11
votes
When will people be able to make their own groups ?
so just wondering if people will ever be able to make their own groups, also if it’s going to be a feature any plans on how it is going to be done ?
so just wondering if people will ever be able to make their own groups, also if it’s going to be a feature any plans on how it is going to be done ?
Thanks for finding a sharing. That is the only down side I think I’ve found with this site I think letting people make groups is a great idea as long as it is done right making it highly restricted is a bummer some of the user generated stuff on the internet is the best
I feel like right now the site is one big group where most people (I think?) usually browse from the front page instead of going into different groups. Maybe some of them like ~music, ~talk, or ~creative feel a bit like they have their own identity somewhat but Tildes hasn't really fragmented into different groups the same way you would find very distinct subreddits on Reddit. You can see that some groups have fewer subscribers than others but I figure that's from people deciding "I'm not interested in this topic" more than non-overlapping communities forming.
If you're interested in user generated content though a lot of people have been making "recurring topics" that can form their own micro-community as the same people show up every week to discuss the same thing.
I think there's a level of expression and self-determinism that's unique to a site where people are able to create their own communities; but unfortunately from what we've seen, the groups that have been popularly requested thus far have for the most part simply not generated enough interest to merit continuing to be around. Some like ~design have fared better.
I suspect at the current level of activity, we'd just end up with a desert of mostly empty groups created by people who later abandon the site, unfortunately!
Great comment I couldn’t have put it better myself
If you want to make your own groups you pretty much want Reddit. The whole point of Tildes is to be a managed community rather than an unmanaged one - because the good user generated stuff is a tiny, TINY amount of the total user generated stuff (aka Reddit).
One possible compromise might be to have a formal process for proposing a new group, with veto by Deimos. Something like this: if you write up a description of what the group is about and it attracts 10 people who interested and 2 moderators volunteer to run it, let's give it a try, and if it dies, then it gets archived. This would be like a less formal version of the way Stack Exchange starts up new exchanges.
I don't think it's likely that we'd get a diverse set of thriving communities going by growing from the top down using very broad, general-interest groups. It's more likely to happen one small niche at a time. The important thing is that each niche needs enough people to get going.
As mentioned above:
I think 'free' group creation will only come when creating new groups becomes a waste of time for Deimos, which will probably take a while because most of the site only browses the front page that tildes give them, not to mention the infrastructure needed to automate moving topics from one group to the other. Maybe when (if) Tildes hits 250k or 250 groups Deimos will get tired and leave it to us for him to focus more on the site (which at this tier of traffic will probably be needed since at 250k Deimos will probably need some mod tools and an automod to moderate all the content coming to the site.)