12 votes

Suppose we make Tildes topics a bit more like little blogs by adding support for "updates?"

I've previously written about long-running topics and I've asked about software for blogging. But I keep coming back to doing some simple blogging on Tildes. I don't think Tildes should try to compete with real blogging software, but maybe Tildes can support a minimal version of it, enough to make it worth doing it here when starting an independent blog isn't worth the effort? An example would be a project diary (like for my accordion synthesizer project). We could encourage people to start a topic for each of their creative projects that they want to talk about and to post updates as they make progress. Or, perhaps this would be a way to cover some ongoing story that they want to live-blog?

I've refined my ideas a bit about how it might work: Suppose a Tildes topic contains a list of zero or more updates in chronological order? Only the original author can post an update, but anyone can write comments responding to any update. When you post an update to one of your topics, the comment tree for each previous update gets collapsed, encouraging people to comment on the latest update.

When a topic gets an update, it reappears in the topic list with a separate set of votes, showing both the original topic's title and the update's title concatenated. Any old listing is removed, so we don't show the same topic twice. However, maybe the topic heading shows the last three updates or so if the topic is getting multiple updates in a short period of time, as might happen when live-blogging.

4 comments

  1. [3]
    Deimos
    Link
    I've had a few thoughts about related subjects lately. They're not very fleshed-out and may not be feasible, but quick/scattered thoughts: I think I've mentioned it before, but maybe adding a...

    I've had a few thoughts about related subjects lately. They're not very fleshed-out and may not be feasible, but quick/scattered thoughts:

    • I think I've mentioned it before, but maybe adding a group like ~blog might be an interesting experiment. It could just be a place where people make blog-like text posts about whatever subjects they want. When we get some better filtering controls in place, users would even be able to pretty easily see only ~blog posts from certain users and/or exclude ones from particular users.
    • I've been thinking about ways to be able to add "additional links" to an existing topic and whether it's worth doing. It's fairly common for me to go back to old threads and post updates in comments (most recent example), but I don't know if it's worth adding that as an official feature. It would be nice in some ways, but also has the potential to get pretty confusing.
    • There's also already a little bit of handling for posts being part of a "series", though it isn't used for much yet. Currently it's being applied to the automatically-posted scheduled posts, like I have tracking for all the posts in the "what have you been playing?" type of posts in ~games. This could potentially be extended out to non-automatic posts too, though again it might end up being kind of confusing.

    Overall, it's just another aspect of needing to try and find a balance between simplicity, organization, more metadata, etc.

    9 votes
    1. [2]
      balooga
      Link Parent
      For the "blog" idea, have you considered allowing users to post topics directly to their profiles, as if the profiles were groups? Reddit does something like this. Then I would have my own place...

      For the "blog" idea, have you considered allowing users to post topics directly to their profiles, as if the profiles were groups? Reddit does something like this. Then I would have my own place to write posts and others could subscribe to @balooga the same way they might subscribe to ~news or something. Then (and only then) would my posts appear on their front pages.

      If this was a well-received feature, you could later allow users to create their own sub-groups like @balooga.blog or @balooga.poetry for more granular subscription options. Of course tags would still work the way they do now.

      7 votes
      1. Deimos
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        I've thought about it a little, but from seeing how it's gone on reddit I'm pretty skeptical about it. It's introduced a lot of confusion over there—for example, I've seen users making a bunch of...

        I've thought about it a little, but from seeing how it's gone on reddit I'm pretty skeptical about it. It's introduced a lot of confusion over there—for example, I've seen users making a bunch of posts to their profiles without understanding there's practically zero chance that anyone else will ever see those posts.

        I think it also shifts the focus of the site somewhat. As is, Tildes is a "subject-centric" site. Other sites like Twitter are "user-centric". There's a spectrum between the two extremes, but it's probably hard to do both well, and it can add complexity for future updates if you always have to try to keep both styles in mind and make sure everything will work for both.

        5 votes
  2. [2]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. skybrian
      Link Parent
      Yes, it might be a good way to get started. Maybe I'll try that.

      Yes, it might be a good way to get started. Maybe I'll try that.

      1 vote