14
votes
Group suggestion: tech support
Right now ~comp and ~tech are getting these kinds of posts, but I personally feel a ~tech_support ~tech.support (or ~tech_help? ~tech.help) group would be a better alternative.
People who love to help would flock to the group, and people who need it would feel safer to ask for help without receiving straight up LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) kind of answers.
There could be also a ~help group, wich a much broader scope (probably about Tildes itself).
What you think?
My vote is for recurring posts in ~tech. Similar to what we have in ~comp with the programming Q&A threads. I don't think that a whole subgroup is a good fit for that, for several reasons.
I think that a separate group would actually hurt visibility for one simple reason. Once I'm sick and tired of my home page being nothing but people asking about their graphics cards, I will simply unsubscribe from the subgroup. One thread? I don't care. I can walk in and look if I can help anyone, but I will do it at my pace.
“Thanks” is noise, and we have a label for that and a culture against that, so technically one should count on new comments always being either questions, or answers, or some clarifications of these.
I don't really care about how many new comments are there in the thread because I can always ignore the thread until I'm in the responding mood.
I find it interesting, because it's forcing Tildes to face a (IMO rather valuable!) reddit use case that is not often mentioned. Same with /r/tipofmytongue kinda subreddits.
I’m not sure I get your point. Could you elaborate?
Basically, this is something I like about reddit but I believe it does clash with Tildes' ideal of content that creates "good discussion". You have these subreddits that are entirely about asking questions and having experts answer (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians) but some are essentially just loosely moderated subs where people occasionally dump their "tech support" or "does anybody else" style questions and I'd figure that's content that would usually be removed on Tildes?
These kinds of question threads are incredibly useful for the person asking the question but they're usually too specific to hold much value for most other users, so it's easy to consider them spam. I'm thinking it could be a case where some settings would be necessary to, say, hide them from the frontpage but not from ~tech or something. Tildes is probably not big enough for it to get "spammy" but in the long run, it's interesting to think of how to manage that type of content.
I'm not sure I agree. There is good content in ask/response communities. I like https://quora.com, especially.
Agreed on both counts - I guess it depends which way people want to start drawing the pyramid: do we add ~tech.support (or ~tech.questions, ~tech.help, or similar) and add support subsections under other main categories when they warrant it? Or do we collect everything under ~help at the top level and start adding ~help.tech, ~help.cooking, ~help.language etc.?
One of the reasons I used underscore is that I saw it on ~games.game_design. But that is a special case. The
.hierarchical structuring is clearly the way to go.I updated my OP to reflect that.
Top level ~help makes the most sense to me as it can be flexible for help with anything and is pretty obvious what it's for.
The reason I used underscores is that with
-auto group highlighting did not work, which made me think that-is not a valid character for groups.Maybe the
.is better in any case, because it has hierarchical significance.