Suggestion: Weighted Subscriptions
On Reddit, I can chose between two options - to be subscribed to a sub, or to not be subscribed. Right now, the situation is the same with Tildes. I would like to have more fine-grained control over which posts show up on my homepage. For example, right now, a signficant proportion of my homepage is music. I don't know if that will continue to be the case as the site grows, but it serves as a good example for now. I like music, and want to see music related posts on my homepage, but ideally I would like to be able to use a slider or selector of some form to dampen the precedence of ~music, so that I only see the very best posts. Other tildes, like ~comp, I want to have higher precedence / weighting, so that their posts make their way onto my homepage with more ease - because it's the topic I care most about.
I understand that this might be simply infeasible for server-load reasons, and I also could understand if it is felt that this would clash with the clean and simple mechanics of the site. However, I think this feature would be really useful, and moreover could serve as a good USP to attract users from other news aggregators who care about curated, high-quality content.
This is definitely something we have talked about. As well as potentially adding weighting to groups/subgroups so they can choose how much content from the groups below them in the hierarchy show on their group page.
E.g. ~music setting "popularity threshold" of # to ~music.blues so only a # derived value of the most popular entries from ~music.blues show in ~music.
That's the nice thing about the hierarchies and tagging (and having @deimos as the developer). We can experiment with all sorts of cool and unique mechanics.
There's an awful lot to be said for engineering a logical structure and skeleton for the site before adding features and niceties - the team here has done a commendable job. Potentially you could even test dfferent mechanics in different clades simultaneously, to find out which work best and how given mechanics are suited to different forms of content.
@deimos is not a fan of traditional A/B testing (neither am I) but yeah there is some potential for having experimental opt-in features or even groups with custom behavior (e.g. ~beta.newcommentsort.1, ~beta.newcommentsort.2) to test and compare feature/system ideas and solicit feedback from users.
I'm also uneasy about A/B tests conducted behind closed doors, whereby the user is served a random choice from a set of potential interfaces, but testing conducted in the open is no bad thing in my opinion.
Yep, I agree with you entirely as well.
That's the idea. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to how a forum should operate, and we've learned that from reddit. Imagine what /r/changemyview would be like if the deltas were a core site feature and not a bot-backed stylesheet hack. Imagine what /r/listentothis would be if we could turn off downvoting, and build a nice header of genres across the top, even filter the music on popularity directly so that people can set their own obscurity thresholds. We tried all of that with hacks and tweaks (and even custom automoderator code, thanks @deimos) but on reddit, it's just about impossible to break away from the site's basic mechanics.
Potentially, each group is going to have a number of systems to choose from that change things like the comment mode, or change the submission page into something form-based instead of just a link.
If there's a case to be made for a feature, it's worth adding and checking it out. The only way to find out what works is to give people all the tools, then let each community run its own experiments. When they ask for help and new features and changes, code them new toys. Sooner or later, it'll gel into a proper 'mode' that supports a new form of discussion.
I want to see a parliamentary procedure mode someday - robert's rules of order, except evolved to work in an online forum instead of a crowded room of noisy people.
That's dope, it could be an interface that looks similar to EQ for music, with a bunch of sliders that adjust the precedence of tildes rather than sound frequencies. ( Instead of a waveform visualization that u tweak, u could have a preview of how your homepage will look that updates instantly as you play around with the sliders. )
Even if it's just a basic [weak ----- average ----- strong] it would be enough to play with and see how well it works. I never thought about that, letting users customize the strength of a portion of their subscription directly. That could lead to some pretty cool mechanics.
I don't think a lot of people would use it once the site gets big, but we could have something akin to 'multireddits' where people can publicize and share their subscriptions like a bundle. What you see now as 'home' is a very basic stub. Someday you might be able to have multiple 'homes' and trade them around to other people, because some days you're in the mood for funny, or serious, or music, or philosophy. That would extend the value of the system to people who can't be bothered by it, allowing the users who want to take the time to do some proper curation on content to make bundles for everyone to use.
That's a really REALLY genius idea, i hope Tilde implements it :)))
This is a cool idea and it plays well into the whole theme of Tildes (e.g., spectra, wave forms, signal, etc.).
I guess a post's popularity is based on adding its number of votes minus a factor for how long it has been on the site. Wouldn't this "just" be a multiplier on the number of votes? So instead of
becomes
Pretty much - though this potentially results in a lot more server-side calculation since there's a much greater number of homepages that need to be constructed. Right now, most users are subscribed to basically the same tildes, so I assume there's some caching and memoization on the backend which allows the same generated page to be served to many clients.