4
votes
Tildes subgroup idea
Original post here
What if subgroups were totally dynamic?
ie:
If I post to ~music with a post tagged [hip-hop] [instrumental], that post could exist in ~music.hip-hop.instrumental, ~music.instrumental.hip-hop, ~music.instrumental, ~music.hip-hop. Is there a benefit in structured hierarchy? Users could sub to the root ~music for everything, if they want, or they could sub to specific hierarchies that they enjoy (ie: i'd sub to ~music.instrumental but not ~music.hip-hop.instrumental.
This would also drop the need for specific moderation teams or support structures for larger subgroups. Additionally, it creates an interesting structure where posts aren't relegated to single groups, allowing for more discover-ability.
Reasons like this are exactly why I've specifically kept the topic tags compatible with group names, because I think there are some really interesting parallels between tags and subgroups. At this point, I honestly don't know how it's going to work. Do we even need "real" subgroups? Maybe not, I'm really not sure.
Maybe, like you said, going to ~music.instrumental is really just ~music, filtered down to posts that have the "instrumental" tag. It makes sense in a lot of ways, but I think this might not work nearly as cleanly in some of the other sections of the hierarchy. For example, having cross-subgroup moderation might seem reasonable in ~music, but it wouldn't make sense for the people able to moderate in something like ~geo.canada.alberta to also be moderating in ~geo.australia.
If you check the parent comment I wrote, I goes quite in details with example of why we should have groups and not just relies on tags.
Of course it's open suggestion so I more than welcome poking holes into it :)
Edit: maybe a good thing could be to have a middle ground and limit the subgroups to only one level?
It's quite a complicated thing to plan I agree.
"promoting" a virtual group to a static group seems like a good mechanic
Yeah, I thought that on a website that should promote "community driven by content", having sub-groups forms in a dynamic way would grant an organic growth that are more close to the real interest.
Once an interest gather an established sub-community, it would be a more reliable investment, in terms of resource spent by tildes as an organization but also stability for the tildes community as a whole, that its sub-group is allowed a sort of advanced structure that require humans to takes the wheel instead of just the system providing an aggregation of content.
I find it an interesting suggestion (and my bad, I forgot to reply) but I was thinking, following your example:
You subscribe to ~music.instrumental only but in that system wouldn't you get also stuff posted to ~music.hiphop.instrumental causing your sub to be quite full of "noise"?
It wouldn't be noise, the granularity you've selected with ~music.instrumental is to have all instrumental music.
A post like this could be tagged with
[legal] [ama] [intellectual property], and could fall into any subgroup as such.