Daily Tildes discussion - why should we allow (or not allow) fluff content?

I would like to see this content disallowed to be honest.

As others have said, there's a million and one places online to find cute animals.

More importantly, since the site is at such an early stage in its growth, every decision made has a big knock-on effect on the site's culture for years to come. Better be strict now, and then allow some slack when there's a concrete enough culture that low-quality content can be effectively 'quarantined'. Ceding ground is a dangerous move.

I am exceptionally torn on this issue. My gut says to deny fluff from taking root on this site (there are plenty of other places people can go for that on the web) but I also understand the opposite side of the argument.

IMO, allowing low-effort content to thrive attracts more users to the site who are primary attracted to that sort of content. Those people can be quality contributors, no doubt, but the vast majority of them are unlikely to be.

This also creates a volume problem in that by their very nature, low-effort easily digestible pictures/gifs outperform more quality, longer-to-digest material such as articles (and even video). This issue can be counteracted through site mechanics, e.g. giving less vote weight to pictures and more to longer form content. However that does not address the systemic cultural problem that comes along with allowing and attracting more users interested in the low-effort content than the high quality content.

On the other hand, posts like this one, are high quality, valuable contributions to the site IMO, despite being just an album of pictures. So where the line gets drawn is going to be important since we don't want to discourage those types of posts.

Overall, it's a tough question but I would definitely not see any problem with banning giphy and various other animated gifs as submissions. Allowing them in comments? meh. Everyone needs to joke around occasionally (even me, believe it or not), or this place would get stuffy pretty fast.

I guess as the person who was promoting the ~fluff in the first place, I should probably give a reasoning.

Mostly: ~fluff provides an "in." A lot of folks here are mods on other sites and therefore already have the "in." They've been on the internet for years and have a solid understanding of the cultures and identities that cyberspace brings.

But new folks don't. Young folks don't. Non-techies don't. Groups of people that likely have a wealth of interesting things to say and contribute might not be comfortable entering into the circle immediately. But they might be comfortable posting something dumb. It doesn't have to go to everyone; not everyone likes fluff.

While it's true that ~ has no real business or existential goal to grow, it should have a vested interest in being welcoming to users who actually do want it. Some users may not feel as comfortable with the mechanics or culture of the site, especially if it becomes one where we're banning pictures of cute animals.

My concern is that by restricting it too much, ~ becomes close to stack-overflow, where new users are actively discouraged from posting.

That said, I bow to the democratic process and if most folks believe that we should remove all ~fluff, then let's remove it. I'm really only here to provide the counter argument.

I'm fine with disallowing it, because I'm also a grumpy old git.

I also dread the thought of seeing the accursed "pupper speak" show it's ugly face here, which it will do if there's a million and one "cute animal threads".

I'm kinda indifferent on this issue, since I'd be filtering out all that content anyway using tags and by not subscribing to ~fluff, so in my world, it'll never exist no matter what we do here today.

I think the primary benefit of banning it is sending a very clear, and direct message that tildes is not reddit and plans to be a superior quality site. It'll likely chase away the naive 'free speech at all costs' crowd and leave us with more intelligent community members overall in the long run. We'll also take heat for it online. If we do this I'd go further and extend that ban to ALL image links of any kind, anywhere, forever.

The chief drawback to banning it is - how the hell exactly are we going to identify it all and get rid of it? While the place is small, that's easy. Once it gets bigger, it's going to be a lot harder, and might not even be feasible depending on how our planned systems play out. It won't be easy. Also, there is a case to be made that images provide value - explanation posters, the entire reddit SFWporn network, etc. It seems like the issue is we need images to be our first special-content-class if we're going to control how they operate.

The other option is quarantine into ~fluff.

Eventually that'll be ~fluff.pics.aww and thousands of others. One of the chief advantages I see to this model is that all of the fluff will be in one place, which means ~fluff's only competition is other fluff, not long form articles or intelligent content from the rest of tildes. Some people have expressed concerns that the mere existence of ~fluff is going to attract users that prize that sort of content - while we're invite only, I don't see that as a problem, and if we're ever public-registration, by then we'll likely have solved the new user problems.

I'd normally recommend against quarantine - but I think that's only an issue when the community by design is going to become toxic (like reddit's pairwise opposed hate communities). The negativity is the issue. I don't see ~fluff as likely to foster that sort of negativity, so the quarantine may work out just fine. If anything it'll be a place more likely to foster lazy comments - or, a place tildes users just go to blow off steam. Not everyone wants to be viewing serious content all the time.

Yes, people who are subscribed to ~fluff and ten others, will see a lot of fluff in their home group pages. Well, we talked about having different mechanics for different hierarchies, so there's a solution here too - a golf penalty on all of ~fluff's content that places it permanently below the other hierarchies in terms of sitewide vote weightings. Within ~fluff, it won't be a problem since all content is sharing the same penalties, and outside of ~fluff, it'll keep that stuff down unless something in there puts on one amazing vote performance.

Another benefit of this is that the rest of us, all over tildes, can move all the fluff all over the site right into ~fluff just by hitting it with a 'fluff' tag, so it becomes a dump for all the light content, but without actually censoring that light content. With this happening, it's possible that ~fluff will turn from a dump into a dumpster fire, but again, I think user-invite mechanics are the solution to that problem, and we won't have it while we're invite only.

The other primary advantage of having ~fluff here is that it gives us a place to experiment with the low-effort content and see if, even there, it's possible to build a hierarchy that can foster quality submissions, or at the least, drag up the best of the fluff from the rest of the pile. I don't exactly consider 'the best collection of cat pictures on the internet' the kind of quality content I'm interested in, but if the subjective quality systems we have in mind work, it'll work there just as well as it works in ~music or any other artistic-appreciation hierarchy.

I also want to point out one more thing - it is impossible to prevent the creation or block the use of a RES-like 'Tildes Enhancement Suite' by users who wish to do so. That browser extension will happily expand images, videos, whatever people want, and make any other alterations to the site presentation people decide they want to see. That's why, if you really want to stop this content, I think wholesale banning images is the only solution.

Kill the bear, or wrestle the bear into submission. We knew this was going to be one of the very first problems we'd have to tackle here.

On reflection, I'm revising my opinion to say fuck it, ban the fluff. In the end, is this really the problem we want to be solving right now? I think we have other matters that are more pressing (like building the trust-based moderation system). Once the castle is complete, we can talk about re-introducing this content, when we're better, wiser, and have systems in place to make it less risky. Right now I think taking a stand for quality and sending that message is more important.

@soulistheanswer convinced me with that comment below when @cfabbro couldn't do it with two hours of chit chat over slack. Do we trust ourselves? Better to remove doubt and temptation. This 'smells' a hell of a lot like what happened when /r/listentothis went default - and in hindsight, that was not the right decision for us to make... though without it, I don't know that we'd have come up with the ideas we're using on tildes now. Better not to repeat past mistakes.

Today, quality. Some latter day, images.

I like the idea of having only one area for fluff. That would make it possible to funnel everything there rather than splintered out into a million + 1 sub-communities of fluff which would outnumber and create too much noise.

Or there should be a way to funnel it to other sites; perhaps direct links to submit elsewhere or just links to the main pages of other sites.

This is something other sites can't do because they're profit-driven and ad revenue driven, they want the lowest common denominator to appeal to all. If they want the fluff? Great! Tildes will push it away from this platform and to those other places.

Maybe some text like "if you're posting fluff, you may want to consider buzzfeed or reddit" would be discouragement enough?

I noticed a lot of sub-reddits and wikipedia and stackoverflow disable certain actions before a user is acclimatized to the culture for a few days or weeks or until they reach a certain karma score. Not sure if that could help the fluff situation.

The answer to this question will really decide what type of site this will be. This isn't just a question of whether or not to allow cute animal pictures, it's a question of will the site's content be driven 100% by community submissions or mostly by the site creators/admins/mods. Both have downsides. The former could lead to low effort posts dominating, the latter could lead to resentment and confusion over what is permitted, and why. If you only allow high quality content, then you have to define what high quality content is, but that will always be subjective at some level.

This will alienate a lot of users. So the question is do you want a small site with only high quality discussion, or a large site with jokes, memes, and cat pics?

I would prefer that all content is allowed on the site, provided it is not hateful, doxxing, etc. As long as it is properly categorized, and categories can be included or excluded from view, then each user can control their own experience.

An argument in favor of "fluff":

People like myself enjoy seeing funny, cute, beautiful, oddly satisfying, etc., things because it gives us a dopamine hit. I don't see anything wrong with that, and I'm not going to apologize for liking and sharing funny cat gifs online. That being said, I like "serious" content too, as do many other people. For example, on reddit I'm subscribed to r/StartledCats, r/eyebleach, r/oddlysatisfying, etc., but I'm also subscribed to r/news, r/science, r/modclub, and so forth. I really hope that "fluff" will be allowed, and if you all want to set things up in a way that favors non-fluff content I think that could be a good solution toward maintaining the desired overall tone while still allowing those of us who want to share and view cat gifs to have our occasional dopamine hit along with the more serious content.

I'm torn on this.

I understand the desire to curb low-effort mass-appeal content, that doesn't provide much room for discussion, and I certainly understand not wanting Tildes to be a dumping ground for such things.

But, I think I'd feel a lot better if there was a stronger definition of 'what does Tildes consider to be quality content?' that gets officially stated, and used as the measuring stick for this (and future) decisions about what stays or goes, before a decision gets made here, too.

On https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals, the final section states "In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important", and states 'In general, any changes to the site that will cause "shallower" content to gain an advantage should be considered very carefully'. Okay, so there is a starting point of what I can use as a bar for quality.

But, against that measurement, where does ~music fit? Is music high-quality content?

Another measurement that can be used, from this post: 'things that appeals to a very wide range of people, so [they attract] more votes/attention' - things with mass appeal, that are generally widely liked anyway. Plenty of music would fit in here as worth sharing, that are not so well-known. But, what about popular music, that also happens to be very good?

If I had to take a stab at trying to define quality content, as I think Tildes is trying to approach it, from my understanding, it would be something like "Tildes defines 'quality content' as content that provides the basis for rich, meaningful, or interesting conversation." Yes, this is subject to interpretation, too. But it pretty clearly rules out fluff.

I don't know how accurate my interpretation here is, of what Tildes is aiming for, for quality content. I may have missed some points made in docs.tildes.net or the blog post - apologies if I did.

If this kind of content is disallowed, I think it would be worth amending the current documentation/blog post, which states (emphasis mine): 'Fixation on growth and related metrics results in a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. Tildes will still allow that kind of content, but its priority is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don't have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.'

Apologies if these things are a bit rambling. I think, mostly, my main concern is that of having a clear idea about what quality content means to Tildes, so I have a better idea of what does and does not fit here.

I think you're going to have a really hard time pinning down the exact difference between fluff and high-quality content because of context and subjectivity.

For example, a picture of someone cosplaying can be a low-effort image in /r/gaming ("Look at this awesome person dressed up as X"!), whereas the exact same picture can be high-quality content if the creator posts it herself ("Look at this costume I made and wore to Made-Up Con!"). Also, while I might consider a clever meme high-quality, some people consider all image-based jokes low-effort fluff.

From that perspective, I think it will be difficult to ban or quarantine fluff in some way that won't create endless arguments, since both will involve lots of subjective policing. Since it is so contextual and subjective, perhaps it should be a second dimension that one can vote on - in the same way you give a post a score, you can also rate its "fluffiness" to determine if it should be allowed or not.

There should be ~fluff or at least ~entertainment.fluff.

I feel like tildes should be a universal tool. Opinionated in its design, but open in its use. I would not make ~fluff part of default subscriptions, but any content that's not against the "don't be an asshole"-rule should find its place. With ~entertainment.fluff this place might be in the long-tail.

Also: Youtube: Ethan Zuckerman: "Internet Censorship: How Cute Cats Can Help" (2008)

But in general I didn't quite get the policy on "top level" tildes on this site yet. Why is not any tilde allowed and what sticks stays? One could still refactor with redirects to e.g. move ~lit to ~literature.

I'll try a little bit of an unusual argument: I don't trust myself. People are talking about filtering out something like ~fluff and simply going their way. But when given that type of freedom of choice, I'm afraid I'd subscribe sooner or later...I kinda like the idea of limiting myself by visiting tildes and being "forced" to view only high quality content. I guess that's kinda my own responsibility. But right now when I come to tildes I mentally prepare myself for long discussions with well though out comments (it's mostly meta discussions right now, but still). While when I go to reddit, even if I'm seeking high quality content, I'll soon get distracted by some screenshots from BPT or a gif on r/nba. And when I go to twitter I get short, often out of context thought particles thrown at me which leave me very dissatisfied.

I would like to see this type of content allowed eventually. Now is not the time for it though. I do think at some point once we're seeing posts with 100+ votes regularly, it might be time to think about adding ~humor or ~fluff or other low-effort type tildes, but I think doing so now will only be detrimental to the site.

I'm against an outright ban, as what fluff is is simply hard to define. Banning cute animal pictures will inevitably lead to either all animal pictures being banned or drama when someone argues that they didn't post for cuteness.

I do agree that we shouldn't fill the front page with memes and the like, but I think we should discourage, rather than ban. Not having a karma system is a good start, as there's nothing to farm for people who post these.

We can't ban memes, people will find a way sooner or later. For example.

Attempting is a waste of time in my opinion. Containing them to their own part is the best way I think. ~fluff or perhaps ~animals.fluff. Give these less weight on voting, and I think the issue goes away.

Edit: For memes we can also do ~games.memes or wherever it's relevant if people want.

Personally I think we can keep it out. The internet has far too many places that try to be content-neutral in order to become these big hubs that encompass everything.

Here you can clamp down on things, and this kind of fluff is pretty clearly not in line with the kind of content yall wanna encourage here, so I say don't give it a space.

I don't really think fluff has a place here. Like yeah, it's cute, you get to see a nice dog or whatever, but there's so many places that you can already get that in an endless stream. Not every website needs to have a facet for literally everything, especially just low effort content.

I'm not opposed to not having ~fluff (I have literally hundreds of subreddits for that), but my real question how do we keep that kind of post from spilling into other ~groups?

Something you might consider is what I've seen suggested on reddit: weight content based on the time it takes to consume it

So I am a bit back and forth on this - my thinking:

For allowing fluff - people like fluff. It's true, it drives traffic and gets eyeballs on the site, and if the site grows, then i's more likely to be successful. Yes, some of them will be a bit more, well, fluffy, but a community built of only early adopters will struggle to survive too - look at google plus.

Deciding what is and what isn't high quality content is also extremely difficult - we see this on WritingPrompts where we aim to be a high quality subreddit and not have people posting jokes or low effort stories, but how do you define that? We try many ways and we're still not successful and that's in a fairly narrow set of ways people can submit. too draconian and we'll just drive people away, too loose and you lose what you're going for.

If we ban pretty pictures, then do we also want to ban sports areas? I mean, realistically what do they bring that you can't get elsewhere and 99% is going to be rumours, news and arguments. Do any sports subs really try to create high quality content? if the line is inconsistent and subject to the whims of the first 500 or 1,000 people, then will it become a community that people want to be a part of?

Having a wide and varied set of voices in your community brings huge benefits and one of the jobs that good moderators do is to encourage and educate new users. Again, on WritingPrompts, we'll very often see people who post low quality stuff and what we'll try to do is to encourage them, help them grow and post better things. It's hugely rewarding to see someone go from a 200 word story to a 20,000 word multi part story.

Against allowing fluff - yes, people like it, but there are plenty of places online you can get it. If you were looking to become the 'new reddit' then it'd be needed, but if you're happy being a fairly small community that is pretty focused on what it does, then maybe you can build something new and something different.

Trying to clone a successful site is rarely a good idea and maybe by setting out stadards early, the site can evolve into something different, but also awesome.

Running out of time here and may come back and add more thoughts, but I am not sure which side I come down on. On the whole I would feel inclined to keep it to one area if you allow it and put a lot of work into quite clearly working out what high effort content is and how you want to get it onto the site.

Despite me having more in the pro- than the anti- side, I actually think I am a bit more anti if I am being honest with myself. Just a bit.

On a side note, I really like that these discussions are coming up here and now. It's going to make a better and stronger community.

One more vote against fluff stuff. I'd love to come to Tildes to read quality content and comments. Reddit is already taking care of cute fluff stuff.

I've seen a lot of discussion here about the concept of fluff, but I haven't seen anyone break down exactly why fluff is so dangerous to a site like this. Specifically, I think the main danger lies in voting patterns. So I'd like to lay out a hypothetical scenario, in order to try to articulate my concerns:

Let's say we have a site with 20 groups, most of which are trying to foster cultures of in-depth content and long-form discussion. Then, you have a topic, ~fluff, that is for low effort, quick-to-consume content, whose users mostly browse from the front page, and whose comments are mostly a sentence or two. Nobody is going to come back to a post to read new comments, and why would they? There's nothing really to discuss.

Now, there will be overlap between the userbases, but let's ignore that for the moment. Let's say it takes two minutes on average to properly interact with and vote on a post from the longer form groups, and ten seconds to consume and vote on a post in ~fluff. (Honestly, I think that's a conservative estimation of the difference.) Given the same number of users in each group, most posts will be voted on at a rate of 30 votes/user/hour, whereas ~fluff posts will be voted at a rate of 600 votes/user/hour, or 20x more. This means that there are more votes cast by the 5% of users in the fluff section than the other 95% of users combined.

But this isn't a problem, right? Anyone who doesn't want to see it can just filter out ~fluff.

However, as we mentioned before, the userbases will overlap. If 20% of users use ~fluff, and half of those vote in the same, quick way across the site, then 10% of your users are casting roughly 2/3 of the votes, and they're favouring easily consumed, shallow content. Thus, easily consumed content is favoured across the site, due to those 10% of users. It's not hard to see how it progresses from there, if unchecked: easily consumed content becomes the norm, the original users are driven away, and those who enjoy such content join.

Now, to be fair, this isn't reddit. On one hand, voting hasn't been the only way of promoting content here, due to the activity sort. On the other hand, the lack of any mechanic for "downvoting" a post gives little power to the users who want to keep the lower effort content in check.

I don't know how this will play out at all. I honestly wouldn't mind having a place like ~fluff, when it comes to the content. What I would mind, though, is if this place lost its culture of deep discussion because those having those discussions were drowned out by those not interested in them. Unless we're confident in safeguards against the kind of issue I outlined above, my vote is against ~fluff.

As someone who definitely enjoys my daily dose of kitty pics, I'm leaning towards disallowing it. I agree with a lot of the reasons already mentioned and repeated throughout this thread. On reddit, I can't stand the "cats standing" (or whatever it's actually called) subreddit, where every comment is "cat".

However, I would like to point out that beyond fluff there are real discussions that are of value regarding cute animals that can often stem from a seemingly effortless pic. For me specifically, anything that helps animals (both the specific and in general) get adopted are good. Awareness brought to endangered species and conservation efforts in general too.

Maybe we don't specifically need a ~fluff group, but still allow the content.

I'm brand new here, but I'm here because I want to see real discussions. If I wanted to see cute cat pics and memes, there are lots of other sites where I could do that. I quite like the idea of a site where that's simply not a thing that's present. I feel like sequestering it won't work. It ultimately takes over, more and more people who are into it join, until the critical mass is here for that, and then after you filter it out, you're not left with much. And then you go looking for another site. So I'm hoping that this site focuses on doing one thing well: thoughtful discussion - and leaves the fluff for other places.

I think that, if you're looking for fluff content, reddit is set up much better for that on a mechanical level. I don't think we need to be Reddit 2; I think we need to be better.

that said, a ~fluff quarantine area would be decent enough. we can have ~fluff.cute, ~fluff.cute.dog, etc. my only gripe is that ~fluff should never be a default subscription; new users shouldn't arrive with the first impression of us just being another Reddit/Facebook/Instagram fluff factory

More agreement on prohibiting the fluff!

I really appreciate the text focused viewing experience of ~. Reddit is full of image w/o content, let us build a culture where that is not the accepted norm.

I think that ~ should create a ~fluff group. It fills a necessary role, since even if it's not just cute animal pics, people will eventually want to post things that are a little lower effort.

I think that creating it now, when there's a tiny amount of groups to even be subscribed to, will be detrimental to the site. It'll drown out the rest of the content since there's such a small amount of content being posted. I would suggest creating it, but lock it and post an explanation that users should be posting high quality content while ~ is growing. Keeps us on track for now while still allowing the potential for future growth.

I would not be upset if decision to ban "fluff" was made.
Having one problem though, defining "fluff" in my mind. I think would probably have to be an ongoing discussion to define as the site grows.

I think an embargo on posts of "cute animals", and other such things would be fine especially where the Tildes community is still nascent. However, I wonder if part of the reason low effort postings start popping up is due, at least in part, to the way Tildes is currently focused on posting direct links to other sites a la reddit and hackernews. Frankly it seems to me that posting a single link is the epitome of a low effort posting anyway.

As an alternative, what about encouraging/enforcing full text submissions where external links are embeded in the user submitted text? This text could provide context for the links and serve as a "substantial basis for meaningful discussion, debate, or insight." This is roughly the same style that is/was used on slashdot, kuro5hin, and metafilter. This of course has the downside that you can't click on the headline directly to go to the linked site, but it does slow down consumption and could perhaps promote more thoughtful discussion.

While not high quality content, I feel that straight up disallowing fluff content on the site will breed an unfriendly atmosphere to newcomers. ~fluff is a good solution to isolate low effort content, but still allowing for a space to screw around and post memes and cat pics. Cultivating a community like SO, HN, or even early days of Usenet is not the way to invite newcomers on the platform. There are a lot of "old grumpies" in this thread, but should ~ be the type of site that is only open to old grumpies?

Fluff content definitely does not belong in the more focused hierarchies, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't belong on the site at all.

I don't know, maybe I'm just the sort of low-effort/quality member that is being discussed here, but I really enjoy fluffiness. Even the concept of catsstandingup (as mentioned by another commentor) appeals to me. I personally don't visit that sub, but the thought of grown humans doing something that absurd almost as a hive-mind amuses me endlessly. I'm glad that sort of HUGE, self- perpetuating social experiment exists. How they randomly pick an identical comment to downvote into oblivion? Hilarious!

I can totally see why ~ would disallow content like the above, though. It's a novelty. I'm ok with going elsewhere for my daily dose of adorable or dumb jokes, but I'm less interested in this place becoming a stodgy, stuffy, elitist place with no sense of humor to be found. I personally value friendliness and openness as well as deep focused discussion, and I'm worried about people being discouraged or feeling out of place just for liking a certain type of content in addition to discussion.

That said, I've really enjoyed my first day here. I am interested to see what this will grow to be and I'll respect what the community wants, even If it turns out that ~ isn't the place for me. I promise I mean all of that with introspection and not with petulance.

My idea would be to leave all as is but add a .fluff to each major group. That way the fluff can't aggregate into a monster and it's easy to know where to go for some amusing shitposts about TV or food or whatever.

I don't think it should be allowed. There are endless places for cute animal content.

If "fluff" is defined as literally just cute animal pictures, then I would be fine with quarantining it in a tilde specifically set aside for content that is not desired in the main site.

Edit: If it has any other definition, then it would depend on what that definition is as to whether it seems wise to ban/quarantine it.

I see lots of comments with very good point here and while I'm also an old grumpy whatever I would like to remind that excluding something brings only the community to find a way around the censor.

Controlling it is actually a better way to manage something that could potentially be disruptive of other content.

An example: Create a ~fluff group in which people will post to ~fluff.aww, ~fluff.doggos, etc but give the entirity of ~fluff a much lesser weight in the algorithm that brings thread up in the front page.

I'm not for the fluff myself. If someone wants to run a space that extremely curated towards say, a specific breed of animal and people can post cute pics of that specific breed I might be ok with that. But I don't want to see r/aww. I can Reddit for that or mainline imgur.

Reddit suffers more every day from the lowest common denominator. It's really going to come down to how people moderate though, and the bigger it gets the harder it'll be to stop it.

I have a middle opinion on this: We could have a dedicated group for this kind of content, but we should avoid creating such a group until a) the community is more well-established so that higher effort content organically maintains itself as the cornerstone of the community, and b) front page algorithms work in such a way that no one particular group can squeeze out content from other groups (which is something that should be on the roadmap, anyway).

I'm not really for or against it, but if we choose to add the group, then we need to do it in such a way that we don't compromise on the purpose of this community.

honestly I am fine with disallowing fluff here... there are many other platforms for finding such content and it isnt necessary imo

I'll concur with the previous commenters that mentioned that this site would benefit from a unique angle; there are other places for such content.

I for one like to see it because too much serious stuff all day every day is just too much. My reddit subs are about 25% each, Sports, Politics, cute animal pics, science stuff.

I think if you have the equivalent of reddits /r/all then fluff forums should not appear on it. As reddits /r/all stands it's 90% meme garbage.

If Reddit is exceptionally good at cute animal pictures, as has been mentioned above, then surely your cute animal picture requirements are filled by Reddit?

Please don't let Tildes become a site of memes and cute animal pictures. I think we can do better than that.

How about a "fluff" tag? If a certain number of users tag a post as fluff, it automatically gets removed or moved to ~fluff or a similar area?

At the very least, banning fluff would be consistent with 'Joke' being seen as a less than positive tag.

Allow it, but make it more difficult to accrue votes.

I would say allow it. I mean if you don't like it you don't subscribe to it just like reddit. Yes it will probably cover whatever our /r/all will be but well that's what ~all is.

Ok, first comment here. A lot has been said already, and I understand both sides, I think.

First I'd like to add a remark: as others have pointed out, this discussion cannot be well directed unless both fluff and high quality content are better defined, in my opinion. So maybe this thread can lead to a better definition and then be discussed again later down the road.

In general, without a more specific definition, I would argue that it should be allowed. It shouldn't be a default subscription, of course, and maybe, as others pointed, reputation shouldn't be added to users on those groups. I'm not into cat pics or gifs (usually), or things like r/earthporn, but some memes can be very insightful and inside/meta jokes are a big part of any site culture and should not (cannot?) be avoided, and they do create a deep sense of community (as do insightful posts and comments).

As long as it is submitted to the appropriate group and tagged properly (I wouldn't call everything just fluff, btw, maybe something less negative and more descriptive, like "instant", I don't know) and thus we are able to filter it out easily, I don't see the problem of having it here. You can set the frontpage in a way where those posts either don't appear or are limited in number or something to that effect.

Reading through this thread however, I have also thought that so called high quality content might be hard to digest. When you get very long conversations between two people, for example, it gets to the point when your attention (my attention) falters. It might be a byproduct of current navigation, being used to reddit apps like Joey that make navigating easier (tap to expand/collapse, next or previous top/new comment navigation buttons, nested comments not as squeezed...). But if that is not caused by the current state but by the long comments, it might provoke some type of fatigue that having some fluff content around might alleviate.

Just some thoughts. :)

The problem I see is where you draw the line. Ok, cute animals, there's plenty on reddit or anywhere else. But what is low effort content exactly? and who is to decide? In my opinion we shouldn't judge what people likes, if it's cute animals, then so be it.
I don't like it, I don't want it and I avoid all those kinds of posts on reddit but I feel like banning content is not going to attract new users. I also agree with other comments saying maybe that content will bring the type of users and posts most of us wants to avoid, so I don't really know. Maybe periodical discussions about content?

Can we like, make a sequestered area for it tho?

I like pictures of fluffy things. I work hard and I like being cheered up after a hard shift. Sometimes I just don’t want to engage my brain much but for me when discussing quality there is a huge difference from a person lovingly posting a good picture of their cute animal and a low effort repost with a copied title and that’s almost 90% of the things I’m seeing on Reddit at the moment.

I don’t know how you filter them out. All I know is if stopping the cat pics stops the facebook style low effort posters coming here and trashing up the place then it might be a good price to pay. Remember the genuine connections you could make on Reddit near the start. I wish I could’ve prolonged that atmosphere, maybe this will help that here.

I found this thread via a link in a low-effort imgur link post. I then noticed how I was unable to tag the original post itself as 'Noise' much like we can with comments.

Might this be a way to self-moderate in the early stages? Though I guess it could be akin to a negative vote in some respects.

Leave it on facebook, reddit and basically everywhere else. Along with the memes and all the other low-effort BS.

I agree with all you wrote and would vote to disallow it for now. I'd like this to become a forum for discussions and an aggregator of interesting content, not yet another cutesy imageboard. This type of low effort content spreads too quickly and then tends to dominate. I don't want to again have to retreat to smaller groups/subreddits and use countless filters to avoid this kind of stuff.

I remember a time when I could browse r/all and at the end of the day most links were purple, today almost 50% gets filtered out by RES and I often still can can scroll through page after page while only finding a handful of post that are truly interesting.

Another problem with this type of submissions is that they get crossposted to dozens of, more or less fitting, subs which results in you not only having to endure that low effort post once but getting spammed with the same picture over and over again.

While we shouldn't outright ban all image submissions I think it needs strong moderation in order to make sure they meet a certain standard. I'm not really a fan of this whole SFWporn shtick, but I nevertheless used to enjoy browsing subs like r/earthporn, r/mapporn or r/dataisbeautiful which nowadays also get flooded with pretty random post, and even low-res, low quality pictures riddled with compression artifacts still garner thousands of upvotes. It boggles the mind.

We should strive for quality over quantity.

New here (to Tildes) - trying to follow some of the bigger news posts here to get a feel of the history thus far. Was there ever a determination based on this post? I've read a lot about Tildes today (after reading about it in a comment chain on HN), and I don't recall where, but I recall reading somewhere that you could post cute pictures. I'm not sure if this information is outdated or not.

I don't have any desire to post that sort of content (even though my cat is the cutest cat ever, of course), but I felt like some resolution would be nice.

?comment_order=newest didn't do much for me. Perhaps the OP could be edited?

I think that the mechanics of tilde are incredibly well suited to filtering out the type of content that you are trying to ban, so banning it is unnecessary.

Don't want to view fluff? Avoid ~fluff. Want to view a topic without the fluff present? filter comments tagged as fluff.