4
votes
Add option to tip/promote posts
I have an idea for Tildes.
You can give people the option to promote their own posts ,using either real money or cryptocurrency, so their posts can appear on the homepage, they get exposure and they support Tildes whilst doing it! Other people can also tip posts, both Tildes and the OP get a share of the revenue! The money Tildes makes from this will be able to support the site!
Please add this. I don't want annoying Google ads.
I'll never add anything like this. Tildes will never have advertising of any type, or any way for users to make money from it (that's a logistical and legal nightmare).
If you're looking for a site like that, you'd probably be more interested in something like Steemit.
To be honest, I've begun to wonder if the idea of being able to vote on comments might be giving us some unwanted side-effects. To attach money to the equation would make those problems an order of magnitude worse.
Agreed on both points. Letting money in the door just means those with money will be the ones deciding what content makes it up the page, and there's no way in hell that'll close in on anything resembling 'quality' in the long run. It'll be spam, adverts, and propaganda.
We did evolve the downvoting with labels. It's better. The upvote is still lingering there like some vestigial ghost we just don't know what to do with yet. I'll bet nearly everyone here still finds their eyes looking for the vote total and that total is having some effect on how people view a submission. I think that's a distraction we can do without... but we do need something to help sort the content. Wouldn't it be nice to have an interface that isn't based on numbers and scores? No built-in karma addiction, something more than a validation slot machine.
To be honest, I'm really kind of terrified by the concept of voting right now because I understand exactly how addictive it is. Do you remember when we stopped showing the vote totals here on Tildes? I was so happy when they came back. Those numbers were like magic vindication. And without them, it seemed like traffic and comments really slowed down.
But now I'm starting to feel like the reason why I was so happy is because votes have become the social media drug that I had previously thought I was immune to.
Do you think it might be time to come up with a community thread to re-examine this issue?
I feel like we’ve taken parallel paths. I was a vocal supporter of public vote counts at the time, but I have since changed my view as well. Tildes has helped me un-learn some bad habits and programming from prior social media use.
What changed your mind? I still think it's an important and relevant metric to understand how the community thinks about an issue.
It's less that any one thing has changed my mind and more of an aggregation of things over time. I do think there is some value to voting and wouldn't want to do away with it entirely, but I'm very much open to changing or tweaking how we do it (exactly how, I honestly can't say -- I think it would take experimentation and reflection, just like we did when we hid vote counts).
If I had to put my finger on it right now, I think voting as currently implemented is a potential problem in two ways. The first is what @Akir has identified: it's addictive for many people, and I know I'm not immune to that pull. I'll also add a part B to this one, and that's that it also invites social comparison, which I think is a major issue with social media at present.
The second is that voting in its current implementation isn't an accurate measure of what we're intending it to be. Two comments, side-by-side, with scores of 20 and 5 respectively, make it look like the first comment was more valued by the community, but it's also quite likely that the second comment has less votes simply because less people saw it. There are a variety of reasons this can happen, but I think it's particularly pronounced on Tildes because we tend to have longer-lived threads that experience a sort of attentional decay. I've noticed that on some of Tildes' ongoing threads, late great posts often only get a handful of votes, and I don't think that's because the community values them less but only because less people saw them. I think if they had been posted closer to the time the topic went up, they would likely have far higher scores.
If we pair problem 1B (social comparison) with 2 (inaccurate data), it's easy to see how someone can come to all sorts of wrong conclusions about themselves, about the community, and about others. Numbers are quantifiable, easily comparable, and seemingly "objective", so they can feel like they are giving us precise insights, but if they're not accurately representative, then the conclusions we draw from them will be meaningless at best and possibly detrimental at worst.
On top of this, I think there's also a pragmatic approach that simply says: is there value to knowing a given comment score down to the single vote? Should we consider a comment with 18 votes different from one with 23? Those both qualitatively "feel" the same to me despite being quantitatively different. I think by lowering our level of precision, we could avoid not only some of the addictiveness of voting (checking regularly for +1s) but also avoid some of the problems with social comparison (both the 18 and the 23 could be displayed as being in the "+10" tier but not the "+30" tier, for example -- with neither one being identified as a "winner" or "better" than the other). I definitely think there's value to knowing that a comment has gotten, say +50 votes overall, but I don't necessarily think it's valuable to know whether that's 54, 55, or 56.
Yep, I always consider the age of the post when looking at scores. It sometimes does tell us something, however, when a comment which comes later 'takes over' the top spot from an older one.
Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to solve the timing issue completely. If I enter a thread 2-3 days later and post a comment and no one posts after I post that, it's simply not going to see a lot of traffic and it's unlikely that comment will go anywhere. I think timing and vote counts is unavoidable because people will not see and interact with a thread forever.
Completely agree on this point. The first thing that comes to mind to me here is the way slickdeals works - you can go from 1 to 5 thumbs, and it's not a linear scale. Then after 5 thumbs it becomes popular and then front page. A "hot" meter, so to speak with a cap at some point (additional votes don't push it any higher but are perhaps used behinds the scenes for sorting purposes). Some sort of vote fuzzing is absolutely okay by me and abstracting it from a count to an icon or a meter that fills feels like an extra step that might be useful to combat the addictive part you called out.
Then how does tildes pay for the hosting costs?
Donations, which give no benefits to the donator. See the Financials page for more detail.
oh, ok. I think that is better actually.
Tildes is designed to be ad free.
I highly disagree with monetary promotion of posts, as it can lead to the problems that have led me to mostly flee other platforms.
That's kinda against the whole point of the site.
Introducing a monetary way to boost your post visibility might as well just be ads.
Tbh I kind of like the idea of tipping, so long as the user gets part of the tip, it didn’t affect post visibility, and there was a setting that let you disable tipping on your posts. I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish tipping from promoting.
I can take it or leave it, though.
I dunno. I think that even if it didn't change anything visible, I'd have a small worry in the back of my brain as to whether someone was saying what they were saying in good faith, or in hopes that someone with money would pay them for their words. That sort of concern is corrosive to conversing in good faith.
I don't know, I just don't really see how that could feasibly happen if this website stays smallish which seemed to be the whole idea anyway. I was just thinking it might be nice to be able to like buy someone lunch or maybe a beer or something for saying something you appreciate.
But like I said, I can take it or leave it.
Ok, instead of promoting posts, we will just have the tip option. the tip would be split 70(creator)/30(Tildes), so the site can still be supported without having annoying ads!
I see you're new here, so I'll just say that you really should read all of the "docs" on Tildes before continuing. They aren't long or all that many, but they do explain how things work around here, philosophy of the site, etc. - https://docs.tildes.net/