There are both good and bad sides to locking voting/replying after a period of time. Reddit didn't have it for years, you used to be able to vote/reply on everything forever. Is there something in...
There are both good and bad sides to locking voting/replying after a period of time. Reddit didn't have it for years, you used to be able to vote/reply on everything forever.
Is there something in particular you think could be a problem?
Here is a really perfect example of why it's bad. My buddy has been having issues with his new GTX 1080 graphics card for months now, where whenever he has anything going on in his second monitor...
Here is a really perfect example of why it's bad.
My buddy has been having issues with his new GTX 1080 graphics card for months now, where whenever he has anything going on in his second monitor (e.g. watching Twitch or Youtube, browser or Win10 app, doesn't matter which) he was getting insane framerate stuttering in games on his primary screen (even with low CPU/GPU/RAM usage).
We tried everything to diagnose and fix it, from enabling/disabling hardware acceleration in the browser, trying every possible browser alternative, playing the games in fullscreen/windowed/borderless, removing his soundcard, turning on/off "allow applications exclusive control" in sound properties, updating and even rolling back every possible driver, enabling/disabling Gsync for fullscreen/windowed applications, using Nvidia Inspector to hard cap framerates, running memory and HDD tests, forcing lower res and framerates on the monitors themselves, etc. etc. etc. etc. And it was still happening.
It was getting to the point where we thought his 1080 was defective and he was considering RMA'ing it, but then we stumbled on a 2 year old reddit thread with a bunch of other people reporting the exact same issue, trying everything they could also think of to fix it, but with no solutions from any of them... just frustration at not being able to solve it.
Well... yesterday he finally figured it out by complete accident. It's the NVIDIA Control Panel "desktop color settings" causing it for some unknown reason. When in "Choose how color is set", "other applications control settings" is enabled (which is the default), it causes the framerate stuttering issue... but when all his monitors are set to "Use NVIDIA settings" it fixes the issue.
But now that the reddit post is archived, there is no way to inform people of the solution! And given it's one of the top results when you search for the issue... that really sucks. If an old topic comment section is problematic, moderators can lock it... but they should never be archived automatically IMO.
I mean it's a shame you can't comment on the original thread to keep it self contained. You can just post another thread (that links to the original) titled "Solution to ...." with an informative...
there is no way to inform people of the solution!
I mean it's a shame you can't comment on the original thread to keep it self contained. You can just post another thread (that links to the original) titled "Solution to ...." with an informative title describing the problem so people searching can find it.
It might be a bit clunky but it's not impossible.
Reddit at least does let you edit exisiting comments you've made even when the thread is locked and I've used that a few times so the final comments don't just dangle with no closure.
The odds of a solution post being similarly popular that enough people actually see/vote on it to matter, and it also climbing the google results so people in the future can find it is pretty...
The odds of a solution post being similarly popular that enough people actually see/vote on it to matter, and it also climbing the google results so people in the future can find it is pretty slim. But if we could just reply in the original thread (maybe even hijacking a top comment position), at least it would stand a decent chance at being seen by all the people who google for solutions to the problem. Plus, why even archive the post in the first place? It makes no sense IMO.
EDIT: My main reason for this reply is to please encourage your friend to post their solution even if you / they think it won't be as visible. There's nothing worse than searching for something...
EDIT: My main reason for this reply is to please encourage your friend to post their solution even if you / they think it won't be as visible. There's nothing worse than searching for something and only finding a bunch of other posts with the same issue but no solution.
I understand your points but I don't fully agree. I think someone searching for an answer to multi monitor setup with specific hardware drivers is going to find a solution when they search if it gets posted.
Having said that, I am used to searching for technical issues though so I know it won't apply to general searches.
When reddit introduced locked posts they said it was due to scalability issues. Sites like this and reddit are incredibly dynamic. If you can guarantee there are no new comments or votes you can deal with them differently and archive and cache them separately.
From what I have heard through the grapevine, Reddit's codebase is a poorly optimized collection of rats nests layered on top of even older rats nests, and their only viable option for performance...
From what I have heard through the grapevine, Reddit's codebase is a poorly optimized collection of rats nests layered on top of even older rats nests, and their only viable option for performance problems (other than to completely rewrite the back end eventually) is to throw more and more servers at the problems to mitigate it. So, yeah they probably did have to archive old posts for performance issues. But that hopefully won't be an issue here at Tildes, even at scale. Only @deimos would be qualified to answer that though.
p.s. As to your edit... I was already planning on PMing the old submission creator (if they are even still active on reddit) and let them know the solution to the problem so they can edit their self-text to let people know. But if that doesn't work I will do as you ask and post the solution myself, even though I don't think that will really help. ;)
further edit: The OP of the reddit submission does appear to still be somewhat active on reddit (last comment posted a month ago)... so I will PM them in the morning.
The only issue I can see is if thread necromancy becomes a problem. That's as old as forums, someone bumping a 5 year old thread, and certain ancient large threads that always end up bumped when...
The only issue I can see is if thread necromancy becomes a problem. That's as old as forums, someone bumping a 5 year old thread, and certain ancient large threads that always end up bumped when new people find them in google or whatnot. Once the forum reaches a certain size, the necromancy can interfere with fresh content as its frequency increases.
I think 4chan already solved this problem. The sage mechanic allows people to add replies without bumping. Here that would probably be the default on threads older than some threshold. Perhaps we might want to include a thread resurrect capacity someday as well, the opposite of a sage mechanic, to put something front and center again. I'm sure there are use cases (most of them edge cases) for this stuff.
That could also be a user-centric setting. Or, it could be based on activity... a single user, or a pair of users, won't bump it, but lots of new comments from several users will, for example. There are a lot of ways to look at this kind of housekeeping.
Honestly though, why bother until it actually becomes a problem? I like waiting until there is a Tildes-centric problem to solve to invent a solution. Things may play out differently here than they have on other forums, we're already doing quite a lot differently than other social sites have done in the past. Let's not pre-suppose what our problems will be, they'll come to us in their own good time. ;)
Apples to Oranges. Conventional forums don't usually have the ability to set the timeframe of their post sort method, if they even have a sort feature at all, whereas Tildes does. If people find...
Apples to Oranges. Conventional forums don't usually have the ability to set the timeframe of their post sort method, if they even have a sort feature at all, whereas Tildes does. If people find that necroposts are "interfering with fresh content" too much, they can just switch their Activity timeframe to something other than All time or change sort methods entirely. And once the "hide topic" and "aside" comment features are added that will also be a way to prevent the issue. The problem is basically already solved here.
Sure, but we have already talked about other ways to mitigate the problem (if it ever becomes one) that don't require reinventing the wheel and implementing a complex sage/anti-sage mechanic......
Sure, but we have already talked about other ways to mitigate the problem (if it ever becomes one) that don't require reinventing the wheel and implementing a complex sage/anti-sage mechanic... like disabling OPs comments from triggering bump, disabling back and forth replies between two users from triggering the bump, etc. And all of those ideas and minor tweaks combined will likely be more than sufficient, even at scale, IMO.
In the context of the all-time activity sort, I'd like to see it not become a cesspool of threads bumping all day, every day, for mundane reasons. That'll be the first thing that suffers if this...
In the context of the all-time activity sort, I'd like to see it not become a cesspool of threads bumping all day, every day, for mundane reasons. That'll be the first thing that suffers if this problem emerges, and it's my primary browsing preference right now, so when/if that finally starts happening, I'll notice. Gonna be a while, I think. Let's see what it's like at 100k users, bet that's the ballpark.
Which is precisely what aside comments that don't trigger the bump solves. As will the "hide" topic feature for topics you're tired of seeing pop up over and over again.
threads bumping all day, every day, for mundane reasons.
Which is precisely what aside comments that don't trigger the bump solves. As will the "hide" topic feature for topics you're tired of seeing pop up over and over again.
Even if it isn't, I still think an overly complex sage/anti-sage system is not the answer. There are a great many other significantly less complicated and convoluted features and tweaks that can...
Even if it isn't, I still think an overly complex sage/anti-sage system is not the answer. There are a great many other significantly less complicated and convoluted features and tweaks that can be made to address the issue instead.
I never said it was the answer, just said it's what 4chan does. Also, don't pretend sage is complicated. It's dirt simple, just a don't-dump flag, and that's the appeal. Checking username count...
I never said it was the answer, just said it's what 4chan does. Also, don't pretend sage is complicated. It's dirt simple, just a don't-dump flag, and that's the appeal. Checking username count against a threshold over a time period to determine bumpworthiness is more complicated but neither of these things is hard.
I think a requirement that bumping needs more than two users to happen is likely to clean out most of the chaff. I'd bet most of the old thread comments that would trigger a bump are just one person talking to another. We'll see what's left behind when that noise is out of the system, how often bumping really happens, and what's going on in the bumped threads.
I wonder if new top level comments should bump? I can see that going in both good and bad directions.
It's still way more complicated than all the other potential solutions we have talked about. Yeah, I originally suggested only top level comments should bump waaaaaay back when in slack. For now I...
It's still way more complicated than all the other potential solutions we have talked about.
I wonder if new top level comments should bump?
Yeah, I originally suggested only top level comments should bump waaaaaay back when in slack. For now I think that would suck, since there isn't enough top level comments being made to trigger bump all that often. But down the road I can definitely see that potentially being a good idea or even having a user setting for it.
If the kind of people who like to post 'me-too' comments (the original scourge of usenet, and I see lots of them on reddit) is high on some topic I can see it turning into a nasty bump monster,...
If the kind of people who like to post 'me-too' comments (the original scourge of usenet, and I see lots of them on reddit) is high on some topic I can see it turning into a nasty bump monster, and that's the place for a 'sage' sticker to be applied by curators. Also handy for chilling out flamewar-primed topics so they don't reignite with every bump.
On the other hand, if new info is available deserving of a new round of attention, that's the kind of thing that I think most people would share as a new top level comment. We'd definitely want that to bump. I think I trust the person making that comment to make that determination too, maybe we just ask them if they want to bump it themselves.
Noise tags negating a comment's bump (which like all other instances of undoing bump, e.g. deleting a comment, would retroactively reset the topic's position to where it was previously) has been...
If the kind of people who like to post 'me-too' comments (the original scourge of usenet, and I see lots of them on reddit) is high on some topic I can see it turning into a nasty bump monster
Noise tags negating a comment's bump (which like all other instances of undoing bump, e.g. deleting a comment, would retroactively reset the topic's position to where it was previously) has been discussed as well. That would handle "me too" type comments from being a problem for long. And if someone gets noise tagged (or malice tagged) enough in a short span you can always temporarily (or permanently) remove all their comments abilities to bump.
Again, I think you're overthinking this a bit too much. No "sage" required.
My reply is not about voting, but about editing. Just as a data point: I like to return to older post and either re-tag them because I've found a tag I was looking for later, or fix typos. Being...
My reply is not about voting, but about editing. Just as a data point: I like to return to older post and either re-tag them because I've found a tag I was looking for later, or fix typos. Being unable to do so causes me mild frustration.
(It causes major frustration in PMs, but that is a topic of its own.)
And there is also an ideological issue. IIRC, Tildes is built with good faith in mind. Disabling a useful feature just because bad people can use it seems to go against this idea, because in theory we shouldn't have many of those in the first place.
That would be a lot less likely on Tildes because of the Activity sort showing when there are any new comments in threads, no matter how old they are (especially while that stays the default)....
That would be a lot less likely on Tildes because of the Activity sort showing when there are any new comments in threads, no matter how old they are (especially while that stays the default).
Regardless, unless the threshold is very short it's a potential problem anyway. For example, do you think anyone's actively reviewing comments being posted in threads that are 4 months old on reddit? The 6-month cutoff doesn't really address that.
As I've observed it, the Activity sort shows only threads that were posted within the selected time period. If I set my Activity sort time period to "last 7 days", I will see only threads which...
the Activity sort showing when there are any new comments in threads, no matter how old they are
As I've observed it, the Activity sort shows only threads that were posted within the selected time period.
If I set my Activity sort time period to "last 7 days", I will see only threads which were posted in the last 7 days, sorted by newest comments first. If a month-old thread has a new comment posted today, that won't show up for me because it's outside my selected 7-day window. I will see only threads posted in the last 7 days which have new comments.
So, unless people set their sort period to "All time", it is possible for an old thread to remain unseen even when it gets new comments.
Not currently.
There are both good and bad sides to locking voting/replying after a period of time. Reddit didn't have it for years, you used to be able to vote/reply on everything forever.
Is there something in particular you think could be a problem?
Here is a really perfect example of why it's bad.
My buddy has been having issues with his new GTX 1080 graphics card for months now, where whenever he has anything going on in his second monitor (e.g. watching Twitch or Youtube, browser or Win10 app, doesn't matter which) he was getting insane framerate stuttering in games on his primary screen (even with low CPU/GPU/RAM usage).
We tried everything to diagnose and fix it, from enabling/disabling hardware acceleration in the browser, trying every possible browser alternative, playing the games in fullscreen/windowed/borderless, removing his soundcard, turning on/off "allow applications exclusive control" in sound properties, updating and even rolling back every possible driver, enabling/disabling Gsync for fullscreen/windowed applications, using Nvidia Inspector to hard cap framerates, running memory and HDD tests, forcing lower res and framerates on the monitors themselves, etc. etc. etc. etc. And it was still happening.
It was getting to the point where we thought his 1080 was defective and he was considering RMA'ing it, but then we stumbled on a 2 year old reddit thread with a bunch of other people reporting the exact same issue, trying everything they could also think of to fix it, but with no solutions from any of them... just frustration at not being able to solve it.
Well... yesterday he finally figured it out by complete accident. It's the NVIDIA Control Panel "desktop color settings" causing it for some unknown reason. When in "Choose how color is set", "other applications control settings" is enabled (which is the default), it causes the framerate stuttering issue... but when all his monitors are set to "Use NVIDIA settings" it fixes the issue.
But now that the reddit post is archived, there is no way to inform people of the solution! And given it's one of the top results when you search for the issue... that really sucks. If an old topic comment section is problematic, moderators can lock it... but they should never be archived automatically IMO.
I mean it's a shame you can't comment on the original thread to keep it self contained. You can just post another thread (that links to the original) titled "Solution to ...." with an informative title describing the problem so people searching can find it.
It might be a bit clunky but it's not impossible.
Reddit at least does let you edit exisiting comments you've made even when the thread is locked and I've used that a few times so the final comments don't just dangle with no closure.
The odds of a solution post being similarly popular that enough people actually see/vote on it to matter, and it also climbing the google results so people in the future can find it is pretty slim. But if we could just reply in the original thread (maybe even hijacking a top comment position), at least it would stand a decent chance at being seen by all the people who google for solutions to the problem. Plus, why even archive the post in the first place? It makes no sense IMO.
EDIT: My main reason for this reply is to please encourage your friend to post their solution even if you / they think it won't be as visible. There's nothing worse than searching for something and only finding a bunch of other posts with the same issue but no solution.
I understand your points but I don't fully agree. I think someone searching for an answer to multi monitor setup with specific hardware drivers is going to find a solution when they search if it gets posted.
Having said that, I am used to searching for technical issues though so I know it won't apply to general searches.
When reddit introduced locked posts they said it was due to scalability issues. Sites like this and reddit are incredibly dynamic. If you can guarantee there are no new comments or votes you can deal with them differently and archive and cache them separately.
From what I have heard through the grapevine, Reddit's codebase is a poorly optimized collection of rats nests layered on top of even older rats nests, and their only viable option for performance problems (other than to completely rewrite the back end eventually) is to throw more and more servers at the problems to mitigate it. So, yeah they probably did have to archive old posts for performance issues. But that hopefully won't be an issue here at Tildes, even at scale. Only @deimos would be qualified to answer that though.
p.s. As to your edit... I was already planning on PMing the old submission creator (if they are even still active on reddit) and let them know the solution to the problem so they can edit their self-text to let people know. But if that doesn't work I will do as you ask and post the solution myself, even though I don't think that will really help. ;)
further edit: The OP of the reddit submission does appear to still be somewhat active on reddit (last comment posted a month ago)... so I will PM them in the morning.
The only issue I can see is if thread necromancy becomes a problem. That's as old as forums, someone bumping a 5 year old thread, and certain ancient large threads that always end up bumped when new people find them in google or whatnot. Once the forum reaches a certain size, the necromancy can interfere with fresh content as its frequency increases.
I think 4chan already solved this problem. The sage mechanic allows people to add replies without bumping. Here that would probably be the default on threads older than some threshold. Perhaps we might want to include a thread resurrect capacity someday as well, the opposite of a sage mechanic, to put something front and center again. I'm sure there are use cases (most of them edge cases) for this stuff.
That could also be a user-centric setting. Or, it could be based on activity... a single user, or a pair of users, won't bump it, but lots of new comments from several users will, for example. There are a lot of ways to look at this kind of housekeeping.
Honestly though, why bother until it actually becomes a problem? I like waiting until there is a Tildes-centric problem to solve to invent a solution. Things may play out differently here than they have on other forums, we're already doing quite a lot differently than other social sites have done in the past. Let's not pre-suppose what our problems will be, they'll come to us in their own good time. ;)
Apples to Oranges. Conventional forums don't usually have the ability to set the timeframe of their post sort method, if they even have a sort feature at all, whereas Tildes does. If people find that necroposts are "interfering with fresh content" too much, they can just switch their Activity timeframe to something other than All time or change sort methods entirely. And once the "hide topic" and "aside" comment features are added that will also be a way to prevent the issue. The problem is basically already solved here.
Nah, it's sufficiently solved for now here. There's a difference. Tell me that again when one of the ~groups is hitting 1k posts a day sometime. ;)
Sure, but we have already talked about other ways to mitigate the problem (if it ever becomes one) that don't require reinventing the wheel and implementing a complex sage/anti-sage mechanic... like disabling OPs comments from triggering bump, disabling back and forth replies between two users from triggering the bump, etc. And all of those ideas and minor tweaks combined will likely be more than sufficient, even at scale, IMO.
In the context of the all-time activity sort, I'd like to see it not become a cesspool of threads bumping all day, every day, for mundane reasons. That'll be the first thing that suffers if this problem emerges, and it's my primary browsing preference right now, so when/if that finally starts happening, I'll notice. Gonna be a while, I think. Let's see what it's like at 100k users, bet that's the ballpark.
Which is precisely what aside comments that don't trigger the bump solves. As will the "hide" topic feature for topics you're tired of seeing pop up over and over again.
I admire your confidence that the problem is already solved. :D
Even if it isn't, I still think an overly complex sage/anti-sage system is not the answer. There are a great many other significantly less complicated and convoluted features and tweaks that can be made to address the issue instead.
I never said it was the answer, just said it's what 4chan does. Also, don't pretend sage is complicated. It's dirt simple, just a don't-dump flag, and that's the appeal. Checking username count against a threshold over a time period to determine bumpworthiness is more complicated but neither of these things is hard.
I think a requirement that bumping needs more than two users to happen is likely to clean out most of the chaff. I'd bet most of the old thread comments that would trigger a bump are just one person talking to another. We'll see what's left behind when that noise is out of the system, how often bumping really happens, and what's going on in the bumped threads.
I wonder if new top level comments should bump? I can see that going in both good and bad directions.
It's still way more complicated than all the other potential solutions we have talked about.
Yeah, I originally suggested only top level comments should bump waaaaaay back when in slack. For now I think that would suck, since there isn't enough top level comments being made to trigger bump all that often. But down the road I can definitely see that potentially being a good idea or even having a user setting for it.
If the kind of people who like to post 'me-too' comments (the original scourge of usenet, and I see lots of them on reddit) is high on some topic I can see it turning into a nasty bump monster, and that's the place for a 'sage' sticker to be applied by curators. Also handy for chilling out flamewar-primed topics so they don't reignite with every bump.
On the other hand, if new info is available deserving of a new round of attention, that's the kind of thing that I think most people would share as a new top level comment. We'd definitely want that to bump. I think I trust the person making that comment to make that determination too, maybe we just ask them if they want to bump it themselves.
Noise tags negating a comment's bump (which like all other instances of undoing bump, e.g. deleting a comment, would retroactively reset the topic's position to where it was previously) has been discussed as well. That would handle "me too" type comments from being a problem for long. And if someone gets noise tagged (or malice tagged) enough in a short span you can always temporarily (or permanently) remove all their comments abilities to bump.
Again, I think you're overthinking this a bit too much. No "sage" required.
What you're describing there is using the noise tag as a case-by-case sage mechanic, and piling up inertia for misuse with each case. I like that too.
My reply is not about voting, but about editing. Just as a data point: I like to return to older post and either re-tag them because I've found a tag I was looking for later, or fix typos. Being unable to do so causes me mild frustration.
(It causes major frustration in PMs, but that is a topic of its own.)
And there is also an ideological issue. IIRC, Tildes is built with good faith in mind. Disabling a useful feature just because bad people can use it seems to go against this idea, because in theory we shouldn't have many of those in the first place.
That would be a lot less likely on Tildes because of the Activity sort showing when there are any new comments in threads, no matter how old they are (especially while that stays the default).
Regardless, unless the threshold is very short it's a potential problem anyway. For example, do you think anyone's actively reviewing comments being posted in threads that are 4 months old on reddit? The 6-month cutoff doesn't really address that.
As I've observed it, the Activity sort shows only threads that were posted within the selected time period.
If I set my Activity sort time period to "last 7 days", I will see only threads which were posted in the last 7 days, sorted by newest comments first. If a month-old thread has a new comment posted today, that won't show up for me because it's outside my selected 7-day window. I will see only threads posted in the last 7 days which have new comments.
So, unless people set their sort period to "All time", it is possible for an old thread to remain unseen even when it gets new comments.
That's right, but "All time" is still the default when you're inside an individual group.