21
votes
Suggestion: ~aww or alternatively ~fluff
As was made clear by snow lepoards eating their own tails, this website needs more puppers and fluffers.
As was made clear by snow lepoards eating their own tails, this website needs more puppers and fluffers.
I agree!! ~fluff would be a particularly fitting name, since it's not particularly high effort content. That, or put it in ~misc.aww. I think it'd be best if we avoided making a lot of high level groups that promote low effort content, as I think that's a big part of what did Reddit in.
Except, in Reddit's case, the decline was aggravated by an active promotion of feel-good, low-effort fluff to the exclusion of other content on the part of the admins.
When you have a hundred subreddits for dog pictures to ten high-effort subreddits, and they all get the same chance at the front page, the doggos tend to drown out the discussion. It's a fundamental flaw in reddits voting system that they've only recently attempted to fix with /r/popular.
Yeah I agree with this. The relevance and quality and meaning is disproportionate to the quantity.
I think that perhaps more important than avoiding having too many high-level groups promoting low-effort content is ensuring that groups for high-effort content have alternative locations where low-effort content can go without forcing it upon all readers of a particular tag. I fear that having the same groups serve to hold both high-effort and low-effort content without any way to filter or distinguish the two is going to be very damaging to Tildes, and quickly make it unusable for anyone coming to it for actually insightful content.
The snow leopards in ~misc, unfortunately, make it clear, along with other posts, that this is already becoming a problem. These posts also indicate the limited utility of having tags added only by the post author: none of these posts have tags that would be particularly useful for filtering them out en masse. (1)
I know that this comment might sound rather cantankerous, but I expect some of us very strongly don't want to see the site overrun by cute pictures and easy links to popular content. While the site is under development, and there are planned features, like non-author post tags and tag filtering, that might address these problems, I worry that the problem could worsen quickly enough that the features won't be worked out in time.
(1) More broadly, the posts also bring up the problem of different ideas as to what tags are supposed to have. Is ~science, for example, supposed to be for links to educational content for a popular audience, or for news for an audience with a scientific background? Is ~misc for high-effort content that doesn't fit elsewhere, or low-effort posts with broad appeal? In each case, having them be both will likely drive away everyone.
Aren't subgroups supposed to help with the issue of "what type of content goes in this very broad category"? For now we only have ~science, so there's only one place to put popsci and heavier stuff, but I imagine once subgroups are implemented people will be able to follow the types of science content they're interested in, while popular posts from any subgroup "bubble up" in the main ~science page.
In this hypothetical, the video I posted yesterday might belong in ~science.popsci (or something like it) and get tagged with things like biology, educational, video, insects, fireflies, animal communication, etc.
Not sure how something like ~science.news would work, since there is already a ~news that could potentially have ~news.science... Is there potential for sharing subgroups between groups, I wonder.
They are, yes, but my major worry is that the planned features that would address this (non-author tagging, tag filtering, category hierarchies, etc) won't be implemented quickly enough to keep the problem from becoming significant.
For example, in the 24 hours since someone initially started making ~misc about animal pictures instead of interesting miscellaneous content, 3 of the last 7 posts are now animal pictures. There's no way to avoid these from cluttering up one's front page without unsubscribing from ~misc entirely.
That's fair~ I'm optimistic that new features will arrive before the problem becomes overwhelming, but you're right about the sudden increase in animal pic posts in ~misc. I don't mind the existence of animal pics, but if they are allowed I support quarantining them in something like ~fluff since a lot of folks would like to avoid them.
Not coming from Reddit (and r/science) I assumed ~science was broad, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that having popsci and news together would drive away people. (I'm interested in both, personally.) I think the problem with trying to address the issue before subgroups and filtering exist is deciding which content is allowed in the meantime.
The more I think about it, the more I think a "promoted content" section of 3-5 links above everything else that uses a different filter/sort criteria would be good. So for science, the top 5 items that are tagged "hardscience" can be displayed followed by the usual ordering of lists which could be a mix of low- and high-effort content.
Another few examples:
That's an interesting idea. Is imposing it from above the best way to do it though? For example, you mention promoting
hardsciencein ~science, butfluffin ~comp. Those seem pretty arbitrary and opposite to each other. I can imagine the reasoning behind each one, but it seems inconsistent. Why is one particular type of content promoted over the others?An alternative would be to allow users to create "dashboards" which can be viewed, copied, and maybe modified by other users, which have sections with various filters applied. A little like multireddits, but instead of just being a single combined view, it can have panes that expose different tildes, and have filtering on each. This way, a user can look at the section they're interested in, click to go to that filtered view, add or remove filters or tildes.
Then, while each tilde shows all its own content, you can browse subsets of that content easily and compose it with other content.
A bit of a crazy idea, I know, but I've been involved in building a similar system, and it's amazing how powerful it can be.
I was using them as examples; it would be up to the mods of the community to figure out what posts they want automagically promoted.
Your alternative sounds interesting though I'd be concerned about complexity and then making sure there's good default dashboards.
Hmmmm good point. Maybe ~fluff.aww?
Just ~fluff for now.
I was trying to put my finger on what i don't like about /aww and ~fluff nails it. That's the master category for all that stuff. It'll live in its own ~fluff hierarchy, and people can subscribe, or not. Simple solution to the 'low effort content' problem. When there's enough .aww tags in ~fluff, we do ~aww (and whatever else pops up).
Agreed. ~fluff seems to wrap it up with a neat little bow.
I think that would be the ideal case actually. It'd be nice to have all the low effort stuff in one place!
Careful now, cat pictures are serious business! /s
But honestly I like the idea that there is one top level group that all encompasses all fluff and sets a lighter tone for its subgroups, without changing the expectations for all the other groups.
so like sub groups?
Honestly, I was somewhat hesitant to post the snow leopard stuff since I don't want the Tildes community to turn into just another "cat pictures" website. I mean, there's a thousand and one sites like that. But cat pictures and other such stuff have been a part of internet culture long enough that they are going to be posted frequently enough to need their own home either as a dedicated tilda or a specific set of tags.
We need ~recommendations ^/s
I asked for a ~humor group yesterday which got a fair number of votes, but I haven't gotten a response from the admins about it. As for an ~aww type group, I definitely think that should that should be added as well.