Limit the number of posts from a particular site?

Do you mean allow users to customize how many topics from a specific domain they will see at once on a topic listing page for them personally?

Or, are you suggesting we limit the amount of topics from specific domains users are allowed to post on Tildes globally?

If you mean the first possibility, I can see the utility and you can ignore the rest of this comment.

If you mean the second possibility:

Are there any particular sites you had in mind when writing this topic?

I think this is a human issue and a moderation issue and probably not something that should be solved via a technical solution.

What I am saying is, if a user or users are submitting so much content to Tildes from a single site that it is actually causing issues, then that is something that I think should be handled personally between the users posting the content and the site's administrator.

I also feel like setting any arbitrary limit on how many topics from a specific domain (or set of domains, or all domains) that can be posted within a period of time is not only going to be incredibly tricky to get right, but whatever limit is set will have trouble scaling alongside Tildes' growth. It becomes just one more thing to maintain.

There is also the issue of sorting. Since you can sort topics various different ways on Tildes, there is nothing stopping topics from a single domain dominating your "Activity" sort, since those topics can be as old as the site itself.

And then you have to consider how communities on Tildes might evolve over time. I obviously cannot talk about it with any sort of authority, but from what I remember, the general idea for Tildes' future is that the different groups and subgroups will eventually grow into their own, distinct communities. Eventually, Tildes will not be just one, homogeneous community, but instead several relatively unique, smaller ones.

What I am getting at is, there is basically no way you could set a global limit on domain submissions across all groups once those groups have sufficiently diverged enough, it would absolutely have to be set on a group-by-group basis.

Which begs the question, who gets to make that decision? If there are thousands of groups and subgroups, but the permission to set domain restrictions is reserved for only a handful of moderators and administrators, then domain restriction requests could become overwhelming.

To be honest, I am pretty opposed to the idea of setting domain restrictions globally on Tildes, now or in the future, but I do think the idea has a lot of merit when you begin to think about the various groups on Tildes (those currently existing and those to be created in the future) as separate micro-communities.

Will specific groups or subgroups ever actually be "flooded" with submissions from a specific domain? Yeah, honestly, that will probably happen. I am still leaning towards that being an issue best solved by human intervention and moderation, but the idea of allowing groups to democratically choose to limit submissions from specific domains within their little slice of Tildes is an interesting idea.

Finally, maybe the best solution for you and others would just be to introduce the ability to filter out or ignore topics from specific domains?

Do you mean a limitation for all users, or a setting that each user can make?

If you mean the first option, I don't think that's a good idea. It's heavy-handed. And, if a single website happens to provide lots of great content, it should have a greater presence. I don't see an issue here.

If you mean the second, I think it's a good idea. But I wonder if the feature would be used enough to justify the development effort.

I don't think a hard control is needed but something like a dialogue on submission to the effect of "you have submitted x links from this source today" could serve as an appropriate gentle suggestion.

I don’t like this idea for a variety of reasons. To keep it brief-ish

• Tildes needs more content. There’s such little new content being added, especially non-tech and non-us-politics content. Two of the most common complaints about tildes when the topics come up to improve tildes are (a) lack of content and (b) lack of non-techy users. I think as long as posts are quality articles it really doesn’t matter what site they come from. If they aren’t things the community cares about they’ll fall from the top of the page into oblivion. Maybe if people get frustrated at one site dominating the top of the front page then more people would post content.

• I don’t think site is a good metric for variety. Most of the long-form articles I read come from one of a few sites but that doesn’t mean they are at all the same subject. I have tabs open to make posts about: a girl who murdered her rapist when she was 11 and her life story, an opioid kingpin, a man who had a ticket for unlimited flights, a mysterious event involving the FBI at an observatory, and the post I did make about the gay Chinese fathers and surrogacy. All those came from narratively. If I submitted all those at once to accurate groups would that be considered “limiting the variety of content” because they all came from one site? Because IMO that’s a bad way to define content diversity. There are lots of sites that are like this. Wired and BBC are some other good examples.

• What does this look like in practice? Let’s use my narratively tabs as an example and say there is a 4 posts limit from a site. Should I not post anything until I read every article I’m going to read in a 24 hour period before I post anything to make sure I only post the articles I find the most interesting from the site? Should I post articles I find interesting as I read them and then just accumulate a backlog of things I want to post until my time limit refreshes and hope eventually I work my way through my backlog? Should I delete posts if I find an article more interesting than one I already posted so that I’m able to post it? Realistically if that limit existed I’d either stop posting since most my posts come from an RSS feed or pocket, or I’d create multiple accounts to get around the limits. Both of which are, in my opinion, worse outcomes.

If the community at large disagrees, I’ll stop posting as much from CityLab and Narratively. I’m going to read them either way so it’s no skin off my bones to post less often. I just don’t think it’s a good direction for the community to move in when the site already feels like it is starved of users who actively engage with the site beyond votes.

I'd be OK with a version of this, if it mixed up the sort order rather than outright filtering the posts entirely.

Sometimes I pull up my RSS reader with my morning coffee and see a number of articles from the same site that I think are worth submitting. But I'm not sure I want to submit them all, at least at the same time, because of that effect you mention of seeing the front page all from one website.

This will be less and less of an issue as the site gets more traffic & submissions, though, so I'm not sure if it's worth building a permanent solution to what will hopefully be a temporary problem.

I would like to limit the time -which could be controlled by end-user side- instead of number of post