6
votes
Default "Activity" sort should be for a smaller period
The default sort being "Activity" is great, but it makes the front page feel stale now that we're getting more activity across days. We should swap out to a smaller period such as 24 hours.
I personally love the fact that threads from days/weeks ago like the "Introductions" one keep resurfacing on Activity, all time. Things are going to feel a bit stale here no matter what we do because right now we're a very very small community. However the front page, default sort being stale is only an issue if you let it be. If you get bored of the front page, play around with the other sorts and time periods and go to the groups themselves and do the same.
One very important thing you should try to keep in mind on ~ is that if you go exploring and find a post from 20 days ago that you missed the first time it was posted, don't be afraid to read it and then leave a comment. Your new comment will cause the post to get bumped to the top of Activity as a result and then other people who may have missed it the first time might give it a read and join in on the conversation as well. That's the beauty of the Activity,all time system being default
Here on ~ we don't need to obsess over only the latest submission and late breaking news or articles. We want to encourage and facilitate ongoing discussion no matter how old the submission is, so long as it's interesting and the comments it sparks are as well. Hence
Activity-all timebeing the default sort. Also, keep in mind that once we have ahidefeature, you can always just hide any posts that keep popping up in Activity that you have no interest in following, too.I actually really enjoy this part of the community. I'm so accustomed to people flipping their lids and saying something along the lines of "don't bump old threads" that it's actually difficult to make that transition to "it's okay to reply", but I like that I don't have to worry about missing out on a conversation just because I didn't notice it the first time around.
This site can be very versatile with the way people choose to use it, and that's something you don't really get from modern websites that like to curate your content for you.
Being able to use ~ more like a forum if you want it to is one of the appeals for me.
And once there's a system for only viewing new comments and their parents (which I've seen people discussing), it's not a pain to dive back into an old topic you read last week or last month.
[I've also seen the concept of tags that expire; ~ doesn't need to be a breaking news site, but if people want that option, a breaking news tag that expires is one way to categorize that sort of content to make it easier to find or filter out the first week (or whatever).]
Yeah, I am definitely a huge proponent of expiring tags.
I have used
breaking newstags a few times already, such as on my submission of the recent Texas school shooting. I think it's a valuable tag to have so that people can keep abreast of the latest news but IMO it should expire and turn back in to a regularnewstag after 24-48 hours.Similarly, on newly published scientific studies I have used
recent studyandrecent publicationtags. After a week or two those should probably have therecentpart scrubbed form them as well.Is there any particular reason why they should transform into other tags? What if instead of
breaking newsturning intonews, you simply tagged the submissionbreaking newsnewsand thebreaking newstag disappeared after its configured expiry?I understand that it may not be as clear initially, but it's probably a lot easier to implement, doesn't need special handling for different tags in software, and doesn't let users do strange things like having
newsexpire tooldsafter a week without its being visible from the start.plus: if a "breaking news" news is tagged "news", you would be able to see "breaking news" posts when filtering with the "news" tag, and a "breaking news" is arguably a "news" that you would want to show up when searching for "news" imho.
Yeah, that’s probably a better approach especially when things are posted in ~news so a ‘news’ tag is a bit redundant. Thanks for the suggestion.
The same goes for tags like ' fresh ' in the ~music community, typically used to denote a new release. That tag should self-delete after say, 30 days, so that people using it to find new music can always find the latest music rather than the tag's old history, which is no longer relevant.
Have you enabled "Toggle marking new comments" in settings? That enables showing new comment count (since last load of that thread) on the post listings (e.g. front page), and when you open a thread, it highlights new comments. There's also a userscript here that adds a button to go to the next unread comment.
With that available to you, any time you load a post, you should be able to see what's been added to the discussion, without having to trawl through old posts.
I have enabled it, yeah~ And it's very handy.
It's just that with the longer threads, scrolling that much is a bit of a pain, haha. I guess I'm lazy. (I might try out the script, but I'm on my phone a lot.)
I made a *monkey script to help with that.
Check my profile history (I'm on mobile), it's called tildes extended.
I got report that it's not working on Firefox due to stricter security but it works smoothly on Chrome.
Tomorrow I'll check how to fix it on Firefox
And what a script it is... It's a lifesaver, thanks again for it.
I actually like how it stands too. It feels a lot like message boards, but more fleshed out.
And thanks for this tidbit. I think it’s cool to see a community encouraging not being afraid to discuss on aged threads. I’ll be more mindful as I continue to browse and comment.
I'm really excited for this. I hate finding something on Reddit that I can give some good insight in, but the post is over a day old. Just makes you go "What's the point?". Nevermind stuff that's months old and locked.
On traditional forums at least you can comment or ask questions on old stuff (project threads anyone?), sure you'll inevitably have the resident forum bigshot shout "Necro!" but often it'll lead to more quality discussion.
If I can make one observation about this 'recent activity sort' feature. It is great, and it clearly solved the problems of smaller communities seeming 'inactive' - but this morning, the tradeoffs we're making having that as the default view are becoming clear.
If you view the 'new posts' you'll notice that most of them are being ignored, there are less votes on them then there were with the initial 50-person test group, and we're now over ten times that many people here. Clearly, people aren't seeing and voting on new posts as much, even though there are a lot more people.
That's not a serious issue after all - at some point, this will look and operate more like reddit by default, before it evolves beyond that into something else, and you'll be able to set your own default view and have tildes remember it (likely even on a per-community basis).
I just wanted to point out that nearly everything has a tradeoff, and we need to be watching for those tradeoffs very carefully so we understand the systems we are building.
Yep, that's what I noticed as well. I've been navigating to new manually each time to see if there's stuff I'm interested in.
Yeah, we just talked about this in slack @amarok but I figure I would post it here for posterity, too:
One idea we had to address this issue was reserving the top 4 slots at the top of activity for New Posts to give them a bit more exposure time on the Activity sort so they don't get overwhelmed by new comments from super active threads.
I think this would be a good idea to test during the alpha phase. My concern is about how it will scale in the long term. What happens when there are new posts every few minutes? Will they cycle through in order of posting?
I see what you're saying and agree... however ideally on ~ if/when that happens and the new queue gets swamped we simple spawn a new subgroup to take the pressure off. ;)
I don't know. Are they being ignored because of the bumped posts stealing their attention or because the community genuinely isn't as interested in discussing them? I know for me there is nothing super compelling in the 10 posts right now under new.
As an aside, while we're on the topic, what's the opinion about off-topic comments like bumping, which I thought were somewhat issues in message board forums? I can imagine it happening here as well down the line.
Yeah that can definitely be a problem, but thanks to comment tagging it's entirely possible that we can address this by excluding new comments tagged as off-topic, troll, noise, flame etc from the "bump" mechanic. So as long as someone makes the effort to tag the new comments (when it's appropriate) this can help a little.
Alternative option: ~ should save your last sort. The whole idea of options is to allow other people different defaults right? Why not just store it with the session cookie?