Better support for long-running topics?
I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread out among a lot of different topics.
It seems like it might be nicer if in the games group, there were one topic for each game? Similarly for movies or books, or creative projects. This is how we did things on the Well, though there was also a "movies that didn't get their own topic" topic. But it seems like that was a limitation of a system that didn't deal well with having lots of topics in a group.
To support this well, we'd need to make coming back to long-running topics more pleasant to read somehow. With a linear conversation the software can start you off wherever you left off. I'm not sure what's best for threaded conversation?
In short, maybe there should be a way to do things more like forum software and less like Hacker News or Reddit? Or should we just try it out without changing the software?
Do you have the "mark new comments" feature enabled? https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits
It makes a huge difference, and (at least in my opinion) makes returning to discussions on Tildes far better than reddit/HN/etc.
I did not. Thanks!
Now that I have more time: this might seem fairly minor, but it's actually part of a really huge question with a lot of implications on all sorts of aspects of the site. There's always going to be a kind of tension between trying to keep certain subjects consolidated/longer-running or splitting them up, and there isn't really a correct answer.
Taking it to extremes, you can also ask something like, "Why do we need ~sports? Can't we just have one sports thread and people post in it whenever they want to talk about something related to sports?" And while it's possible, and might even be the right approach in some cases, it also has a lot of downsides when you merge everything to that level.
To go with your No Man's Sky example, when you go on some of the more active forums that organize everything into single threads like that, you'll find something like a No Man's Sky thread that's 350 pages long and has been running for years. But almost all of the pages are irrelevant at this point and nobody looks at them any more, so the fact that they're there doesn't really add anything. It's just a thread that continues forever, and anyone that's interested in NMS can't tell whether new posts in that thread represent big news (like this major update) or are just someone posting a reaction gif without going back in every time there are new posts.
So by making the choice to keep it all in one thread, it's kind of a decision to prioritize people that aren't interested in NMS, because it makes it easier for them to be able to ignore it—they just have to ignore that single thread. But for the people that are interested, they constantly have to check the thread to see if anything new and important has come up. They also can't easily separate discussion related to different updates, aspects, etc.
On Tildes, even though a lot of the features don't exist yet (or aren't necessary yet), I'm trying to aim more towards making it both easy for people to follow subjects they're interested in, as well as ignore them. By splitting into groups and sub-groups and having a tagging system, we're able to do that more easily. Traditional forums usually don't have many options except splitting into more and more sub-forums, and that gets unwieldy in a different way, so they lean towards consolidated threads.
Again, none of these are necessarily better than the others, they're just different approaches with their own benefits and drawbacks.
So... I don't think I'm really addressing the question much overall, but in general I think that splitting things up more has a lot of benefits, especially when you start considering functionalities like search, being able to prevent people from reposting the same links, future filtering options, and so on. But there's still a balance you have to find of splitting things up too much, and it's something I consider pretty often myself when I'm deciding whether to post an update as a new topic or just as a comment in a previous thread about the story. I don't know what the answer is, and there probably isn't one. It's just choices we have to make, and those choices will probably even change over time as the site evolves.
Yes, it seems like a popular game would end up having its own group? There are subreddits devoted to individual games.
But there are lots of games that don't have enough discussion to get their own group. Long-running topics might serve as a way of gauging interest to create a group, since an active topic invites discussion in a way that that a tag does not.
The key insight is that, as we see with recurring topics, conversation happens more on subjects where there's something prompting you to comment, since it means at least one other person is interested in reading about that topic. Tags don't really serve this purpose here like they do on Twitter.
On the other hand if creation of new subgroups were easy then that would serve a similar purpose, as it does on Reddit. (With the downside of having many abandoned groups.)
We don't really need any new software features to get started on this. It would just be a matter of someone deciding to create a topic on something they want to discuss and commenting every so often to keep it active. If other people do this and it turns out to be a popular convention then we get long-running topics. (Sort of like the invention of hashtags on Twitter.) But, I thought maybe it would be better to ask before I go off and experiment.
I personally don't think people should be intentionally commenting weeks/months later on a topic just for the sole purpose of bumping it to keep it alive. However, when there are relevant updates that they genuinely think people might be interested in, I don't see any problem with them making a new comment in an old related topic instead of submitting a completely new topic, and I have even done so myself. E.g. On the Medieval Myth-busting and BA Thanksgiving topics.
Yeah, I don't mean bumping for the sake of bumping, but more like getting in the habit of reviving an old topic rather than starting a new one when you have something to say and know a suitable topic exists. (And to set that up you might create the topic with the idea of doing that.)
Fair enough... in that case I am 100% on board.
Another crazy idea in support of this might be to have long-running topics where anyone can change part of the title when they post a comment? For example someone just posted "No Man's Sky - Synthesis Update (releasing tomorrow)"
Here I think it would be better represented as "No Man's Sky" being a long-running topic title and "Synthesis Update (releasing tomorrow)" as a subtitle that can change day-to-day. As you read through the topic you could see the points in the conversation where the subtitle changes. I guess this could be represented by separating top-level comments into sections, so when you post a new top-level comment you could put it into a new section. One of these sections could be the "current" section whose subtitle gets displayed in the topic headline, though I'm not sure how we resolve disputes about when to change sections. Maybe just try it and let people figure it out?
Maybe inactive sections should freeze after a while, so if you want to revive an old topic, the conversation happens in a new section.