I'll start by lodging the obligatory objection to "analogue" being used to describe board games. Even though I'm the one who raised this name in the group proposals thread, it was a joke. I didn't...
I'll start by lodging the obligatory objection to "analogue" being used to describe board games. Even though I'm the one who raised this name in the group proposals thread, it was a joke. I didn't mean it to be taken seriously. I have never heard anyone refer to board games as "analogue games". While this nomenclature might make sense to people who focus on games in the digital space, because analogue is the complement to digital, it does not make sense to us actual boardgamers because we do not define our gaming as "not digital".
The design paradigms for video games and tabletop games are different, as are the development processes for each one.
And, with @Deimos probably building a feature to subscribe to tags (source), it will become possible to subscribe to "design" or "gamedev" if one wants to see all design & development posts about video games and tabletop games.
Finally... to throw the cat among the pigeons....
@NaraVara's proposal for a ~design group got a lot of support. If @Deimos decides to create that group (my bet is that he will, based on such a strong groundswell of opinion in its favour), then would it make sense to create ~design.games?
It's also worth noting that many video games systems also use "analogue" stick controllers as well.. which makes that term even more ambiguous and confusing to use for tabletop games. And I 100%...
It's also worth noting that many video games systems also use "analogue" stick controllers as well.. which makes that term even more ambiguous and confusing to use for tabletop games.
And I 100% agree with your suggested ~games.video/tabletop.design/development hierarchy, since I really don't think gamedev should be a top level group when not even programming is... and likely won't be? since it will prob be ~comp.programming.
However, I don't think ~design.games actually makes much sense, since even though it has the word "design" in it, game design is rather distinct from most other fields of design, e.g. fashion, consumer products (i.e. industrial design), urban planning, architecture, etc.
As a former Business Analyst, I object strongly to the idea that consumer opinions would be considered "contamination" when discussing how to develop games for those consumers. Game players (not...
we go from what was a purer representation of discussion between development-minded individuals, to the opinions and votes of consumers. Contamination.
As a former Business Analyst, I object strongly to the idea that consumer opinions would be considered "contamination" when discussing how to develop games for those consumers. Game players (not "consumers"!) are the people for whom games get developed. Developers need to pay attention to what players want. What's the point of developing games that noone wants to play?
Maybe it would help if game players and game developers got to talk to each other more often - especially if, as you say, there are some differences in ideology between these two groups.
Anyway, some game players would be interested in reading about the development of their favourite games.
The bubble up mechanic is entirely theoretical and how it will work in practice is completely unknown at this point. However, I imagine if someone is subbed to ~games but not...
The bubble up mechanic is entirely theoretical and how it will work in practice is completely unknown at this point. However, I imagine if someone is subbed to ~games but not ~games.video.development then they will not see any of that content "bubble up" to ~games. And I am with Algernon on this one too, in that IMO there is more than enough crossover between gamers, gamers interested in game development and gamedevs that I can definitely see a decent amount of people subbing to both and wanting that content to bubble up. Whereas I don't think nearly as many ~comp users would want ~comp.gamedev content to bubble up to ~comp. But who knows... I could be wrong there.
Nope you're not the only one with doubts about the value of groups vs tags... I do as well, and I think even Deimos has admitted he is unsure whether groups are the ideal way forward or if tags...
Nope you're not the only one with doubts about the value of groups vs tags... I do as well, and I think even Deimos has admitted he is unsure whether groups are the ideal way forward or if tags and filtering should just take over. The current plan of using hierarchical groups is all rather experimental and theoretical at this point, although we do have some real world examples of such a system being successful to go off of too, e.g. Usenet was hierarchical and largely worked fine.
Groups hierarchies do have drawbacks, there is no denying that, but so does flat tag based organization as well, just as they both have benefits. It's just a matter of trying to determine which is best suited for what we want to accomplish organization-wise here, while also keeping user comfort and usability in mind as well. And I think Algernon did a good job of describing why groups have value to most people, which is why that is still the model being used.
p.s. It's also definitely worth noting that the reason groups and tags behave similarly (and have the same character limitations) is because tags were originally (and still are) envisioned as basically precursors to groups. E.g. If in ~comp, programming topics begin to dominate to the point where they drown out other computer related topics, then ~comp.programming can be created to take some of the pressure off and allow more diverse topics to thrive on ~comp again. And in cases where sub-groups created like that stop being active, they can be easily folded back into their parent group and apply the subgroup tag to all the content from them so none of the old content is lost in the process.
Groups can have a sense of place that tags don't; things like their own mod teams and rules, custom styling, sticky posts, wikis, etc. Groups don't yet have much of those things that set them...
Exemplary
Groups can have a sense of place that tags don't; things like their own mod teams and rules, custom styling, sticky posts, wikis, etc. Groups don't yet have much of those things that set them apart, so they feel like tags.
We need to decide if Tildes should be a collection of communities, like reddit, or all one community like a classic forum. Do we want the users in separate boxes, or just the topics in separate boxes and the users in one big box? If it's the former, then we need groups that are their own place, with things that make them unique and set them apart. If it's the latter then tags alone are more appropriate.
Edit: Another thing about groups: context. When posting in a community dedicated to a specific thing you can assume most of your audience has basic background information about that topic. You can get straight to the meat of what you have to say. But if your post is going to be seen by a broad audience, you have to explain a lot more. That feeling that most people aren't going to get what you're saying without having their hand held can put people off of posting. (This is why I think the "We'll see what people post and then make groups around that" approach is flawed.)
No prob. But to be fair, I'm guilty of that sort of behavior on occasion too. :/ Tildes is still in the very early days so people trying to assert dominance is only natural, albeit admittedly...
Some of the responses I get/see on Tildes feel more like a display of dominance rather than constructively explaining an alternative viewpoint, so I appreciate you taking the time to enumerate the motivations for this design choice.
No prob. But to be fair, I'm guilty of that sort of behavior on occasion too. :/ Tildes is still in the very early days so people trying to assert dominance is only natural, albeit admittedly pretty unproductive and I'm sure off-putting to many... which is why I have been making a genuine effort to stamp that behavior down in myself as much as possible these days (not always successfully though).
An yeah, most of us who were involved in helping Deimos brainstorm ideas for the site, back before it even had a name, have extensive reddit experience and have been theorizing about how to improve social systems for 10+ years on /r/theoryofreddit, /r/ideasfortheadmins, etc. So a decent amount of thought, planning and debate has gone into nearly every aspect of the site here. E.g. Even the bottom positioning of the new top level comment box was deliberate.
Now, whether or not all the theorycrafting we have done and things that Deimos has planned here will wind up working out... who knows? But at the very least, thought has gone into it all. :P
Statistically, there have to be a few other people here who agree with you. What you're suggesting is not an uncommon a point of view among developers and programmers and other IT-type people....
Am I the only person who finds the group hierarchy to be confusing and arbitrary? Please tell me I'm not the only one.
Statistically, there have to be a few other people here who agree with you. What you're suggesting is not an uncommon a point of view among developers and programmers and other IT-type people.
However, the general public prefer to subscribe to groups (Reddit) and/or individuals (Twitter).
Then users can whitelist/blacklist any tags they want for filtering. Some of those tags would just so happen to match what we presently call 'groups'. So instead of ~comp.gamedev, you might have comp and gamedev for a given topic, which may make sense if, for example,
You would need to build an interface to construct Boolean formulae. I want to see all topics tagged with both "australia" and "politics", but not topics tagged with only "politics". And show me all topics tagged "science" but not tagged "geology" or "chemistry". And so on.
The list of tag combinations that people would need to build for themselves will get large and complicated.
Cap the total tags to a few per topic.
If you're going to make the whole website operate on tags instead of groups, then it's foolish to restrict the number of tags that can be applied to a topic. Each topic would need to be tagged as widely as possible, to make sure anyone who's interested in it can find it in some way.
Right. Whereas groups are easier. Why does there need to be a cap at all? What's the point of a cap? What benefit does it provide? I'm not equating subreddits with groups (necessarily). I'm...
There is no requirement to build a convoluted interface. The blacklist could carry precedence for hiding any topic that contains a tag specified within. Any more granularity than that is too much work for the user anyway.
Right. Whereas groups are easier.
There's nothing inherently wrong with capping the tags to some reasonable number.
Why does there need to be a cap at all? What's the point of a cap? What benefit does it provide?
I don't know if I'm comfortable equating subreddits with groups
I'm not equating subreddits with groups (necessarily). I'm pointing out that user behaviour indicates that they're more comfortable with subscribing to a group/community/sub-forum/whatever for a particular subject than subscribing to a tag for that subject. This isn't about copying Reddit or Twitter, it's about seeing what users prefer to do and working with that.
There is some overlap once you start getting into interaction, experience, and interface design. And there was a micro trend in the late aughts about “gamification” as a design ethos. But I don’t...
There is some overlap once you start getting into interaction, experience, and interface design. And there was a micro trend in the late aughts about “gamification” as a design ethos. But I don’t think that’s any more overlap than anything else.
I’d be way more inclined to put a Mark Rosewater blog posts in a game design group and might not even think to include it in a design group.
Thanks for the (as always) extremely detailed suggestion. I was away last week so I'm trying to catch up on everything now and didn't have a chance to read it until today, but I think it generally...
Thanks for the (as always) extremely detailed suggestion. I was away last week so I'm trying to catch up on everything now and didn't have a chance to read it until today, but I think it generally sounds good and agree they'd be useful groups. As part of being away, I'm way behind on everything including adding the new groups, but I really want to get that done this week.
I agree that the trickiest part is trying to figure out where to fit them into the hierarchy. I think I want to have a general discussion about the group hierarchy as part of adding groups, so we can probably talk about it in more detail then. I think there's a fair amount of confusion about the hierarchy (which is largely my fault for not clearly defining much about it), so hopefully we can try to resolve some of that soon.
Absolutely want to throw in my support for this suggestion wholesale, including the group placement. Most everything I consider posting here usually has to do with game development or design, as...
Absolutely want to throw in my support for this suggestion wholesale, including the group placement. Most everything I consider posting here usually has to do with game development or design, as those are the topics I know most about, so I'd definitely use both of these proposed groups.
I'll start by lodging the obligatory objection to "analogue" being used to describe board games. Even though I'm the one who raised this name in the group proposals thread, it was a joke. I didn't mean it to be taken seriously. I have never heard anyone refer to board games as "analogue games". While this nomenclature might make sense to people who focus on games in the digital space, because analogue is the complement to digital, it does not make sense to us actual boardgamers because we do not define our gaming as "not digital".
Groups need to be discoverable and comprehensible. Most people would know what ~games.boardgames or even ~games.tabletop is for. They will not know what ~games.analogue is for.
With that out of the way, I think it makes sense to have separate design and development sub-groups under each of ~games.video and ~games.tabletop:
The design paradigms for video games and tabletop games are different, as are the development processes for each one.
And, with @Deimos probably building a feature to subscribe to tags (source), it will become possible to subscribe to "design" or "gamedev" if one wants to see all design & development posts about video games and tabletop games.
Finally... to throw the cat among the pigeons....
@NaraVara's proposal for a ~design group got a lot of support. If @Deimos decides to create that group (my bet is that he will, based on such a strong groundswell of opinion in its favour), then would it make sense to create ~design.games?
It's also worth noting that many video games systems also use "analogue" stick controllers as well.. which makes that term even more ambiguous and confusing to use for tabletop games.
And I 100% agree with your suggested ~games.video/tabletop.design/development hierarchy, since I really don't think gamedev should be a top level group when not even programming is... and likely won't be? since it will prob be ~comp.programming.
However, I don't think ~design.games actually makes much sense, since even though it has the word "design" in it, game design is rather distinct from most other fields of design, e.g. fashion, consumer products (i.e. industrial design), urban planning, architecture, etc.
As a former Business Analyst, I object strongly to the idea that consumer opinions would be considered "contamination" when discussing how to develop games for those consumers. Game players (not "consumers"!) are the people for whom games get developed. Developers need to pay attention to what players want. What's the point of developing games that noone wants to play?
Maybe it would help if game players and game developers got to talk to each other more often - especially if, as you say, there are some differences in ideology between these two groups.
Anyway, some game players would be interested in reading about the development of their favourite games.
The bubble up mechanic is entirely theoretical and how it will work in practice is completely unknown at this point. However, I imagine if someone is subbed to ~games but not ~games.video.development then they will not see any of that content "bubble up" to ~games. And I am with Algernon on this one too, in that IMO there is more than enough crossover between gamers, gamers interested in game development and gamedevs that I can definitely see a decent amount of people subbing to both and wanting that content to bubble up. Whereas I don't think nearly as many ~comp users would want ~comp.gamedev content to bubble up to ~comp. But who knows... I could be wrong there.
Nope you're not the only one with doubts about the value of groups vs tags... I do as well, and I think even Deimos has admitted he is unsure whether groups are the ideal way forward or if tags and filtering should just take over. The current plan of using hierarchical groups is all rather experimental and theoretical at this point, although we do have some real world examples of such a system being successful to go off of too, e.g. Usenet was hierarchical and largely worked fine.
Groups hierarchies do have drawbacks, there is no denying that, but so does flat tag based organization as well, just as they both have benefits. It's just a matter of trying to determine which is best suited for what we want to accomplish organization-wise here, while also keeping user comfort and usability in mind as well. And I think Algernon did a good job of describing why groups have value to most people, which is why that is still the model being used.
p.s. It's also definitely worth noting that the reason groups and tags behave similarly (and have the same character limitations) is because tags were originally (and still are) envisioned as basically precursors to groups. E.g. If in ~comp,
programmingtopics begin to dominate to the point where they drown out other computer related topics, then ~comp.programming can be created to take some of the pressure off and allow more diverse topics to thrive on ~comp again. And in cases where sub-groups created like that stop being active, they can be easily folded back into their parent group and apply thesubgrouptag to all the content from them so none of the old content is lost in the process.Groups can have a sense of place that tags don't; things like their own mod teams and rules, custom styling, sticky posts, wikis, etc. Groups don't yet have much of those things that set them apart, so they feel like tags.
We need to decide if Tildes should be a collection of communities, like reddit, or all one community like a classic forum. Do we want the users in separate boxes, or just the topics in separate boxes and the users in one big box? If it's the former, then we need groups that are their own place, with things that make them unique and set them apart. If it's the latter then tags alone are more appropriate.
Edit: Another thing about groups: context. When posting in a community dedicated to a specific thing you can assume most of your audience has basic background information about that topic. You can get straight to the meat of what you have to say. But if your post is going to be seen by a broad audience, you have to explain a lot more. That feeling that most people aren't going to get what you're saying without having their hand held can put people off of posting. (This is why I think the "We'll see what people post and then make groups around that" approach is flawed.)
Also, also, the same subject can spark very different conversations in different communities. For example "Bernie Sanders wants to spend $216 billion to replace all diesel trucks with electric trucks" would lead to very different conversations in groups for truckers, Tesla enthusiasts, economists, or political scientists.
No prob. But to be fair, I'm guilty of that sort of behavior on occasion too. :/ Tildes is still in the very early days so people trying to assert dominance is only natural, albeit admittedly pretty unproductive and I'm sure off-putting to many... which is why I have been making a genuine effort to stamp that behavior down in myself as much as possible these days (not always successfully though).
An yeah, most of us who were involved in helping Deimos brainstorm ideas for the site, back before it even had a name, have extensive reddit experience and have been theorizing about how to improve social systems for 10+ years on /r/theoryofreddit, /r/ideasfortheadmins, etc. So a decent amount of thought, planning and debate has gone into nearly every aspect of the site here. E.g. Even the bottom positioning of the new top level comment box was deliberate.
Now, whether or not all the theorycrafting we have done and things that Deimos has planned here will wind up working out... who knows? But at the very least, thought has gone into it all. :P
Statistically, there have to be a few other people here who agree with you. What you're suggesting is not an uncommon a point of view among developers and programmers and other IT-type people.
However, the general public prefer to subscribe to groups (Reddit) and/or individuals (Twitter).
You would need to build an interface to construct Boolean formulae. I want to see all topics tagged with both "australia" and "politics", but not topics tagged with only "politics". And show me all topics tagged "science" but not tagged "geology" or "chemistry". And so on.
The list of tag combinations that people would need to build for themselves will get large and complicated.
If you're going to make the whole website operate on tags instead of groups, then it's foolish to restrict the number of tags that can be applied to a topic. Each topic would need to be tagged as widely as possible, to make sure anyone who's interested in it can find it in some way.
Right. Whereas groups are easier.
Why does there need to be a cap at all? What's the point of a cap? What benefit does it provide?
I'm not equating subreddits with groups (necessarily). I'm pointing out that user behaviour indicates that they're more comfortable with subscribing to a group/community/sub-forum/whatever for a particular subject than subscribing to a tag for that subject. This isn't about copying Reddit or Twitter, it's about seeing what users prefer to do and working with that.
There is some overlap once you start getting into interaction, experience, and interface design. And there was a micro trend in the late aughts about “gamification” as a design ethos. But I don’t think that’s any more overlap than anything else.
I’d be way more inclined to put a Mark Rosewater blog posts in a game design group and might not even think to include it in a design group.
Thanks for the (as always) extremely detailed suggestion. I was away last week so I'm trying to catch up on everything now and didn't have a chance to read it until today, but I think it generally sounds good and agree they'd be useful groups. As part of being away, I'm way behind on everything including adding the new groups, but I really want to get that done this week.
I agree that the trickiest part is trying to figure out where to fit them into the hierarchy. I think I want to have a general discussion about the group hierarchy as part of adding groups, so we can probably talk about it in more detail then. I think there's a fair amount of confusion about the hierarchy (which is largely my fault for not clearly defining much about it), so hopefully we can try to resolve some of that soon.
Absolutely want to throw in my support for this suggestion wholesale, including the group placement. Most everything I consider posting here usually has to do with game development or design, as those are the topics I know most about, so I'd definitely use both of these proposed groups.