Sub-tildes have a fundamental problem. Can it be solved?

not
2018-06-05T00:22:13Z

I've been doing some thinking and concluded that in it's current form, tildes design has a fundamental problem that is going to make high-quality discussions nearly impossible.

Assumptions

I'm relying on four assumptions here:

A discussion's quality is proportional to it's exclusiveness. In other words, the more wide the audience participating in a discussion is, the worse the discussion gets. It's not hard to see this. A discussion about a discovery in cancer reasearch on a news site will be much lower quality than among cancer reasearchers. This has also been shown to be true by reddit's /r/all.

tildes get more specific, the "deeper" they are in the hierachy. ~sci.biology.cancer is more specific than ~sci. ~sci also a has more subscribers.

tildes.net wants to use this specialization to foster high-quality and qualified discussions on specific topics.

tilde submissions "bubble up", as they currently do

The Problem

You might be able to see what I'm getting at. I think these three together are a fundamental problem for the quality of discussion in subgroups:

Highly upvoted posts from specific subgroups will be exposed to wider audiences, thus lowering the quality of discussion.

More generic posts have a higher likelihood of receiving upvotes from the more general groups above them, thus lowering the quality of submissions.

A Scenario

Let's simulate a scenario using my above assumptions. This might be unhelpful, since it's very easy to poke holes in such a specific scenario. This is more intended as an overall picture of the incentives the users have.

We have three submissions to ~sci.biology.cancer, about the news of three different discoveries:

A link to an original scientific paper with it's original title

A link to an original scientific paper, with a modified title

A link to a news story in a popular tabloid newspaper, with it's clickbait title

So, how would these fare?

The first submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology.cancer subscribers, who understand the paper and topic, but are low in numbers.

The second submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology, who are familiar enough to understand the modified title.

The third submission can be understood by anyone, and would be upvoted by the whole of ~sci, slingshotting to the top.

Let's take at the result in ~sci.biology.cancer:

The highest ranked post is now a clickbait article of no significant interest to anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic, filled with unqualified discussion. The second ranked post is slightly better, but still less useful than the first post, which is being drowned out by other submissions.

Conclusion

As a submitter with the current system, instead of submitting high quality content that interests the subtilde, it is in your interest to submit a post that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, the subtildes above you. This will significantly decrease the quality of specialized subtildes.

Ideas

I believe the bubbling up mechanic must be modified in some way to prevent this unfortunate systemic issue. I don't really have a good solution, but here's some ideas to get the brainstorming going:

No participation (voting/commenting) for users higher up the chain. This would be very extreme.

users don't see comments made higher-up the chain. ~sci.biology would not see ~sci comments. This would be extraordinarily confusing and have weird edge cases.

Votes would be counted separately for each part of the sub-tilde chain. A post might be highly upvoted in ~sci, but only receive a few upvotes in ~sci.biology. I like this idea in general, but it does not solve the problem of the low-quality responses landing in ~sci.biology.cancer too. Maybe that's just an acceptable trade-off, though.

What are your thoughts on this?

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1m1/sub_tildes_have_a_fundamental_problem_can_it_be_solved

Votes: 16

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