Community Resources?
One of the most useful things about most internet communities is being able to compile resources on a particular topic and act as a hub for getting into that topic. On Reddit, this is handled through sidebars and wikis containing guides on how to start speedrunning, sewing, [ridiculous third example for humorous effect], etc. On imageboards, you have generals with pastebins and charts that each new version of that thread inherits. Traditional forums have a similar implementation, just slower.
Given that groups on Tildes are not user-managed and the Reddit-style posts don't encourage the kind of infinite repeating and bumping you see on imageboard generals, I don't see how this kind of thing can take root on the site. How is this going to be managed, if there are ideas on the way?
Of course, this is working from the assumption that this is something which the site should have. Personally, I see it as an essential measure for any site of this kind, but maybe yall don't agree.
Read about the trust system. There will be moderators of a sort, they will just earn their powers through taking actions that the community appreciates. E.g. tagging effectively, editing titles when required, being active in the comments section, submitting quality topics, etc. So community resources will likely function similar to how they do on reddit. People with enough trust to earn the right to edit the sidebar, wiki, etc will be able to do that.
I have also been pushing for the creation of a meta community for each ~group where everyone with a certain level of trust can interact with each other to arrange things, come to decisions on policy and enforcement of rules, review other trusted users actions, etc.
I understand that, my issue is more in what those moderators will be able to do. In a system where creating new groups is a major decision on the level of site admins rather than a per-user thing, the specificity of those resources is limited.
For example, if I wanted to have a hub for resources on speedrunning a specific video game with a small community, that wouldn't make sense to be in the future equivalent of a sidebar in ~games, as it's too specific. Unless the hierarchical system is going to be much more expansive than I understand it to be (as in to the point of being entirely functional sub-communities of their own), I'm not sure how the current setup of the site could allow for this.
If ~ takes off, the plan is most definitely to have the hierarchy be that expansive and if there is enough interest in speedrunning (I am a huge fan as well BTW and watch AGDQ/SGDQ every year) then ~games.speedrunning will be created. The only reason we have such a strict limit on the number of groups and admin only group creation right now is because we don't want to make the same mistake Imzy did. They allowed user created communities right away and it fractured their userbase so much that very few communities actually saw any activity.
To give you an idea of what we eventually envisioned ~ looking like, here is the prototype I worked on for deimos back when ~ was called Spectrium. As you can probably tell, it was modeled after Usenet and has an incredibly deep hierarchy as a result.
Wow, this is great to see! I suppose I was just thinking of these as being beefed up tags, my bad! And I do appreciate the decision to keep things limited for now, I've noticed that exact problem on several reddit spin-off sites.
Are there any plans for how, if / as the site grows, interest for new entries into the community will be measured and put up for consideration? Will this be more up to trusted users / moderators or continue to be a site admin thing, just more liberally opened?
Yeah, sorry. A lot of this stuff is still very poorly explained, which makes it hard for people to understand how the site might be able to evolve as it grows. Other people mentioned the plan for the trust system already, but I think it's also worth noting that this doesn't necessarily have to be a fully automatic thing - at least at first, we can always just effectively grant users "full trust" manually, which isn't much different from a normal moderator system.
As for the hierarchy and how we'll make decisions about when to split the groups into sub-groups, I don't know if we'll have a formal process intially, but it really depends how fast the site starts growing and how often that becomes necessary. At some point it could even be automated I think, perhaps even linked to the trust system with something like "several high-trust users think a new sub-group is needed, let's just automatically create one".
One really neat thing about trying to keep the tagging and subgroup systems compatible is that we could try out subgroups, and then "merge" them back up into their parent if it seems like they're not going to get enough traction. Say for example that we think a ~games.speedrunning is a good idea, but then after a couple of weeks it turns out it's getting almost no activity. Instead of leaving a dead subgroup around, we could merge it back up into ~games and just tag all the posts from it as "speedrunning". This may get a little bit weird in some cases and I don't know if we'll actually want to do it, but I think it's an interesting possibility.
I really like the idea of an "upstream merge" for sub sections that lose steam over time.
I imagine monitoring tags will be the easiest way. If ~games gets flooded with a particular genre, game or niche subject like speedrunning then it can then be spun off as its own group to relieve the pressure on the New queue there. But I imagine petitions can also be effective as can any other way to show there is enough interest to warrant getting their own group (e.g. a fundraiser since ~ is donation driven after all).
But to be honest that is something we have not put a whole bunch of thought into yet because @deimos also intends to implement comprehensive tag filtering. And if that works then it's possible we may not even need to splinter communities and the issue you just brought up might be able to be addressed in another way... such as having custom collapsible sidebars based on the tags people don't filter out.
~ is just a lot of ideas and theories right now and while we have tried our best to think about everything and plan for it accordingly, we honestly have no idea how it will work out in practical terms so being able to remain agile and come up with new solutions on the fly is important. Hence the daily discussions and ~tildes for people to make suggestions, ask questions and point out things we missed (or made mistakes on).
I think as the site develops, one of the core components being built here is to trust the active users of a particular community with the management of that community. Distributed leadership, and whatnot. So while now there isn't much in the way of user-managed sections, as this place scales and especially as the more scaling-focused solutions to reward long term, quality users with trust kicks into effect, it seems likely that there will be some room for the sort of community-created resources you're talking about.
It just doesn't make sense just yet with some 150 users.