24
votes
~personal should be a thing
I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.
We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.
Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.
For people that may have missed it (since it was kinda buried in an unrelated topic), @Deimos actually talked about this recently:
https://tildes.net/~news/pfc/daily_thread_for_news_updates_discussion_of_george_floyd_protests_june_3#comment-55ay
I think that’s a good idea. I have at times thought about sharing this kind of thing and having a ~personal group would be a good incentive for people to do so without fear of having their posts considered irrelevant or trivial.
I think this would work better as a tag than a top level category. “Personal” and “blog” are both more about the medium/source than the content.
While I do agree that it can work as a tag - I think a top level category has quite a but of merit.
Nobody generally wants to post personal opinions/events/rants in a top level existing group - it would break the standard discussions and could give the feeling of 'wanting attention' (not bad, but not a positive emotion in most cases).
I thought about ~misc, but again - that has the same issue. Majority of posts are designated as news or more professional opinion pieces whereas a ~personal group would be more inclined for personal thoughts that people wouldn't normally share in top level groups.
Agreed. We've got one user here who occasionally posts stuff from her own blog and it's totally okay. The best approach here would simply be to post the blog entry into the relevant group, well and if it isn't relevant to anything, either ~life or ~misc will do. I'd be careful with making new groups, because we already have some which are fairly inactive, adding more wouldn't help.
On the contrary, I believe that a ~personal group may incentivize and encourage more activity. I posted a reply to @DrStone above that may clarify some thoughts as to why this would be.
Not every blog post would merit being designated to one specific group, a ~personal group would advocate for more personal opinions/views/thoughts/rants that usually wouldn't work in top level discussion.
I am normally the one to suggest using tags > making new groups, but I actually strongly disagree with doing that here. IMO ~blogs or ~personal makes way more sense, since the content submitted there would have a completely different purpose, and be in a different format (text topic only), than most of the contents submitted to other groups. And mixing blog posts into ~life or ~talk would just confuse things and users.
Having a dedicated group would also potentially allow for some unique handling not available elsewhere too. E.g. Allow the user who submits a blog post there to set the default comment sorting, allow users to subscribe to or filter out particular users' blog posts, maybe even allow inline/embedded images in those blog posts, etc.
Blog posts are still about something though. If someone writes a blog post about a woodworking project, it makes more sense to go in something like ~hobbies. If the write a blog post to review a movie, ~movies. Life journal style post, ~life or ~talk. This applies both to "blogging" as text posts and to submitting links to one's personal external blog.
Would, say, a tab on someone's user page (alongside "All Posts", "Topics", "Comments") for "Text Posts" be enough to feel like a "blog"? You'd post in the appropriate content category, but it still shows up like a feed on your page. Or that plus a checkbox when posting "include in my blog" if all of one's text posts seems too broad. You could go the other way too if we add posting to your personal space (much like reddit has now) and "submitting" it as a topic to a content category.
True, but I that's kind of how I envisioned ~blogs working anyways. E.g. Allow me to create ~blogs.cfabbro, where only I (and maybe people I approve of) can post text topics to, and then when I write about computer forensics allow me to have that post mirrored to ~comp with the
computer forensicsanduserblogstag.This sort of dual model would have the benefits of giving users their own space, allow people to subscribe/view ~blogs to see all blog posts on the site (which would aid in discovery), and subscribe to particular bloggers they enjoy, while also still allowing people who are only interested in the particular subjects to find those blog posts through the respective related groups they also subscribe to, even if they don't sub to ~blogs or a particular user's blog.
I originally suggested a group called ~personal, which @Deimos implemented as a group called ~life.
So the ~life group is the ~personal group.
If ~life is a bout broad stuff, we could also fold it into ~life.personal. ~life gets used to as about personal stuff anyway, and a .personal section could be for people posting about themselves.