.
I should point out that this is far from the first time this discussion about a future structure for groups on Tildes has been triggered. If some people seem a little frustrated or jaded, they have good reason to be. We've had this discussion many many times. If you scroll through the topics tagged "groups" here in ~tildes, you'll get an idea of how often this subject has been discussed in various times and places and ways.
It's going to come up many more times in the future until it is properly resolved, especially with continued user growth, I guarantee it.
I think continued user growth will probably resolve the issue to a large degree.
Right now, a new user sees a Tildes website with 22 vague top-level groups and only 1 sub-group. They're seeing an undeveloped structure - basically just a bare tree trunk without branches. That's because @Deimos is deliberately holding back from creating too many groups and sub-groups so that he doesn't fracture the user population too much, after seeing other forums kill themselves that way.
With such a minimalist group structure, it's only natural for newcomers to ask for more groups to cover subjects that don't seem to be represented by the current groups.
However, as the user base grows, and as Tildes sees more traffic, there'll be a need for more groups and sub-groups - and @Deimos will create them. He'll create sub-groups like ~tech.socialmedia and ~tech.rocketry and ~science.astronomy and ~humanities.history and ~socialscience.economics and ~games.computer.esports and so on.* Even further down the track, the creation of sub-groups will devolve to future group moderators, using the same method of monitoring high-usage tags to determine what sub-groups are necessary.
That means that the sub-groups and sub-sub-groups which are currently being represented only by tags will come into existence. New users in the future will therefore see a more developed group structure than we're seeing now. When people see the branches and twigs growing, they'll stop asking how to get more sub-groups because they'll see the process in action.
* These potential sub-groups are merely examples I made up for demonstration purposes. There is no guarantee these actual sub-groups will exist in the future. "The opinions expressed here do not reflect those of management."
Isn't that exactly what I did here? You wrote:
Yes, and it's going to continue to come up, that's directly what leads to it being resolved. It is the mechanism you just described.
No, the mechanism I described was that increased traffic would require Deimos (and future moderators) to start actually creating groups on a semi-regular basis, so that people wouldn't have to wonder how and when groups will be created.
That's got nothing to do with people coming in during alpha-testing and wondering why the site isn't finished yet.
Well, it's somewhat debatable and semantic then, but the point is too minor to discuss further I think.
Actually, economics is one of the social sciences, which I've been putting in ~science for now, pending a separate ~socialscience group.
There's a difference between news about countries' economies, and articles about economics. One is news, the other is economics.
Well, the social sciences are one of the five major areas of academic study, alongside the natural sciences (physics, biology, etc), the formal sciences (mathematics, logic, etc), the applied sciences (engineering, electronics, etc), and the humanities (history, philosophy, etc). So it's natural to have a separate group/sub-group for the social sciences.
Exactly. We're already planting the seeds of similar sub-groups in ~science and ~humanities by tagging topics as "physics", "biology", "history", "language", and so on. I expect that something similar would happen to a social science group, with tags and then sub-groups for economics, anthropology, sociology, and so on.
If the demand is there, why not? I would expect to see very different types of posts in each sub-group, though. And, to reflect this, they should be named differently: ~news.economy (news about the economy) versus ~socialscience.economics (scientific articles about the study of economics).
Nope! I'm content to just sit back and rely on the hard work done by other people who have already come to a consensus regarding such a structure. There's no sense in reinventing this particular wheel for this particular road.
That Wikipedia link is helpful and I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see an implementation similar to that organization.
Contrarily though, I don't really think that having the same subject appear in multiple subgroups would be a good idea, as that would likely lead to excessive complexity and fragmentation. It would be better for the redundancies to just be pointers to a unified location per subject.
The idea of having redirections/aliases has been broached before. For example, ~news.economy and ~economics might both merely be aliases which direct someone to ~socialscience.economics. Or not. Maybe there'll be a need for separate groups to discuss news about countries' economies and the latest academic studies in economics.
If we were being strictly hierarchical, then yes. I had a similar thought myself.
However, this is not a library or database where everything must be stored according to a fixed hierarchical referencing system, and where everything must be indexed accordingly. This is a web forum which is used by humans, who tend to do things haphazardly. Rather than organising the groups here around a strict hierarchical design, Deimos has chosen to create groups based on what people will actually use and what is actually popular. And, seeing as computer-related subjects are popular... he has chosen to have ~comp as a top-level group, rather than burying it three levels deep in a tree branch.
Disagree, ~tech, ~comp, & ~science (whether including social sciences such as ~econ and ~politics) could all be easily bundled into ~STEM. The decision on how to organize the groups is almost always going to be subjective and reflect bias, and the existing organization here is no different in that regard.
No, just the part about ~comp, ~tech, and ~science being justified to have separate dedicated groups whereas ~econ and ~politics don't. It's entirely subjective, there isn't much of a fundamental difference. The hierarchical structure is probably best, so ~econ doesn't necessarily have to be a top-level but it should be dedicated IMO.
And there have been a few threads already that are all heavily ~econ that I've seen in the past couple days, that's what triggered the request.
As a foreword, I hope my comment isn't perceived as rude, and I understand many of us are very much enthused about Tildes as a site, and platform; and also that people are free to argue the merits and cons of their own and others' opinions, but I really do think one of the most exhaustive, wasted uses of conversation on this site is discussing the exact nuances of group hierarchy & which groups exist, and which don't.
To make this merely not just a complaint, I think it'd actually be more constructive to discuss what set of prescriptive rules should be used to validate & create group hierarchy; so less generic conversations about group hierarchy can be de-duplicated and not needed to be had for every single topic under the sun. If we reframe the problem statement as "how should group hierarchy be dictated", rather than "how should group
$xfit into group structure$y", we may arrive with some more concrete rules for establishment of future top level and sub level groups, how groups interact in potentially an acyclic graph, and how tags fit into this—without needing to have the discussion over, and over, and over again.Once we have some form of loose community acceptance around concrete rules which are tangible & fit into the majority of use cases, we can avoid endless repeated discussions which march only closer to the end of time. Granted, I accept this might require some actual non-generic conversations around actual use cases, like this one; but I see a lot of empty writing in these sorts of threads that doesn't result in us being closer to establishing a widely accepted site structure.
Postface: Woo! Managed to write this generic meta-comment without a single reference to a hypothetical-yet-to-be-created Tildes group!
The only rule here for creating groups so far is "whatever Deimos decides, based on input from Tilders". We're literally making this site up as we go along.
And I'm not sure whether there needs to be anything more formal than that.
I'm reminded of a story I read about a university that deliberately didn't build any paths between its buildings. They waited to see where people actually walked, then paved over the tracks people made. I figured that was the approach here: see what people actually post about, and create groups accordingly (Deimos has even hinted at something along these lines).
So, now, I'm going to meta your meta: Why do we need concrete rules for creating groups?
I'm going to borrow @Deimos' words here, because he said it well in an earlier discussion about the structure of groups on Tildes:
In other words (mine): there will always be a subjective element to any decisions made about groups here, because we're not trying to create a logical hierarchy for the whole of human knowledge, we're trying to make an accessible forum based on what people are most likely to want to read and talk about.
You're analogy is a bit incorrect here, the way I see it. The creation of paved paths would be analogous to monitoring the usages of tags, not monitoring the usages of meta conversations about group hierarchy. To extend your analogy, we're basically arguing about what university buildings to build in places where buildings already exist.
We don't need them. I'm suggesting they might be useful to prevent repeated, and eventually pointless discussions down the road. This is why the Tildes FAQ exists. To reduce the frequency of repetitive questions. It never works with a 100% success rate, but online de-duplication mechanisms & hints do have an effect on improving duplicate post frequency. Every subreddit ends up having some issue with constant repetitive postings, and I suspect for Tildes, in general that's going to be around the exact meta-structure of groups.
Exactly. This is one possible answer to your question about what the concrete rules are for creating groups and how they're structured: they will be created in response to demonstrated user need, in the structure that best responds to observed user behaviour. The concrete rule in this case is "monitor tags and create sub-groups for tags that get used a lot".
Not in my experience. FAQs are only good for the people answering questions, not the people asking them. They give the answerers something quick and easy to link to, rather than having to type the same answers over and over again. Most people never look for FAQs before asking their questions.
Anyway, an FAQ about the exact meta-structure of groups isn't going to answer this type of question about "Why isn't there a group about X?" You can't answer that question by telling people that ~GroupX will exist under the ~GroupW.GroupX structure in the future. You need to tell them why it doesn't exist now. And the answer is that there's not enough demand for a group about X yet.
I strongly disagree. While there might not be enough activity now to justify creating a group for economics, that doesn't mean there never will be.
This is an outcome of the early population on Tildes being heavily skewed towards people working in, or interested in, IT and computers and technology in general. The humanities and social sciences are drastically underrepresented here right now. Go look at /r/Economics on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/). There absolutely is a justification for having separate groups for subjects like this.
We just haven't reached that point yet on Tildes. But, to say that economics doesn't need its own group at all is unfair and wrong. If anime and computers get their own groups, then economics also deserves its own group. Just not yet.
FYI: @Open_Thinker
That's better! :)
Yes, 100% agree, thanks for tagging me on your comment.
Whether it's named ~economy or ~economics I also don't particularly care, that's why I suggested ~econ.
However, I think you are displaying your own personal bias and subjectivity (which is fine). Much of ~politics is in fact ~econ driven if you look under the covers, and an ambivalence of ~econ usually signals an ignorance of the subject (which is true about most subjects, to be fair). Whether a site like Tildes survives over time is also dependent on ~econ (or is at least ~econ-related, I don't think that's really disputable), so we see that it is a relevant and potentially interesting subject!
And let's be real, whether ~econ is created or not is at this point entirely up to the site's admin(s), which is to say again is entirely subjective, until a more formal process is put in place--which is actually the real, underlying issue as someone (I think you, actually) wrote. And I already wrote earlier that if it's not created right now, that's fine and I understand.
However, if Tildes never develops an ~econ (or a similar equivalent), chances are that means it will have remained quite small and perhaps failed to take off in popularity (which is perhaps acceptable?).
That was me.
https://tildes.net/~tildes/bok/can_we_have_a_dedicated_econ_group#comment-2war
I think groups are and should mostly be shaped by the community. Of course, I would like Phylosophy and Linguistics not pushed together under ~humanities, as they are nothing alike, and even Linguistics/Phylology. But if there aren't enough people interested in this separation, the groups just become ghost towns.
On the other hand, we have ~tech and ~comp because the site is full of tech-minded people. And there is ~anime because there is lots of degenerates as well, apparently. Plus, we have a high percentage of trans and gay people, so ~lgbt.
If you want ~econ to be worth adding, you should invite more people who are interested in it. Othewise, I don't see a point to that. Deimos will then decide whether he is OK with adding another group.
However, they do both fall within the top-level academic discipline called "humanities", along with Theology and History. That's why I requested a ~humanities group - to give these various subjects some representation on Tildes (and I knew I wasn't going to get separate groups for each subject!).
I can't tell if this is a joke or if you just blatantly insulted every person who likes anime.
Actually, ~lgbt was created just to give LGBT people a welcoming place to post, rather than because we have a significantly high percentage of LGBT people here. (That said, we do have a slightly higher than average representation of LGBT people here.)