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What level of conversation is tildes aiming for?
One thing I'm uncertain about Tildes is how informative its posts are meant to be. I've been keeping myself from posting hype threads about upcoming movies (Dune, Ride Your Wave, etc.).
What type of balance is tildes trying to strike? I'm in favor of shitposting, but against images, since I think text encourages the type of discussion I'm looking for a community. So I'd like to see copypasta, but I'm not sure what the general consensus is.
Edit: I'm looking less for general examples than some sort of hard and clear rule. I'm seeing comments which disagree somewhat and leave ambiguities, but I believe the criteria should be better laid out.
I post game trailers and similar types of content regularly, so I'm definitely fine with that kind of thing (since it's not necessarily obvious: I'm the creator of Tildes and the person who, in the end, decides whether any post should be removed or not).
So everything doesn't have to be super in-depth or anything, but personally, I try to think about it as something like, "a few days from now, if I'm someone that's interested in this subject, would I still care if I saw this?" There is a lot of content on the internet that makes zero impact, and is just forgotten minutes after you see it. That's the type of content that dominates a lot of platforms (because it's easy to view and share), and I don't want Tildes to be yet another one smothered in it.
This applies to both submissions and comments—a huge number of comments on sites like Reddit are basically nothing more than clutter, and it's effectively wasted time to read them. By saying that you like shitposting and copypasta, I think that's mostly what you're talking about, and I don't think that belongs here. For example, if you post a thread that's like "Who's excited for the Dune movie?!" and 50 people post comments that are basically just "yes I am very excited", nothing interesting has happened. There was no discussion, nobody got any new information about the movie, nobody's any better off than before they read the thread.
I would much rather have threads here that only have 10 comments that are actually worth reading vs. ones with 100 comments where 90% of them are just noise to skim through. If you want that style of content—where reactions dominate more than discussion, and people communicate largely through memes and gifs—there are already plenty of sites you can find it. I think people worry a little too much about trying to find one site that has everything they want. There's no reason that you can't visit Reddit/Twitter/etc. when you're in a shitposting mood, and Tildes when you feel like more substantial content.
Every post doesn't need to be inherently informative, and every post doesn't need to have the potential to generate a good discussion, but I think any given post should generally try to have at least one or the other.
I think game and film trailers are good posts because they are fodder for discussion about the work or related works
I can only speak to my own preferences, but I think of Tildes as a platform for content that is meaningful, whether that's serious or funny, factual or opinionated, informative or creative. It's not an encyclopedia; people are sharing random ideas just as much as outright knowledge. However, I come here to get away from low-effort memes on Reddit and everywhere else on the internet. I don't think there's anything wrong with a "hype thread" as long as it's framed a little less narrowly, but copypastas would feel out of place to me here. They're just fluff, and we have enough of that on every other social site as it is.
The "Tildes is a place for high-quality discussion" disclaimer before posting is a bit disheartening. I guess what I'm looking for is a more cut and dry analysis of what that is, instead of vague/case by case analysis. A hard and fast line would be good: Content produced by copy paste is not allowed. Or maybe some form of plagiarism check where Tildes runs a hash over previous posts in its history to determine of people are repeating content.
Removing posts for isms and obscenities is another matter, but I'd like a computer-decideable way to determine whether the post should stay up.
The group in question matters, too. ~talk is explicitly casual. It's not for shitposts, and yet it's also not a highbrow forum with exacting standards like a ~physics or ~historians group. I expect we'll have plenty of casual spaces here as the place grows up.
Spoken like a true programmer. :P I understand and appreciate what you're describing, but the premise of your suggestion is not something that I think Tildes has an issue with (or ever will). This community is small enough to foster a collective attitude of good faith in its users, at least relative to other sites. I don't think plagiarism has ever been a serious issue here. What you propose we codify is already implicit in the phrase "in-depth content." It's difficult to contrive a situation where a copypasta would be considered "in-depth"; there is no such thing as a serious copypasta. They may emulate a complex writing style or in-depth analysis of an issue, but as mindless iterations of an original thought (genuine or otherwise), they do not bring anything new to the table.
I've spent a great deal of time pondering administrative theory in online communities over the last few years. Perhaps this is not immediately clear to everyone, but auto-deleting/flagging good-faith but against-the-rules content detracts somewhat from the subliminal principles of community presence that a pseudo-decentralized moderation system facilitates. That is to say, if it's purely the judgment of the administrator and their obedient mod-bots that decides what stays and what goes, users have little incentive to cultivate any sort of genuine site culture themselves; they're just along for the ride.
Obviously the power structure here is fundamentally centralized, but it still feels different from a community where adherence to the all-encompassing Law is emphasized over inherently thoughtful conduct. If every discussion about what belongs on Tildes ends up with a link to the rules, then the ability of users to influence what happens on the site has been transferred to a static document whose alteration they are another degree of separation removed from. However, if no such document exists, then the implications of one's comment being marked as noise, or the opinions voiced by other users in a meta thread, are the actions that become elevated within the community as the push factor behind a cultural shift. This produces in users a sense of having contributed to the community in a way that overzealous, top-down moderation inherently cannot. In a place like Tildes, that sense of culture is something we're searching for.
I'd also like to point out that a more complex ruleset doesn't necessarily equate to a better one. I've operated a relatively large wiki (65k+ articles) for the past five or so years. We have a ridiculously specific style guide detailing nearly everything someone could think to ask about how an article should be organized. However, this is largely done for structural reasons—issues unique to encyclopedias and the necessity of article standardization for mass editing and readability. The closer to get to the content of any sort of actual user-generated material, rather than its formatting, the vaguer the rules become. We ask editors to use a formal tone, but how on earth can you define what that is without leaving it somewhat open to interpretation? Beyond a few realistically definable characteristics, the scope of such a rule is too broad to actually cover, as inconvenient as that may be for the systemically inclined among us.
At a certain point, it becomes literally impossible to police user behavior because human interactions are, at their core, completely and utterly subjective. I realize that this word tends to evoke a deep-seated, burning rage within the hearts and minds of STEM-ites around the globe, and I sympathize deeply. I am one, by training. However, in a place like Tildes, where we seek to embody trust, concern, and respect, the best decision we can make would be to emphasize our support of collectively agreed-upon values over prescriptive, legalistic procedures.
My opinion is that we can have high-quality discussion about practically anything if we are just willing to be a little thoughtful. Again, you don't have to write a thesis (writing an academic paper on something won't make it any less silly), but if we aren't willing to get to what makes something interesting or meaningful in whatever way, rather than simply surface-level emotion, then why should anyone else care to have the convo in the first place?
Cut and dry is specifically what's being avoided, so as to keep people from trying to argue over the specific boundary.
There is a specific boundary though: what the moderator decides. Cut and Dry is transparency of the moderator's thought process. It's also a great deal more encouraging. There was a post recently by a user who felt like they didn't have anything to contribute. I think this is possibly because they got a misguided impression from the vague criteria they had seen before.
I think it's about culture. There is no explicit boundary; rather, a tacit knowledge of what's acceptable and what's not. This is part of what made usenet so successful: people joined in small groups at the beginning of each school year, and acclimated to the existing implicit standards of acceptability. This does mean that you have to spend some time reading before you start to write, so you understand what the culture is. Personally, I think that's good. And tildes has, to some extent, the same thing; the invite system limits inflow of users (though even with an invite system, acceleration happens; it's just more muted than it would otherwise be).
I read that thread too. My take was not that they were intimidated by the lack of rules, but rather that they were simply unsure if commenting (as opposed to posting) was considered "enough" to contribute to a community. I don't think it was specifically limited to or directed toward Tildes.
An analogy I've used in previous discussion threads about this is the glycemic index - a measure of how quickly the sugar and other carbs in a food are digested and enter your bloodstream.
Tildes in general aims for content that digests "slowly" / has a low glycemic index. A comment or text post should take some time to write, and then some time for other users to read, and digest, and think about before replying. Links should take some time to read or watch and digest (you can see a clever element of this in the site's design, where news articles automatically have their length in words shown alongside the tags, and videos have the length of the video displayed).
The polar opposite of Tildes in this regard isn't really reddit, but the frontpage of imgur or other sites where literally every single piece of content is just a image or GIF that takes 1 or 2 seconds to look at, laugh at, then move on.
The big question to ask yourself when posting, or commenting, is "can this encourage meaningful discussion?"
Upcoming movies? They can work if the link has some substance, or if you're able to start off with a comment adding some substance (speculation, discussion of previous work by the creator, etc.). Just commenting "I'm so excited!" is probably going to get flagged as noise.
Shitposting, memes, copypasta, and the like are greatly discouraged; they rarely generate meaningful discussion that couldn't have been started a better way, and if you're including additional commentary in the OP, it's not really just a shitpost/meme/etc. anymore.
Personally I'd rather not hear about most movies (or games or books) that haven't been released yet, no matter how much commercial interests want to hype them up. Actual movie reviews might be interesting, and of course people will want to talk about movies they've seen.
However, I'm not going to get in the way of obsessive fans doing what they want. :-)
It seems like a recurring "what have movies have you watched recently" topic might be a good idea to get conversations started?
This is just my personal opinion: I see Tildes as the middle ground between reddit and hacker news. You can sometimes have less intellectual* conversations than hacker news but it never devolves into the level of shitposting that is frequent on reddit. I would not like to see Tildes become a platform for copypasta (I can't see the difference between copypasta and spam).
* What I mean is that for some hacker news threads (but not all) you just can't comment unless you have a PhD in the topic or are very informed and have self studied it. That's less of an issue here.
And hopefully less endless arguments and hair splitting than HN
The first year here was exactly like that. It's settled down somehow. I feel like there is a mental adjustment period here where new users have to decompress a bit from the social norms of the rest of the internet before they feel comfortable. That first year was rough because we all got to go through that process at the same time.
Personally, I find tildes to be of higher quality than HN. Granted, all three (tildes, HN, reddit) have serious problems, and all three are prone to some of the same sorts of devolvement (though with slightly different manifestations). (And I suspect part of the reason HN has devolved more is that it's so much older than tildes.)
Disagree. People in technical HN threads have no idea what they're talking about as often as not; they're just good at bullshitting.
I may not have been clear enough in my previous comment, what I meant is that to be able to distinguish between bullshit and smart comments in technical threads you need a certain degree of advanced knowledge, otherwise you end up making a fool of yourself or not adding much to the discussion. That's been a problem I have with hacker news and the reason I tend to avoid threads about physics or math.
Here's a good example of a hype thread.
It's just a post to a trailer people are excited about. There aren't a ton of comments, but that's reflective of the fact that we still don't have a ton of information about the game.
The way to see it is that people post when they have something to say. An article that's relevant to the post is good, a comment about how the content made you feel or what you're thinking is fine. What's missing, that you would see on a place like Reddit, is reaction gifs or memey canned responses which is what we're mostly trying to avoid.
And memes and reaction gifs aren't even verboten in and of themselevs, it's just not cool for your post to only be a meme or a one-liner. Those things are fine as part of a broader post that makes some sort of point that's not just repeating a thought or a phrase that's already out there.
Here's what I'd like to see as the metric for posting:
If you find something on the internet and think, "Oh man, that's interesting! I should share it with others in case they haven't seen it!" then I think that's a good post.
If you find something on the internet and think, "Oh man, I can get SO MANY VOTES FOR THIS!!! OMG!!!" then please don't. Or go spam reddit if you can't help yourself.
And by "you" in the above examples, I mean "You In General" not "The OP In Particular".
I guess I'll be try to be brief to simplify this:
1: Does this (post or comment) inform me enough to remember it and want to cite it later?
2: Is this (question or content) interesting enough to make me want to reply to it with more than a brief reaction?
3: If it doesn't fit one of the 2 above, would the person who posted it accept a clarification and learn from it? (This one's specifically for context stuff, which I ask for a lot)
Obviously 'interesting' and 'informative' is pretty vague and post aren't categorized this simply (poetry being the main example that comes to mind) but it might help.