17
votes
~all?
Could we have a meta-group which is a union of all the available (sub)groups? The purpose of it being having a way to view what the front page looks like without having to log out. IDK what is the general trend but I personally don't follow all groups (e.g. I am not interested in anime, and I try to minimise my intake of politics, so I am not subbed to ~anime and ~news), but sometimes I am curious about what the part I don't usually see is like.
I should admit that viewing the frontpage in a private window is almost there (with the caveat of having to copy links around if I want to comment, which is not much trouble frankly), so this would rather be polishing than some very useful new feature.
It's going to seem a little hypocritical when you look at the current state of the site (where, like you said, logged-out users see everything and new users are auto-subscribed to all groups), but this is actually something I'm quite opposed to. I'm accepting it for now because the current site size means that Tildes acts more like a single community where topics are in different categories. However, when the site gets larger it will transition more into a collection of separate communities, and when we get closer to that state I don't want to have a "global view", "default subscriptions", or anything along those lines.
There's a significant difference between the effects of needing to opt in to particular topics vs. opting out, and I believe that an easily-accessible view that mashes everything together is harmful once communities have their own cultures. Way back when I was a mod of /r/gaming on reddit, I wrote this post about how being a default subscription made it practically impossible for /r/gaming to ever be good: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ipqq2/how_being_a_default_subreddit_affects_rgamings/
I definitely do want to add options for letting people set up their own custom views of the site, and if someone wants to manually set up a view that includes everything, I'll probably be fine with that. But I don't want to make it easy, because there have been a ton of negative impacts on reddit communities from the presence of default subscriptions and /r/all, and I don't want to repeat that here.
Also, if there's an ~all view, groups will fight to dominate it, as we've seen on reddit so often. That leads to some pretty shitty behavior.
You've probably heard this before, but I really appreciate your thoughtful analysis of what an online community should look like. It feels like you truly understand the problems other forums are facing and how to solve them.
Thanks for your answer! I repeal my suggestion then.
Is this like the /r/this+that+whatever feature in reddit (are they called multireddits or were they a different thing)?
Similar sort of concept, but more in-depth than that. For example, I'd like each "view" to be able to contain a different set of groups, its own inclusions/exclusions based on tags/keywords/domains/etc., its own default sorting methods and time periods, and so on.
So for example I could set up something like "newest game sales" that includes posts from ~games tagged with "sales" but excludes anything tagged with "switch" (since I don't have one), sorted by newest. I could have "highest voted ~news posts from today, excluding politics", and whatever other views I like to look at.
What's my monthly Tildes donation going towards if you're not living the high life, my friend? ;)
Don't worry, I'm buying plenty of Steam games that I never actually get around to playing.
That makes me feel better.
That sound really cool! Looking forward to this. Is there an issue for this for following its development?
Hmm, I've done a bit of work towards it while just playing around, but I don't think there's an actual issue. I'll create one.
/r/all on Reddit has a horrible impact of having out-of-community people destroy the community culture - and exclusively in the topics that community cares the most about!
I would very much appreciate this never becoming a thing on ~tildes in the slightest. Maybe to handle the curiosity and the group advertisement purpose that /r/all serves could be an ~exemplary that allows only internal links and generates a read-only view of good content from ~s.