The case against ~news
The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news.
/r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be better served by eliminating ~news entirely and replacing it with a news tag with a date property, which would allow for nice chronological filtering for catching up on news stories, especially if the article date could be scraped somehow. Miss a week of news? Search the tag with a date range, get all news stories for last week, perhaps with a minimum comment threshold to see what sparked discussion.
I think ~gov (or politics) would be needed as a replacement, as it's a major driver of most news stories, but there's so much more to politics than just news, and those discussions don't exactly fit anywhere nicely at the moment, esp if it's a random blog post relating to recent events in the news. Almost every other group serves as a nice catch-all for most other common news categories.
The only issue I would see would be when ~gov would overlap with the other categories, which would likely happen a lot..but that happens with the current ~news too. I think that could be further mitigated by having a sort of x-post system blurring the lines of tags and groups even more, where ~gov would take precedence but posts would then also appear in the tagged groups for users not following governance otherwise.
That's actually a foundation of my more insane idea of completely eliminating traditional groups by letting people build their own groups in the form of prioritized tags, but that's another post for another time.
Yes, ~news really shouldn't exist. All other groups are based around subjects, while "news" is a type of content. The reason we don't have something like ~videos is the same: that's a type, and the videos should just go into whatever group is for their subject instead.
We're already "avoiding" ~news in many cases: when there's news about a video game, it goes in ~games. News about a TV show goes in ~tv. News about sports goes in ~sports. News about tech companies go in ~tech. And so on.
The issue (and reason that ~news exists despite explaining why it shouldn't) is that there's a lot of content that people just think of as... "news", without a particular subject. If anything, the subject is probably the location that the news is relevant to. That is, we should probably have something like ~geo with subgroups like ~geo.usa, ~geo.canada, etc. and then any news stories relevant to the location go in those.
Overall though, I think that would just end up being more confusing than helpful at this point. Even though "news" as a concept doesn't really fit in with the rest of the groups and organization of the site, everyone still knows what it means and I don't think it's causing much confusion. It's more important that the group system is useful than being perfectly logically consistent.
The way I've been thinking about it is more that Tildes isn't yet mature enough that we have enough groups to put all the news into yet. So instead we just have ~news for now as more of a "misc" category. In the future I would hope to see the usage of ~news naturally dissipate into the other groups that are suitable for the individual subjects.
I think there's two axes (at least).
One is the "news-ish-ness" of it (I'm avoiding newsworthiness because that has other connotations). The other is the subject or theme.
If a brand-new video game gets released, that's ~news and also ~games. If an article is written about the making of an older game, that's ~games but not ~news (even if the article is "new" in the sense that it was just published).
If news-ish stuff happens and it doesn't obviously fit into any of the other groups, it usually ends up in ~news. Something not-news-ish that doesn't fit into any existing group usually goes into ~misc.
~geo or ~local would be awesome, but I don't think it would solve the problem. Within those groups you'd have a) news that's only interesting to locals; b) news of broader interest; and c) non-news stuff, which I think would be mostly only interesting to locals.
For example, news about George Floyd's murder might belong in ~local.usa.mn.minneapolis...but it's obviously also national & international news that should "bubble up" out of that group to a broader audience. Meanwhile there's other local Minneapolis news that shouldn't bubble up to a broader audience because it's local-only. Then you have non-news-ish stuff like "what's your favorite pizza place in Minneapolis?".
It might be nice to have an ~geo, for the non-usa folks.
I presume all US centric news and politics would ideally go under ~geo.usa, and then the most voted/commented items would bubble up?
It might remove the implicit bias that everyone is interested in everything that happens in America.
This would make it even more difficult to decide where to post things since there are many stories that are about multiple places. (Consider deciding where to put a story about US-China relations.) Tags seem better for that.
Unfortunately, Tildes isn't using tags enough in the UI, but it seems that's planned.
I actually agree. Basically all the categories are news, so a dedicated news category seems superfluous.
However, I’m not sure about replacing it with ~gov. I think that runs around the rationale behind not wanting to have a dedicated politics group. If we have a ~news it might be best to focus it more like “current events” to cover whatever big things are going on right now. COVID related stuff is a good example.
An alternative use could be something like the Editor’s Notes Josh Marshall puts in TalkingPointsMemo. Rather than reporting any discrete bit of news, he sort of does a metaanalysis on what’s going on with a particular story. I find it really useful as he sort of steps back and gives you a fact pattern like, here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t know and here are the reasonable conclusions we can draw based on how our assumptions square up or the story keeps developing.
But there aren’t many analysts who do that. We’d basically just be posting Josh Marshall over and over again. Maybe a little bit from Jeet Heer.
I totally understand the rational of not having a dedicated politics group, it definitely has the potential to go cesspool quickly, especially as the site grows larger. But I would say news would ultimately devolve in such manner as well
I can understand this argument and agree with a lot of it, but some of the most popular topics have been the coronavirus daily/weekly topics (which is special enough to have its own group) but the protests, BLM movement, and police response don't really have a good place to sit, even if ~gov or ~politics were created.
I assume ~politics was omitted deliberately, even though we talk about it all the time. There is a politics for every subject, and it invites partisanship.
I like the idea of adding ~gov. I would have suggested ~law but ~gov is more general. Although, I suppose there is governance for every subject, too.
A ~gov group would invite more discussion about the concrete mechanics of government, perhaps by people who work in government, though I don't know if we have anyone like that who wants to talk.
Definitely. By forcibly breaking ~news (which has a huge potential to cluster political discussion) into as many topics as reasonably possible, it diffuses that partisanship across a broader surface, which in theory I would think could make it a touch easier to moderate.
It makes me think my original thinking was reversed: ~gov or ~law shouldn't be a catch-all, they should only be covered when the topic wouldn't better be covered in another group with a politics and/or news tag. Would also allow for some nice sub grouping like ~gov.elections.usa or ~law.usa.judgements
It’s more that nobody wants to listen to us, as we tend to be killjoys. :-p
But we can’t restrict participation to people by background so I’m not sure you’d get critical enough mass.