Beyond headlines?
Tildes is much like Hacker News and Reddit in that article previews are limited to just headlines. (Well, there are tags, but they're de-emphasized since they're hidden by default.)
While they are very concise, a problem with headlines is that we rely on them too much. Even good ones don't really tell you what the article is about. In cases where it's hard to read the article (because it's paywalled or whatever) the conversation can be based mostly on the headline rather than the substance of the article. On Hacker News there are often mini-disputes about whether the headline is clickbait or not, and what's a better headline. "Headline is misleading" is a pretty common complaint.
I'm wondering if we could add a bit more information? One possibility would be a "Subtitle" field. Lots of articles have subtitles that are somewhat more informative, and doing a copy-paste is pretty easy.
Another would be to have a "pull quote" field. This requires a bit of editorial judgement by the submitter about what's the best pull quote, but I think that's okay. It's still copy-paste so at least they don't have to summarize anything in their own words.
For the last few days I've been posting a pull quote as the first comment whenever I post an article, and I think it works fairly well, except that the summary says "1 comment" when actually nobody commented - it's just the pull quote. Also, having an explicit field for the pull quote might allow better UI possibilities, like you could put them under the headline in the topic list.
I feel like this is unnecessary and a bit of an overcomplication, since the topic title field can already easily accommodate an article title and subtitle in most cases. And if people feel like the article title isn't informative enough (or is clickbait), IMO they should just ignore it and submit using the subtitle alone instead (if it's more informative)... or just try their best to construct a more objective/informative title themselves. That's what I have done in the past, and most of my title edits to other people's submissions on Tildes so far have been to do exactly that too (i.e. remove the shitty original article title and replace it with the more informative article subtitle).
I am personally not in favor of this suggestion, and a comment I made on a similar idea (giving OPs a comment sticky ability to include pull quotes and provide updated information) from a long time ago sums up why:
p.s. By all means, keep including pull quotes as comments in your submissions if you enjoy doing so and think they help in some way. However, I just feel that those sorts of comments should be judged independently of your submission. And truth be told, I honestly can't help but feel that pull quotes are actually potentially detrimental to quality discussion, since they give people an excuse to not read the whole article (since they can more easily convince themselves they got the gist of it from having read the pull quotes alone), and also potentially encourages people to make comments in response to just those pull quotes instead of only after reading whole article (or at least making an effort to).
You're right that it could be abused. However, here are some things that I think would make it worth the hassle.
We could have a rule (enforced by convention or maybe even in software) that the pull quote must be a quote. This is easy for everyone to understand and limits abuse to selective quoting, which I think we can deal with. There could also be some kind of length limit to make the UI design easier.
There is a tradeoff here because, as readers, we do want enough of a preview that we can decide whether to read the article or not. A longer preview might act as a teaser (convincing you to read the article even if the headline didn't do it), or you could decide that you don't need to read the article. More engagement isn't always better and deciding not to read an article is sometimes a good result.
It's a judgement call, but I think headline-only previews are sometimes too short to decide on what's interesting, and I'd like to see a bit more of the article. Sometimes I wonder, "why did they post this link? What's interesting about it?" A pull quote of whatever you (subjectively) think is most important should communicate that better. It's an editorial judgement that I actually want to see.
p.s. Despite me being so critical of your ideas here, I have added them to Gitlab... since I am ultimately not the decision maker here on Tildes (I have just volunteered to try to help manage the Gitlab), and even though I have my doubts, I do think your ideas have some merit and may potentially be worth exploring. ;)
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/591
BTW, if you could let me know if the above feature request issue accurately conveys what you are suggesting here, I would appreciate it. And if not, please let me know what I can add/change so that it does.
It's not just about potential abuse... see the p.s. paragraph. And another potential issue with this idea that is worth mentioning is that it also raises the barrier to entry for submitting things even higher, which was already apparently an issue because many people have claimed even the additions of tagging makes it more daunting and discouraging. So ultimately, no matter how you engineer the system or which conventions you enforce, I honestly don't think the benefits (helping people decide whether something is worth reading or not) is worth all the potential downsides. That's just my 2¢ on it, anyways.
Yeah, I'm mostly suggesting this because, as someone who posts links, it's what I want to fill in. I would find writing a summary too much effort, but cut-and-paste is okay.
They should still be optional fields. Making that non-intimidating seems like a UI design issue?
If someone wants to get fancy, the software could automatically generate a pull quote and the submitter could adjust it by hitting up and down arrows until the paragraph they want is showing. But I hesitate to suggest a feature that would take a lot of coding effort and then break based on changes to other websites.
Alternately, maybe adding a pull quote could be left to someone else, like tagging? Or a comment could be tagged as a pull quote from the article and somehow treated differently?
Tagging is entirely optional, but even so it still apparently makes a decent amount of people feel intimidated and discouraged from posting. And I suspect why that is the case is because even though it's optional, it still "feels" like it isn't just by virtue of there being a native feature to support them displayed on the submission page, as well as the fact that tags are being applied to every topic regardless of if the OP included them, and also because they were once prominently displayed on the front page... which is at least part of the reason why Deimos has now hidden tags from the front page by default (other than "important" tags like NSFW, SPOILERS, etc). See this topic for the full reasoning behind that decision: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/i0d/some_layout_adjustments_and_de_emphasizing_topic_tags_a_little
So if sub-titles and pull quote fields were also added to the submission page, the contents of which were then displayed somewhere on every topic page, even if there was a giant "THIS IS ONLY OPTIONAL" above each field on the submission page, that probably wouldn't really make much a difference to any people who might feel intimidated by them. People would likely still feel obligated to fill them out regardless, especially if the majority of everyone else did as well. Which is the exact same problems as tags, and might then result in them having to be hidden by default as well in the end.
At least when pull quotes need to be made as a comment, people can chose not to vote on them if they don't think they add anything of value, apply the "noise" tag to them if they think they're noise (which is a very common occurrence, BTW), and they also won't become needlessly entangled with the submission itself forcing people to make a judgement call on whether the value of the submission outweighs any possible negatives they feel about the particular choice of pull quotes that the OP selected.
p.s. Although, admittedly I could be wrong about all this, as it's mostly just speculation. So it may still be worth giving it a try at some point and seeing how people react. ;)
I'm no UI designer, but here's an idea: suppose there are two pages, the first with the required info and the second one with the optional info?
First page:
Headline: ____
Link: ____
<Post> <Add more Info>
Second page:
Headline: _____
Link: ___
Tags: ___
Subtitle: ___
Pull quote: _____
<Post>
Anyway, that's just one idea. It could be done either with literally a second page or JavaScript that changes the page. I would leave it up to whoever is doing the work.