State of Tags as a Mechanic
Through what I've seen with the tag system, it seems completely superfluous and often detrimental to a post that requires a full read. Sure, it helps identify funny posts and gives warnings and the like, but it seems too powerful a system for sensitive people to abuse. Tagging a joke comment as "Fluff", "Funny", "Joke", or "Troll" devalues a post, as it spoils everything in the post before you read it. A lot of humorous posts rely on punchlines at the end or misdirection via links or lengthy stories, and the punchline is achieved by leading the reader on until the end. The site's preamble states that it doesn't aim to provide a "safe-space" as well as not become completely unmoderated. I feel like we don't need big warning signs going "FUNNY JOKE" on a post because it cheapens the impact and makes the site feel too "safe", in that we have to carefully curate comments and warn others about "dangerous" comments.
On another point, the tags are one word. Posts are often many words, and span many subjects. Placing one word on a comment can make a reader come to a quick conclusion on whether or not they'll enjoy reading a post, and a post might get glossed over very easily due to such an ambiguous descriptor.
Tl;dr, Tags both devalue and cheapen comments by allowing users to gloss them over by looking at a one word descriptor of a possibly long post
I just inadvertently answered this in another thread. Let me repost the response here.
Eventually we want the site itself to be doing most of the tagging.
Reddit has their lazy 'suggest title' - but man, that lookup can do so very much more. Auto-generate a good title, auto-find all the right tags, and then the user can just edit them. I have one fleshed-out use case example right here for handling music threads. That's basically /r/listentothis' solution in a nutshell, but we could never implement it on reddit. Here, things have changed. that general idea can be extended to most other classes of content - tv, books, films, videos, games (you've seen steam's tags). All that data is just sitting out there waiting to be used.
We talked about having forced tags. Repost is an example of that. If the topic's been posted we can show the user the relevant posts and ask, "Are you sure?" If they submit anyway, it can get a site-added repost tag, and people who are annoyed by reposts can just say "We don't want to see any reposts in our feed" then poof, they are gone, forever.
The tags also open up lots of other interesting possibilities. I'll list a few we talked about.
The NSFW filter, for example, can be [nsfw.gore] or [nsfw.porn] or [nsfw.pick-your-category]. Then you can choose if you want to block all NSFW content (the root of the tag) or just certain types like porn or gore, or both but not others. This can also be extended to spoilers and all sorts of other tag classes.
Tags like [news.breaking] and in music [fresh] tend to denote current events and new releases - a time-sensitive class of content. Now, if those tags stick around forever, they stop being useful... but if the self-modify or self-delete after a certain time period, [fresh] can auto-remove itself after 30 days, and [news.breaking] can just become [news].
We talked to the /r/science mods about their recent row with reddit over being able to post AMAs and have them get noticed - after all, we've got PhDs here willing to talk about their fields and research, yet reddit wants to put that on even footing with cat pictures. We've got a problem with that. Some content is objectively good, and it deserves a bit of a boost. If we have an [ama] tag that we carefully gate access to, so that it doesn't get abused, it could apply a vote multipler so that as other people vote it up, their votes carry more power, and push it up the page faster than normal submissions.
We also talked about 'fluff' content - a [fluff] tag could similarly apply a visibility penalty to help sort out the trash.
Reddit really should have added tagging 8 years ago when they were asked. It opens up entire new frontiers of content management and user-choice filtering, and it'll also make the search engine into a beast. Imagine you click a button, and the content of the entire ~music world is suddenly at your fingertips, sorted by genre and either popularity or quality or both - on demand music charts.
Outside of tagging, we talked about megathreads a bit, and the idea of letting editors merge threads together on the same topic. Also, tildes isn't a 24-hour turnover aggregator like reddit is. Some threads deserve to live for weeks, and that simple, silly 'activity sort' we added to help with the low activity has already achieved that. It's perfect for smaller ~groups just starting out, to keep them engaged and happy and active within their communities.
Unlike reddit, ideas get taken seriously here, too. Most of what I'm sharing with you here has been suggested by others and turned into workable ideas. I'm sure over time people will begin suggesting all kinds of other tools to help, and we'll be looking at how they work and implementing the good ones - or even letting safe bots run to do some of the work, if it doesn't fit the code directly.
Communities may also have their own unique features and systems, because what works in ~science is not the same as what works in ~music. Each hierarchy could have very different systems driving it, depending on the needs of the content.
We've also talked about allowing highly trusted users to edit the tags on other submissions - it's a form of not-quite-moderator, editor-level access. There could also be some sort of voting mechanic on some, or all, of the tags, where others can give feedback to get them removed or changed.
Each community is going to have a 'tag signature' as well. If you submit to ~music.metal.progressive (aka ~progmetal), the submission is going to have each of those tags present by default. If a group dies off from inactivity, we can roll it back into the parent, ~music.metal. Also, submissions that do really well get to bubble up into the parent communities, where their content is still on topic, but less niche. This is how we aim to sort on quality instead of just popularity.
If we look at ~comp, and see that a third of the tags there are [netsec] that's a good indicator it's time to spin up a ~comp.netsec aka ~netsec as a full community, rather than just as tags in the larger community. The new subgroup sort-of creates itself, and maintains the relationship with it's parent, and also starts with all of the content of ~comp that was tagged [netsec] so it's not empty on day one. Creating it as an official group just makes it into a full community.
As for the comment tags - that's your replacement for the almighty downvote. Now people get to tell us why a comment has problems. You'll notice most of the tags now are of a neutral-to-hostile flavor, but it probably won't always stay that way. At some point we expect to have some very advanced comment sorting here that isn't just time or score based, such as grouping all of the funny or offtopic together. Also, systems like /r/changemyview's awesome delta-bot can be built in here using the tags.
Also, some of the tags will have effects on the comment. Some of that might even work like a downvote, and if it gets bad enough, result in a ban, or losing access to trust levels within that community. What you say here will have consequences. Generally, those who remain civil will never have problems. Those who don't, won't be here very long.
Voat and reddit are democratic republics based on popularity. Tildes is a democratic meritocracy focused on quality. That's a very big difference. Right now, all the system here can do is store the tags. All of this represents some of the future planning for how to put them to good use. It'll improve as we develop the site, but that basic tag mechanic has to be here first, before we start putting it to all of these kinds of uses.
Hope that addresses your points. :)
Thank you for the well written reply! I knew this function was still in its infancy but I didn't know to what extent you had planned on improving it. That all sounds extremely promising and I hope we can make it a reality.
Honestly, we are horrible at documenting all of our plans and intentions, so I can't blame you one bit. This site is, in a nutshell, the result of one of reddit's all-star players (Deimos, creator of Automoderator and SubredditSimulator and Reddit Gold) sitting quietly, and patiently, in a slack channel and listening while another few dozen reddit mods vented, ranted, argued, and crafted system theories with each other. He quietly built the whole thing in the background while we talked about the why and how of it all. It's fair to say most of it is all still in our heads at this point.
The reasons we're opening up now instead of later when more of this is cooked are pretty basic.
But, most importantly - we can't do this in a vacuum. We've got to get more people who care about building a better platform for all of us to use here, so we can have our ideas challenged and improved. That's where all of you guys come in - coming up with crazy new ways to solve all of social media's problems.
For sure. You can make a shiny, brand new, friendly website but if nobody knows about it then it's useless. I plan on continuing to help out by contributing as often as I can, and I hope this site prospers!
If a comment is trolling, should everyone who sees it tag it
Troll? Is it enough for one person to do so? Or 5? So far, I'm finding that I often don't agree with the comment tags I see. I don't personally want to see trollish comments, but if I can't trust that others are tagging appropriately I likely won't filter them. Honestly, I'm not sure the envisioned democratic meritocracy is any replacement for plain old flagging for a moderator.As @cfabbro said, currently don't have much sense and some part of it is being discussed across the board but imho the tags for comments should be not visible by default (visible with a click) and not become effective (example: hide 'troll' comments) unless they reach a threshold. Ideally the threshold should be a relative number and not an absolute but that require having a metric to match against.
Ideally, yes, people who have an issue with a comment should tag it.
I doubt we'll ever be taking action based on just one tag, though. The threshold for action is likely to be different between small groups and large ones - a group with 10k users and 50 votes on a troll tag vs a group with 15m users and 2000 votes on a troll tag, for example. It might even be better to set thresholds based on the number of people who have viewed a thread, instead of subscribers - since there's no guarantee all the subscribers would see it. Figuring out the balance is probably going to land in the lap of the moderation teams for each community, unless we can discover some sort of accurate scaling algorithm, and even then I think we'd like to let mod teams tweak it a bit if it suits the community's needs. Also, not everyone will get to do the tagging - it's open access right now, but eventually you'll only be tagging in the communities you yourself visit frequently, just like everyone else.
We don't have the 'reports' feature built yet. That'll work similar to reddit but without the suck factor - and it's intended to be used for more serious infractions such as doxxing and truly vile comments. Those are the ones that 'require' action. The tags will more likely just have an effect on the visibility of the comments themselves - which groups they sort into (funny vs offtopic) and what their visibility rank is within the thread itself. Trolls are likely to get pushed to the bottom, especially if there are a lot of votes on them.
Right now we don't have action auditing but that is coming... first in the form of a simple changelog and later as a more fleshed out trusted-user meta-moderating system. The tags being misused now is understandable since there is no accountability. But once we can audit who tagged what we can start sending PMs to let people know they are using them in inappropriate ways and we can work from there. If particular users keep abusing them, they may temporarily (or permanently) lose access to the ability. In a way the tag system will act as a honeypot for us to gauge how must we can trust certain users.
Any thoughts regarding making comment tags invisible? Then, rather than requiring users to actively audit others, people will stand out if their tagging choices are unusual.
We're currently debating that. I am personally torn on the issue. I see the value of having them visible, but perhaps the placement could be changed to below the comment so as not to induce bandwagoning. However not everyone agrees and we haven't reached a consensus yet. The issue is likely to be posted as daily discussion at some point so we can solicit input from the users before any decisions are made though.
Could always have them hidden by default, but visible with a click.
Yeah @deimos suggested making it a user setting option (we haven't decided which would be default but I would push for visible to be default because I am a transparency advocate) and I think that might be the best of both worlds. Though I still think the positions is something we need to deal with regardless.
To clarify, what I meant was something like a 'Reveal Tagging Stats' link under each comment.
Ah, yeah that is certainly a possibility too. We were already planning on doing something similar for topic tags; Only show the most relevant 4-5 and hide the rest behind a fold
[+]that would only show them when you clicked it. So something similar with comment tags is possible for sure.I really like the idea of "downvotes with a reason" but:
Joke - Noise - Offtopic - Troll - Flame
One of these things is not like the other, unless making jokes on ~ is to be discouraged.
That's exactly the vibe I get with the tags. With all of them being negative save for one, they feel like "I don't like this post" indicators more than anything else