Is there any way to filter out users?
I was reading this thread and thinking about my experience with political stuff on Tildes. It seems that issues proposed by the thread often have more to do with individuals than a topic or group.
It's a little less obvious now for two reasons 1) usernames are only visible within "link threads" 2) you can only see a limited sections of posts on other peoples profiles.
I'm not knocking those choices I just want to point out that it makes it less easy to general sense of who is posting in a way that you find to be lacking substance or inflammatory.
I would be happy if I could rely on filtering groups from the home page but unfortunately it doesn't take much guile for an individual to politicize virtually any topic that arises in a way that triggers distracting or unpleasant emotions around a discussion.
My questions are:
- Do we have that option to filter out users right now?
- Would that option make your experience on Tildes better?
- Would it be useful to filter a users posts while choosing to allow their comments on other threads?
That's good to hear.
Feel free to respond further or not as you're just letting me know but I'd like to share my thoughts on the feature abstract.
I would opt for the simplest version of this, just filtering posts by user. This would allow participation and an opportunity for being a better user while stopping a user from detracting from other users experience on the site.
I do recognize the filter bubble problem as important but an argument of a slippery slope shouldn't restrain a feature that I think most people here would benefit from and use with restraint.
Could always start at the surface level. IMO it's a measured response.
If you're using uBlock Origin, you can filter specific user comments/threads immediately. In fact you could probably do it on a per-thread basis by changing the url of the filter. The caveat here is that it doesn't stop one from receiving reply notifications.
I'm not sure if there is an issue for "ignoring" other users though. The closest thing I found was an issue to "block notifications". I'll leave it to @cfabbro to find the correct issue/previous discussions.
If @cfabbro does appear I'd like to narrow it down to "filtering post visibility by user" I think that's a better frame of reference for the suggestion.
I'm here now, though I am not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean there should be a separate issue made just for that particular part? I can do that, if so. Lemme know.
p.s. If you have a Gitlab account, feel free to leave a comment on the Gitlab issues themselves with any suggestions you may have related to them. I do try to include links to any topics on tildes I notice that discuss the issues, but even so, having feedback scattered all over the place can be a bit of a PITA for code contributors to sort through when it comes time to finally implement the features.
If you would that would be great. I was thinking something along the lines of...
But feel free to modify, of course. I wasn't sure if I should specify the problem/need.
Sure, can do. But first; Are you referring to just filtering topic submissions submitted by said user, like how the tag filter currently works, or comments, or both? If it's going to be made a separate feature request issue from the overarching "investigate" one I think it should be as detailed/specific as possible.
p.s. I'm about to head to bed, so I will wait until you respond and add it in the morning. Hope you don't mind.
No problem at all, I'm talking about filtering topic submissions by said user like tag filters work.
I do not think comments should included to minimize the concerns you brought up in your overarching issue.
Gotcha. That makes sense. Submitted to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/672 :)
I think I'd use such a feature if it were granular like you proposed. There aren't any users that I just full stop don't want to see, tildes has done pretty well keeping out the real assholes, but if I could filter users from topics with certain tags, i.e. not see political posts or even just comments on political threads from such and such user (really what it boils down to honestly), I would certainly use it, and probably participate more in those threads. As is, I don't really engage in the sort of current issues political threads not out of lack of interest, but out of lack of desire to get into the long, unproductive back and forths I see there constantly. If the option were all or nothing though, I'd go with nothing, there's nobody here so obnoxious in one topic that I'd be willing to forgo their input in another.
What you're seeing in the resulting discussions can be encouraged by different shades of outrage triggered by a headline. The Tildes community discusses news more in a way that I generally prefer but we're not immune to the trap of being pulled in by the catharsis of engaging in political and ethical outrage.
I don't think I would use it very often either but it seems that the potential for one person to be a visible source of terrible articles and news sources.
Hmm, I'm not sure it's entirely, or even mostly to do with headlines, especially since people go to pains to de-editorialize them, and I figure at least a slim majority of users are reading the attached articles before commenting. I think it's just that there's two main camps here, the social democrats/liberals and the more hard left socialists, and they have irreconcilable differences on a lot of topics that results in a lot of talking past one another, regardless of how the discussion started.
I'm not super worried about that, I feel like anyone that consistently posted in a way that harmed the discourse on this site that much would just be banned outright, like alyaza was a while back.
I'm actually interested in learning more about the socialist side of things but sometimes these debates get out of hand before I even see them, and when I participate they don't go that well either. It seems like maybe we should try to talk about it, but it would have to be done very carefully, and I don't know how we could set up ground rules to do it productively. Maybe less emphasis on abstraction and more on explaining where you're coming from?
Yeah, it's a tricky situation, but I'm glad it's getting some notice and civil discussion over the past couple days, even if this isn't the first time. I do feel like political discussions here have been significantly better in the past than they are now, but I don't know if that's because of a fairly vicious and drawn out primary that we're still in the aftermath of, or shifts in the userbase, both, or neither.
I'm not sure how the abstraction thing fits into this; I read patience_limited's comment on it in the other thread (which I assume you're referencing), and totally agree that political discussions tend too much towards the clinical, especially among groups of people that don't actually have a lot to lose from their political opponents gaining power, groups which probably constitute a hefty portion of this site's userbase. But while getting away from that style of thinking is a good thing in and of itself, I dunno how much it helps the issue of social democrat-socialist slap fights, aside from promoting a popular front mentality, which I think most people here have already. Although admittedly the more I think about it, maybe further strengthening of that mentality is exactly what we need.
For example, I think discussions might go better if we avoided the words "capitalism" and "socialism". These are abstract, summary words with lots of baggage. Finding alternative ways to talk about what we mean, other than the ones we're used to, might avoid the usual cliches.
Talking in terms of abstractions is easy (I do it all the time). Finding examples of what you mean is much harder but I think it results in better writing and discussions.
It's definitely an interesting thought; while capitalism and socialism have reasonably precise technical definitions, most people are pretty unfamiliar with them, and will confuse things like capitalism and market economies, or socialism and social democracy. And a lot of the socialist jargon is super outdated and misleading; I'd bet that if you started throwing around terms like dictatorship of the proletariat, abolition of private property, or abolition of rent, almost nobody would correctly interpret what you were saying except people who were already socialists.
At the same time, I really feel like you do need some sort of shorthand for saying 'my overall political program is to build a radically egalitarian economy by having the workers control the means of production' or 'I believe we should improve quality of life without changing our economic paradigm', since when put in the context of a broader political agenda, the same programs can have quite different goals, and that bears keeping in mind.
That shorthand, though, obscures a lot of differences. Two people advocating "socialism" might want different things and still use the same term. An outsider only gets a very vague notion of it. Shorthand can be useful among people who have already hashed out their differences, or who have similar educations, but it seems much less helpful for two strangers meeting on the Internet.
Then again, writing about economics at length is work, and it's unreasonable to expect people meeting for casual conversation to do a lot of it at once. I think it might be more helpful to share links or talk about books you like?