Unofficial Weekly Discussion #2 - Topic tag system brainstorming session
Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:
After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.
I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.
Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.
The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.
Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:
Week - #1
Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs
I'm not currently using the tag feature. I was using it when introductions threads were a trend (when every new recruit to Tildes felt the need to make a post introducing themselves): I filtered out "introductions". But, as those those threads stopped being a thing (thank goodness!), I didn't have a need for that filter so I dropped it. I currently have no tags in that filter feature.
I'm not comfortable filtering things out by tags. It makes me anxious that I'll miss something. I hate making things invisible. How can I see what's going on if some parts of the website are invisible to me?
I would much prefer to filter in by tags. I want to add a tag to a personal list, and then have post with that tag appear in my front page feed; I want to subscribe to tags.
It would be nice to concatenate tags: to have a facility for subscribing to posts which have tags "A" and "B", but not "A" or "B" alone.
I like the idea of subscribing to tags. Another possible system could be to have tags you're subscribed to be highlighted on the homepage (eg. a different color/background of sorts).
Just a half formed idea I’ve been having lately to float to the group.
I’ve been feeling really burnt out by death in the news. I’ve been wondering what it would be like to have a news consumption experience completely devoid of it.
I think tags could be one way to do this as long as folks were consistently tagging with the same thing, and remembered to do so.
What if there was a checkbox on the submission flow that asked, “Does this post contain sensitive content? (death, violence, sexual harm, etc)” and, if checked, would provide some checkboxes with various
trigger.tags that would be appended to tags and applied?I think this is only one approach, but I’d be curious how others feel.
My idea was to use the tagging system as robust and versatile way to use the site within it's existing framework, my thought was based on email rules.
It would allow users to create their own 'sub groups' and as things wax and wane as they do it prevents purging of 'dead' groups as those tags would still be available.
Filtering and subscribing to tags by user or group would be useful, for instance if one user crestes a weekly discussion, or you're Interested in discussing the Marlins sports team but not articles about Marlins under ~science
Sometimes topics fall under multiple groups, such as scientific news. Posting it under one group and then tagging it with the other prevents crossposting but also prevents users from missing out because they don't like to read one or the other normally, which than brings people who normally wouldn't be in that group into the discussion, bringing new insights to it.
All of this would of course rely on the users to use the tagging system in this way or new and creative ways that I haven't thought of. This could of course be good or bad.
I have now gone through everyone's comments here again and added their suggestions to Gitlab, and I will try to remember to do this again if more are added later as well.
@Algernon_Asimov, @Adys, @Lawrencium265 - I added your tag subscribing related suggestions to the gitlab issue for "Allow users to subscribe to topic tags in a similar way to how groups can be subscribed to."
@aphoenix - I created a Gitlab issue for your suggestion, "Automate topic tagging for topic media type"
@Deimos - I added the create mechanism for "site wide tag results" issue to Gitlab as well.
Would it make sense to tag "video" for things that in video format? In the groups discussion thread the other day, someone brought up that they'd like having a video group so they could unsubscribe from that group, but to me having a group act as a description of format is not a good idea, and it seems more like a tag. It would also be possible to just add "format" to post and have a filter (ie - text, link, video) and have those potentially be automatically detected.
Anyone have any other ideas, or any opinions on this?
I knew about the videos tag, but it feels like it doesn't get applied all the time. I guess I was kind of suggesting that we should start actually trying to tag everything it applies to (and I'm including myself in that) but more was trying to figure out if that's just making work - catching this as an auto-applied tag seems pretty easy.
Maybe I should make an issue, and then code up a solution for this.
Yeah, I think we can do something like "topic type" mostly automatically (and then maybe allow manual edits when it's needed). For example, pretty much every link to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. could all just be automatically considered a video, there's no need for people to have to tag every one manually.
Yeah, and Tildes auto-tagging content based on format/media-type would certainly save users (especially those of us with tag-editing) a lot of effort over time so we don't have to keep manually applying them too, which I like very much as an idea.
p.s. What the H happened to your link?
is borked!
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, search (and browse) by tags does work across groups. E.g.
https://tildes.net/search?q=A+laypersons+introduction+to
https://tildes.net/?tag=a_laypersons_introduction_to
Both return results from all groups.
However both methods can be also restricted to particular groups now too. E.g.
https://tildes.net/~science/search?q=A+laypersons+introduction+to
https://tildes.net/~science?tag=a_laypersons_introduction_to
Both only return results from ~science.
Are you starting your search from within a specific group's page? Because that triggers the group-specific search, which was only recently added as a feature, so I can see how it might be catching some people off-guard. See the latest ~tildes.official topic:
Recent updates - repost warning, topic-tagging improvements, group-specific search, markdown strikethrough formatting, wiki/docs updates
Hmmm... Yeah, actually clicking on the tags on a topic in a group leading to results restricted just to that group might be a bit weird, especially since I suspect most people "browsing" by tags, even in a group page, probably expect it to fetch them all the results, not just the ones within that group. @Deimos, thoughts?
edit: At the very least, there should probably be a similar "Search results from inside ~group only. [Search all groups]" header+link in the ?tag= page too, so it's easier for people to navigate to the unrestricted results page.
It's a little tricky, because there actually is no "site wide tag results" right now. If you're not inside a group, it shows all the results with that tag from your subscribed groups, not everything.
So that's something we need overall, but then yes, we probably need a better way to get to it as well.
Ah, I didn't even realize that tildes.net/?tag= only returned results from subscribed groups, probably since I am still subscribed to all the groups so didn't notice any glaring omissions when I have been browsing by tag. It suppose it makes sense to do that, but a "site wide tag result" option would definitely be nice to have eventually, especially as Tildes continues to grow/add more groups and user group subscriptions begin to diverge more as a result.
p.s. please label this comment noise, but seeing as user mentions don't work in topic text yet, I wanted to properly ping @Lawrencium265 so they could be made aware of this discussion. @Eylrid too, because they had a good comment in that thread as well.