14
votes
Friend mechanic
I personally think a friend mechanic which allows you to follow what other people say on the site would be quite nice.
Right now the only way you could do this is by checking their profile every now and then which is... tiring at best.
I don't think there's necessarily room for abuse but I'm interested to see what you all think of this.
Edit : I've made a top-level comment to clarify certain things
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i'm not really seeing why people are opposing this so much when this entire website is already mostly user driven. we don't need to be fucking reactionaries and spurn everything reddit and social media as a whole did poorly just because they did it poorly. y'all. i'm pretty sure we can facilitate people interacting with other people without it becoming a clusterfuck considering that the entire backbone of this website is literally people interacting with other people over shared topics. you can say that it's "content" driven, but at the end of the day someone has to post the content and people have to interact with the content for this website to thrive. there might be an emphasis on content here, but without users even the most discussable content means fuck all, so i feel pretty safe saying that we're still user driven and always will be. i don't see why we shouldn't then facilitate means by which to encourage users to actually interact with each other. besides, if it doesn't work we can just get rid of it.
also, i feel like i've heard countless people speak about how this website isn't boldly experimenting and they'd like to see that, but then when people suggest really any unorthodox ideas like this, they end up getting shut down--so do we want experimentation, or do we want to just keep playing it safe with features even though the website is always getting larger and gradually harder to mold as it grows? it's not going to get any better from here, people: the longer we wait to experiment, the more likely it is that the outcomes of experiments are going to define the community instead of the community defining itself, because the community will have a harder time correcting any fuckups in community dynamics that experimenting causes.
moreover, if we're going to spurn every single unorthodox idea people throw at the wall even though we're in alpha, we might as well not bother to be in alpha and just advance to being in beta or whatever. the whole point of being in alpha is to throw all the weird ass ideas we have at the wall, see what works and what doesn't, and refine those things from there until they can be implemented or tossed as non-viable accordingly. we've done like, one unorthodox thing recently--and that thing was implemented (and half-reverted because it was sorta confusing) by deimos and wasn't a community suggestion as far as i'm aware.
I think it's not necessarily the fact that they don't want experimentation but that people want experimentation that they personally think will improve the platform.
Just because people want experimentation, that doesn't mean they necessarily want to change the central design and purpose of Tildes. We could experiment by adding a feature where, once a day, a random post will win its poster some money. That's experimentation, but is it experimentation that works within the context of what Tildes is and what we want it to be?
People don't want experimentation just for the sake of experimentation. They want experimentation that's about developing and improving Tildes.
Actually, I'm not sure that people want experimentation just for the sake of experimentation. The impression I've received is not that people want Deimos to experiment with Tildes, but that they want him to develop it: not just throw weird-ass ideas at the wall to see what sticks, but keep adding features which are going to get Tildes from where it is now to where we imagine it will be.
honestly, this is why i don't like meta on this website and, forgive me, but i am really beyond my breaking point with this whole line of discussion in general and i have to get this out here because i cannot take it anymore:
i didn't suggest this. what i suggested is, maybe instead of us all pedantically blowing up every idea people bandy about with respect to this website and making it borderline impossible to actually experiment with the dynamics of a website that is basically a tabula rasa for innovating new features that facilitate the growth and development of this website and future communities like it because nothing ever comes of them, we as a community actually allow some sort of rocking of the status quo and flesh out the ideas people throw in here instead of castigating and viscerally condemning them because it was executed shittily on some other website ten years ago, and go from there.
this isn't fucking reddit, and i hate that people are just apparently willing to tolerate or outright facilitate this weird, reactionary tendency toward completely rejecting the new ideas people present in this section seemingly every time someone actually comes up with an idea that doesn't appeal to the orthodoxy some of you seem to expect of this website. tildes is a once-in-an-internet-generation website that actually cares about its userbase and is actually willing to facilitate changes in accordance with what its users want, and we're genuinely just gonna fucking squander that by acting like a bunch of shitheads and bitching about how users don't present complete ideas and how we don't need to entertain non-conventional ideas for the sake of experimentation because apparently that's just too much for some people? come the fuck on. we should be responding to every single idea in this section with ideas for fleshing it out instead of annihilating it because it doesn't go into enough visceral detail for the liking of some people or is too vague.
like, we could have spent fucking hours figuring out this idea and a possible implementation for it. we could be breaking wild new ground that nobody else is willing to fucking touch with ideas like this, and instead this topic is basically dead and so is the idea with it because people are more willing, seemingly, to shout down anything that doesn't jive with their idea of what tildes should be. it is such bullshit, and it is the worst fucking tendency on this website. once again, i put forward the question: if we're going to spurn every single unorthodox idea people throw at the wall even though we're in alpha, why are we even in alpha to begin with? isn't the whole point that we're figuring out the best way to go about things, which means sometimes we break the orthodoxy?
like, this genuinely frustrates me. what is the point of suggesting anything in this section if, at the end of the day, nobody does anything with most of the suggestions, most of the responses are just bitching about pedantic details, and people throw cold water on the notion of experimentation to begin with? let me give you my take: if i had any ideas for tildes (and i do--or at least i have opinions), i would honestly not even bother to suggest them in this section because i simply do not have the time to parse out all of the inevitable, incessant pedantry that would come with that, nor do i have the time to defend why my idea is something worth experimenting on to people who aren't receptive to it in the first place.
that should not be the fucking attitude people come away from this section with. we should be egging people on and adding to their ideas, not tearing them all the fuck down and just making the experience fucking awful for most of the people involved. and yet, i am honestly so offput by the meta in this section with respect to how ideas are treated that i almost didn't bother to comment on this because i didn't want to waste my time even defending my contrary-to-the-apparent-widespread-opinion take like i knew i was inevitably going to have to because it is such an exhausting endeavor since nobody seems to come in here with the idea of actually elevating the unorthodox ideas people sometimes put out there. hell, i think even this comment is a waste of my time, because i feel like nobody is going to listen to it and they're just going to find some complaint with my wording to invalidate the whole thing. but genuinely, i cannot take how we as a community respond to ideas like this anymore. it's such an unproductive way of doing things that it makes me want to scream.
i hope that, if nothing else, people in the future try and approach other ideas like this one with more constructive ideas in mind so that eventually, we can maybe have a community that builds ideas up instead of basically blowing them up over the tiniest details (or a lack thereof)--but i'm not optimistic, honestly, and i think this is probably going to be the last time i really chime in on an idea because of that.
I think you're missing the point that there are already some overarching guidelines and intentions and plans about what Tildes will and will not be. We're not going to add every unorthodox suggestion to this website just for the sake of it, because not every suggestion contributes to what Tildes will be.
We wouldn't add a gaming feature, or a gambling feature, or a petitions feature, or a shopping feature... because those features are not part of what Tildes is about. Not every idea is useful in the context of Tildes, because Tildes is not a blank slate. It's not a place that's going to be everything to everyone. It's a specific website with a specific intention.
I get that it's frustrating when something that seems like a good idea gets criticised, but not all good ideas will fit here. It's not about whether the ideas are constructive or not, it's about whether they fit into the vision for Tildes.
Actually.. I don't see why that wouldn't fit here, that seems pretty good. We already have people just linking back to other sites for that specific feature so why would it not be integrated? (Sure there's an extent to that logic but I don't think petition is that far fetched)
i think you're missing my point that i'm not asking, or suggesting we should add every unorthodox idea on this website. i'm saying that, for the love of almighty fuck, people in here need to just stop with this ridiculous bullshit notion that if people don't lay out their ideas perfectly down to the absolute most pedantic detail or if they don't fill out a screed on their idea or if their idea doesn't jive with what tildes "should be" to them, that means we need to obliterate it and disregard it. it's so fucking unproductive and it makes people not want to contribute their ideas to the site.
thank you for demonstrating exactly what i was just saying we shouldn't be doing by raising an incredibly pedantic, meaningless point and using that to try and disregard my entire, overarching point that people on this website are stupidly reactionary about new ideas to the point where they might as well not be raised because people are more intent on tearing them down than either encouraging them and building on them or reforming them to be "in scope" of tildes, whatever the fuck that amorphous concept means. regardless, i'm tired of this and it's increasingly clear to me that i'm just chiming my opinion into a void pointlessly like i assumed in my little screed up there, so i'm just not going to bother commenting on ideas and meta issues in the future. it's not worth my time if everything i say is just going to be disregarded.
Hey.. I get it but I think it's normal for resistance to come before any idea is accepted, it just makes sense. Remember that people want the best for the platform and that means that people will disagree, it's unavoidable.
Calm a bit and please participate more, I think you must have good ideas or appropriate concerns which should be heard.
my issue isn't so much with what's gone in this particular topic so much as the culture of how people respond to suggestions as a whole on here (which this thread just happens to be a good example of). it's fine to disagree, yes, and i agree with allowing disagreement--but how people do it on here isn't productive, and that's what i'm getting at. instead of cultivating a culture here that seeks to improve upon what people suggest through disagreement, we have a culture that's doing a lot more tearing ideas apart without giving them the proper time of day, and that's super irritating and leads to people both being offput because suggesting ideas feels impossible, and ideas that are good being passed over because nobody gives them the time of day and therefore they never get implemented. and i'm not really alone in my sentiments on this problem, i'm just vocal about them.
Huh, I could have sworn I added a "friend mechanic" to gitlab already, but I guess not. Personally, I am absolutely for the feature since I already use it myself on reddit, along with RES user tagging (which I also use here using Tildes Extended).
And honestly, I don't really understand where the resistance to this idea is coming from other than from contrarianism. Friending is a pretty standard mechanic on social sites and IMO it has far more upsides than down. And if people do abuse friending (e.g. for forming vote rings), that "friend" connection actually makes them easier to detect so it has an upside there too. Also, keep in mind that Tildes = Trust users, punish abusers.
Anyways, added it to gitlab as a suggestion:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/451
While I get your reasoning for wanting this. I feel like it would make the site too "Facebooky". I like the fact that you can come here and see such a wide variety of people and their thoughts/ideas and that it puts them in a place to be interacted with equally by everyone. If someone has a lot of "friends" they will have an advantage over everyone else and have their things be viewed or voted on more than someone who doesn't have as much friends.
I'm not sure if vote rings are a big issue. It's still very much possible without this system.
As a compromise though, perhaps user pages could be tied into the bookmarks system? Three tabs: Topics, posts, users. That's fairly subtle, but still allows easier navigation as per OP's request.
That's an interesting point of view.
Sure, that could possibly make it so people with more "friends" get more votes but I've not seen this being gamed on Reddit... atleast from my knowledge so I'm unsure if that's something that would actually happen.
As for the similarity to Facebook, I really don't see it.
I guess I must've not explained myself clearly, what I want is not necessarily a "mutual" friend à la Facebook but more like a "follow" where you can see all of their posts and comments in a particular place outside of the main feed.
I agree with Wishkah. I feel like adding this feature is one of those steps you would have to take to make this website a social media platform like Facebook or twitter. Let me elaborate further where i see the connection.
I know this wont be added ever, but imagine if there where ads on the website, and clicks became valuable. Then you would have Tildes celebs sooner or later if the user base is big enough. People could make a living based on the amount of followers they have, those people would later get paid to post subliminal ads or some type of agenda creating "fake news" and letting big company´s take over. One of the big issues social media has today.
It´s an extreme example and there would have to be more steps taken of course.
Try and browse Tildes without looking on usernames for a while, and let Tildes as a whole be a personality. Someone with infinite(kinda) angles to approach subjects of discussions.
Your last suggestion is interesting but I think you've snowballed from "friends". Like, by a long shot.
Friends wouldn't need to be made public or anything of the like with my suggestion, it could be implemented similarly "invisible" as the bookmarking system so assuming celebrity status wouldn't really work, right?
indeed, my point was to snowball the idea into traditional social media. Just to try and make the connection of a small feature as friends, is a step towards it.
I mean it all started with forums, then you had friends added, and then a profile, and so on. I am not opposed to your suggestion because it creates celebrity status within the community instantly, i am taking it to an extreme where there would be many such steps, just to add more angles to the initial statement @Wishkah made.
Why?
I mean... as brilliant and insightful and amazing and superb and remarkable as my comments are... they don't really mean much outside of their context. Wouldn't you just have to go to the threads where your "friends" have commented anyway, in order to fully appreciate what they have to say?
Also, a feature like this would shift the emphasis on this site from content to individuals, which is not what Tildes is about. This is not Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of those other places where you follow people. This site is built with content front and centre, for people to discuss. This would change the intent of the site.
The phrase you were looking for is "social networks".
Hubski has the "follow this person" feature, whereas in addition to the tags and the sources you follow, you'll get posts from the users you follow displayed, as well as those posts the users shared, on your feed, and their comments – in the comment feed. The latter is, admittedly, not a good suggestion – I've seen people reply to one without observing the context more than once.
Basically, you follow someone if they posts things that appeal to you more often than not. For example, if you enjoy hearing about the Web and the latest trends in consumer-oriented technology, you'd follow me – and see those posts displayed more prominently on the front page.
This doesn't make Tildes any more about me, or you, or any other user: it just makes filtering content easier based on the followed person's interests.
Yes, I'd agree a lot with this view of what I'm proposing. Furthermore, it allows you see from other groups that you might've not known about which is personally what I would like most from this.
Sure, right now the groups are still quite small to make subscribing to what you want easy but in the future, I think that'd be really nice.
If a user strikes you as interesting, you can just click on their username to see their recent comments, and discover other groups that way (I've done this myself on Reddit). Why do you need a whole new feature that highlights what your "friends" are saying in order to discover groups?
I don't. I don't understand why there is a bookmarking feature in Tildes.
But why? Why are you following people? Why are you not subscribing to groups? Why are you focussing on individuals as the source of your content, rather than groups?
Someone mentioned elsewhere that they would follow individuals to get certain category of content, but an individual is going to post a random assortment of stuff, rather than a single category of posts.
And why do you think following people rather than content is the right direction for Tildes? What is it about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram - where people follow other people - that works, and is a good fit for Tildes?
That's the important question. Not whether this feature works, or how we would implement it, but whether the philosophy behind the feature - that we should focus on individuals rather than content - is the right fit for Tildes. We've seen what happens on other websites where the individual is put at the centre of the design: it becomes about celebrity, and followers, and likes, and influencers. Is that something we really want to introduce to Tildes? Is that what Tildes is about?
Of course but that requires me to constantly look at people that interest me's profiles instead of being able to simply have an influx of their activity where I can easily see a variety of people that I think are doing interesting things. That's kind of the whole point.
So you do want to turn Tildes into a place where we follow people, rather than content. That would be a substantial change to the philosophy of this site.
Or you know, allow options to filter and explore new content, I'm not asking to change the default home feed and never did, I don't know where you're getting this idea that I want to change core mechanics when I really am not.
"Kinds of things @user123 tends to post" is a class of content in its own right. Note that this is still substantially different from a social media site, where you (generally, especially on the facebooky end) don't follow people for the kinds of things they post, but who they are as human beings.
Really? Have you seen my posting history? It's not very consistent!
Then OP can subscribe to groups.
And there is a way to find them.
Tell me this when there's 20k subgroups. Please do.
... or I could subscribe to ~tech.
Well, that's an argument for removing tags too, in my opinion. Tags, Groups, Friends, what have you, all are slightly different implementations of content following which may have overlap in the minds of some users, but be distinct, useful alternative mechanisms for others.
No, tags are still about content, rather than about people. If I'm interested in a certain type of content, I'll be able to find it via groups, sub-groups, and tags.
In fact, following an individual is less likely to produce the desired type of content than subscribing to a group/sub-group or a tag. If I subscribe to ~tech, I know I'm going to see topics about technology; if I follow @ThatFanficGuy, I'm going to see topics about "consumer-oriented technology", as he promises, but I'm also going to see topics about internet browsers and computer games and disco-ish music. That's not a very efficient way to get the type of content I may be looking for.
People don't post only one type of content. They have a variety of interests, and post in a variety of groups. Following a person because you're interested in one type of content is going to end up with you seeing other content you're not interested in. It's more efficient to subscribe to groups/sub-groups and/or tags if you're looking for a particular type of content.
The point of following people instead of topics is to expand your center of interest so that's exactly what I'd want.
It's only more efficient to subscribe to groups if what you want is focus rather than expansion of your circle of interests.
I wanna find new interesting things that I never though to even look for, you get what I'm going for?
So go look at the list of groups. Other than that, I don't get what you're going for. The message I'm getting is that you want to follow people, like on social networks. You want to make this place more like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where it's more about personalities than about content ("I like what this person does, so I'm going to follow this person as an individual.").
But the users posts in groups, using tags. Any content you want to find can be found by subscribing to groups and tags.
Imagine you're interested in Australian news (just hypothetically). You could decide to "follow" me because I post a lot of Australian news. However, if you do so, you're only going to get my personal slice of Australian news. You won't get all Australian news. On the other hand, any Australian news I do post will be in ~news with an "australia" tag (or, in the future, in ~news.australia). So, if you want to read Australian news, it's more efficient for you to subscribe to ~news and "australia". That way, you get all Australian news, rather than just what one person can read and post.
Meanwhile, if you do "follow" me for the Australian news and the science fiction, you're also going to be subjected to a lot of irrelevant discussion about history and religion that you may not want to see. If you're using me as a source of content, you're going to get a lot content you just don't like. But if you want to see certain types of content, there's already a mechanic for doing so: groups and tags.
You really think Tildes is going to be a community when it has 100,000 users? Or 1,000,000 users? Don't assume the current tight-knit atmosphere is going to last as Tildes grows. In fact, I would be disappointed if this "community" atmosphere continued too long, because it would show that Tildes isn't attracting new people.
But you see, that's exactly what I want. I want to find about things that I didn't think would interest me. New interests. Expanding the circle of interests, not focusing it. You're missing the point.
No. No. No.
I want the option to follow people to expand my horizons on new groups.
If your solution is "go look at the list" then I think you don't realize for example how many subreddits there are. There are more of them than hair on my head and then it becomes hard to find what I actually want. That's why it'd be useful to see what interests people that you know.
So, whenever you find a user who interests you, click on their username and read their recent activity. That's how I've discovered quite a few subreddits.
You're missing the point entirely.
I'm not gonna start bookmarking 50 people and look at each page on a regular basis, that's just not gonna happen.
I didn't say that. You're annoyed at being misunderstood; it might pay to not repeat other people's mistakes.
If you're reading a thread and someone makes a illuminating point or strikes you as otherwise interesting, you click on their username there and then. Spend a few minutes reading their recent posting history, stumble across some other interesting discussions and possibly even a group you want to subscribe to... then close that tab and move on. Don't save the user, don't "follow" them, don't add them to a feed. Use them as a content-discovery mechanism, and then move on.
You can repeat this as often as you like, whenever you like. Anytime you see an interesting post or comment, just open the user's page and discover other content. You're not limited to only users you've followed. This opens up the possibilities of content discovery even more.
If all you want is a way to discover groups and content, that works. It has worked for me.
Okay, this thread's turned into a bunch of weird tangential and pedantic bickering that's hardly about the actual idea any more (and is getting a little personal in some places). I'm going to stop it here, since it seems to have gone past the point where much else productive is going to happen.
For the record, I'm not opposed to the overall idea. I think it would fit well into the vague "views" concept I've mentioned before (which @hungariantoast quoted in their comment here). There are some valid concerns about it, and aspects that would need to be figured out, but it's not infeasible.
Thanks for (most of) the discussion in here - there are definitely some valid points to keep in mind if/when I start implementing anything similar, so I'll refer back here eventually (this thread is linked in the relevant issue).
For what it's worth, I'm for this idea. I've been on plenty of traditional forums that have friend features and I've never found that to be something which turns a site even remotely social media-y, that seems like an unreasonable worry imo.
I do think we should talk about what the feature might look like and do, both because I'm curious what others want and because it helps avoid visceral reactions from thinking about Facebook or something. In my experience friending on forums is largely symbolic, adding them to a list you can see the online status of and essentially just giving yourself a quick link to their profile. I imagine others have more fleshed out ideas?
I've actually never thought about an online status and since the system I was thinking about isn't "mutual", it would be kind of creepy, I think.
I was more so thinking about a feed of those user's activities to explore new topics and groups which might interest me based on an already acquired shared interest from another interaction.
So after some discussion, I'd like to regroup some of my thoughts to more fully flesh out the initial idea.
The system would :
It would not :
Some fears about the system :
Why have this system at all? :
Most of my thoughts are here, but I do want to add that I absolutely support the goals behind this. Filters are always useful and expanding interests is definitely something I'd like to see more tools for, so I do want to see this happen. It's just a concern of how to do it, as while I agree that the problems would likely be largely curbed by the trust system, I'm not convinced they would eliminate them enough to prevent notable harm in the long run if this isn't implemented right.
I think that would be spotted a mile away by those who are actually in the discussion and that person would be banned for being malicious.
But really, anyone could still do this by going to the person they want to agonize's profile and stalking from there, it would just be slightly annoying for them.
Well, by "friending" and "following", that's actually exactly what I meant. I didn't necessarily want highlighting although that could be cool but more so a feed of their activities since that could introduce me to new topics and groups.
This largely echoes my thoughts regarding this idea, specifically the idea of a digest and the possibility that tags/following could encourage voting based on users instead of comments/posts. I do find the prospect of "views" and integrating this into them very intriguing and useful though, good stuff!
One thing I would add to the idea is that I feel the best way to do the digest might be that while it would directly show posts by followed users, it wouldn't directly link to their comments — instead, it'd link to the post the comment was in, marking said post as having "activity from xyz", while marking the relevant comment via color.
The idea behind this would be that having to find the comment in the thread would likely lead to you seeing several other comments alongside it, serving to help prevent the person being followed having their opinion become the ur-opinion of a given group through sheer user popularity (which would be something that may result from the potential "voting based on user, not content" issue). It's not a perfect addition – in particular it may need tweaking for particularly large comment sections – but I still think it would be useful.
The point of the site is discussion. It revolves around that. Each thread is each own world. That way we would make it revolve around people. A different paradigm in my opinion.
A different paradigm that has already been embraced. There is a reason this isn't an anonymous board (only pseudo-anon) and ~music and ~creative still show usernames on submissions. Not everything here is just about discussion and each topic being viewed in total isolation from every other... Tildes is also about communities, and facilitating people connecting with one another and getting to know one another in the groups (and eventually sub-groups) they frequent.
I would actually would say that Tildes' community and the moderation is what draws me most to here.
There's just this sense of community and respect with people here, I can't quite put my finger on but I guess the invite-only system is what created this even if it wasn't necessarily the function. It feels a little like an early-internet forum in a good way and I'd hope to be able to keep that community aspect as it grows.