What kinds of content are you hoping to see on Tildes?
There's been quite a bit of discussion lately about people don't want to see, but not that much about what sort of content we do want to see. What would you like to see more of?
For the official stance, I'll repost the instructions that most of us are probably skipping over by now.
Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussion
Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.
Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.
This seems vague, and we probably have different ideas of what's high-quality and what counts as good discussion?
I'm also wondering if we should be here more for the links or for the discussion. When I arrived, I was just happy to find a quiet place where I could post links to articles that I found elsewhere and were particularly interesting to me. (But I think I had gotten into a rut for a while after getting obsessed with the pandemic and politics.) Maybe we should try posting more links?
I'd like more personal and emotional posts. More openness to people being people and expressing themselves. More art, more support!
Also generally more activity in ~anime and ~books, which I should really contribute more to myself.
Agreed. And I think it’s especially important that people apply this to their commenting too, not just top-level topics and links themselves. I think being more personal and sharing more individual experiences could help with some of the tonal frictions that exist on the site. A lot of the commenting here tends to be primarily ideas-focused, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it can definitely contribute to a sort of stuffiness or “debate club” type atmosphere.
I’m someone who pretty regularly talks about personal things and experiences here, but it can often feel like I’m spilling my soul not to a social group of peers but to a room full of auditors.
From the other side, I find that the posts I mark exemplary most often aren’t well-worded arguments about the ideas in debate but are instead the words of people who are putting aspects of their own humanity out there for the rest of us to see and consider.
I think we learn and grow from each others’ stories, and everyone has so many different stories they could tell.
Though you do it well, I think a lot of people might be reluctant to post much about their personal lives for privacy reasons. (That and sometimes not a lot going on currently, due to the pandemic.)
It might be easier to look for interesting stories posted elsewhere? But it’s not the sort of thing that I see shared regularly at my usual Internet destinations.
The privacy thing is a good point. There’s a lot I don’t share out of regard for that (I know it’a probably hard to believe there’s stuff I don’t share!). I imagine many others feel equally, if not stronger, about that.
As for looking elsewhere, there probably are better places for that type of content, but Tildes is where I am, and it’s the community I care about. I’m far more interested in developing and participating in this community than I am in finding another one.
You won’t get rid of me that easily, skybrian! :P
Oops, sorry, I meant that maybe we should look elsewhere for interesting stories and link to them here!
I am lazy about writing (unless provoked) so I think first of linking.
Came here to say pretty much exactly this.
I agree with this request and to be more specific with it, I'd like to see more prompts for personal content. Making the mental health thread monthly has helped with this a lot.
In general, I like these regular, flavoured "What's up with you?" threads -- mental health/fitness/tv/creative. I don't want to outright say I want to see more of them, but maybe more different ones?
What kind of content would you like to see in ~books? I’m trying to read more lately, are you interested in an ad-hoc book club?
More everything. I don't mind wading through or filtering out content I don't care about. Not in the slightest. This site has good filtering tools. Historically it's been lack of fresh content that leads to me forgetting to check sites and eventually forgetting about them.
Yes, I can easily filter content on a site with a lot of it. I can’t easily create new (and decent quality) content on a site that doesn’t already have it. I don’t want to hit critical mass, but more activity generally would be welcome.
Conversely, too high of a signal to noise ratio could exacerbate number of dead discussions, especially since not everyone will use filters.
I agree with this. I've been here for about a week but I've only checked the site maybe 3/4 times? I'm typically more of a lurker/commentator but I just haven't found much to comment on here yet.
I've said this before, but I'd love to find ways to highlight and encourage more "timeless" content—the type of articles and links related to particular subjects that are so good or useful that you come back to them for years. So many of the links posted to sites like this are of fleeting interest, and nobody ever looks at them again after they're more than a few days old.
Especially with some of the stronger organizational features on Tildes, there's some interesting potential to do a better job of keeping track of content that's still worth reading even long after it was originally written/submitted.
I like this idea a lot, but one thing that would make it a lot more useful is at odds with some privacy decisions already made, specifically tossing the comment read-status data after a time. When an older post that I know I've read before resurfaces, trying to sift through potentially hundreds of
postscomments without the help of "x new posts" and new post highlighting I often finding myself deciding it's not worth the bother.Yeah, we can definitely improve that. At the very least, I want to make the collapsing/highlighting time threshold something you can just change on the fly on the page, instead of being completely linked to the last visit time. So for example when an old thread comes back up, you could just set it to something like "highlight comments newer than the last 24 hours", and it would be exactly the same as if you had a last visit 24 hours ago.
I've been saving the posts that I want to come back to elsewhere.
I remember this being discussed before as well.
Concretely, what are the site mechanics ways that you have been considering trying out, there? I'm definitely down for experimenting.
I don't really have specific ideas for how to do it. I just think that there are very different "levels" of content, and that link-aggregator sites generally don't distinguish between them at all.
As a gaming example, there's a huge difference between the type of articles like ones on The Digital Antiquarian compared to more-typical ones that just do something like explain a bit of new info about an upcoming game.
Overall, I think it would be really nice to be able to do something like, "I'd like to read a great article about games" and not have to sort through hundreds of trailers/reviews/etc. because they're all treated the same by the site.
Perhaps this is where local content curators can choose to highlight an 'article of the week' that they feel fits that description, which gives it an exclusive tag and highlights it for the week? That allows older chosen articles to be queried too.
Create a bestof tag, when applied to topic, the 'old discussion' message turns off, votes are removed/disabled, and top-level posts become ordered by date.
Maybe a certain amount of "exemplary" labels might make a comment stick for longer? That wouldn't work for threads though.
Can you give an example of what that would look like?
Also, why do you want that? Maybe this is something different than what you mean, but I recently returned to forum I hadn't been to in a few years, and the same 5 topics from 3 years ago were still the top 5 topics. They had 100s of pages of responses. I don't have time to go through what's new since the last time I visited, and frankly, I doubt there was anything compelling in them. (And at least one of them was a photography topic, and the majority of the photos had long since disappeared as links rotted.)
I come to sites like this to find new and interesting stuff. I don't mind the occasional throwback (which even I post), but never-ending topics that get hundreds of pages of responses are a huge turn off to me, personally, as they're overwhelming and difficult to wade through. You also end up with what I call the Top 40 problem. Things get popular, then remain popular because they get special placement that says they're popular, and new things get ignored.
I think Hacker News does something like this, intentionally or not, with their (year) labels on posts.
Those are usually high-quality and generally applicable articles, particularly if they've been discussed before.
I think that's definitely different than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about cases where the "main content" of the thread is exceptional, whether that's an external article submitted as a link topic or a text topic where the content is on Tildes itself.
Ongoing threads that stay active over extremely long periods—which are usually ones where individual posters are sharing something, similar to where we use the ask.survey tag here—is a separate type of content (and "fleeting" in its own way). That would be like if we had something like a single "what games are you playing?" thread that just kept going forever, instead of having a new one come up weekly.
I rejoined the Well recently and that’s definitely a problem there. There are topic titles that are basically the same as when I left five years ago. It looks extremely stale compared to here or Hacker News where you see fresh headlines daily (at least).
There is also a problem that you have to look inside each topic with new content to see what it is. It’s like a game where you look inside each box to see if there is a prize. Sometimes you get interesting content and sometimes it’s just a one-liner.
It seems like the recurring topics on Tildes have a similar issue with uninteresting topic titles? But at least the conversation restarts.
It seems like long-running topics aren’t inherently bad, but they should have subtitles or subheadings that change to show what’s new in a compact way? A topic devoted to a game could have subheadings for each new link posted under it.
Incidentally, I’m wondering about that change a while back so that we see how many new comments were posted in each topic, by default. This seems like a fairly positive thing and we’re used to it now, but I think it changed the character of the site from being more of a link aggregator to more of a discussion board?
Thanks for the clarification! I think that makes sense.
Give published works or major events dedicated posts when discussion about it sparks. Reviews/analysis of games/books/tv, stuff that won't be irrelevant in 6 months. Major news events, the kind that resulted in daily/weekly posts, build 1 major meta-post (wiki?) to cluster future discussion on it.
I wish ~arts, ~books, and ~science were more active. Between ~games and ~tech, a lot of Tildes' homepage is similar to what you see on Reddit or Hacker News.
I made an effort a few months back to post some ~science content once every day or so, but the articles simply didn't get a ton of engagement. I eventually fell off of it because I wasn't sure if people were finding the content interesting. A lot of this content stuff is a chicken-and-egg situation, where it's hard to build up a community interested in that stuff without content, and it's hard to get content without the community. I'm wondering if these issues wouldn't be solved more or less by simply getting more people on Tildes.
I think a lot would be solved with simply more users. Something like games is accessible and relatable by the average person, let alone the more tech-leaning crowd here, so it lends itself to discussion; people likely have participated in some way, have formed their own opinions, etc. Science is often harder for the average person to discuss beyond a "wow, that's awesome!", at least until the topic or advancement hits a relatable point (integrated into a real consumer service/product, etc.).
I made an effort to post content in ~humanities some time ago. I just don't think there are lots of interest. Tildes is very much tech oriented, for better or worse.
Humanities is one of the groups I'm most interested in. I find the articles and the topics discussed very interesting as well as the discussions generated in the comments section. The problem is that I don't know where to find relevant topics, or to know if they're relevant, or feel qualified enough to add anything to the discussion—usually someone else has already expressed my point of view in a more elaborate way, or countered whatever point I was going to bring.
That last point goes for discussions here in general.
Perhaps this speaks to @Whom's suggestion of "more personal and emotional posts."
I remember feeling apprehensive about the first political science course I took in college because it was on theory, i.e. basically philosophy—which I knew nothing about. Who was I to examine Hobbes? I wasn't even a political science major! I realized pretty quickly that, despite whatever show people put on, they're all still learning too. They're also all still people. Our discussions in that class (and others) were strongest when they integrated traditional academic rigor with a reasonable amount of personal experiences, informal cultural references, and affective reactions in general. That's not to say I would never make rationalistic or formal comments when I thought they were appropriate, but just that they weren't mutually exclusive with the earnestness of being that characterizes individual lived experiences.
I think that basically anyone can introduce a certain personal perspective to the conversation that can guide it forward in a novel way. Even if it's not strictly on-topic, it's interesting to hear about the emotional reactions people have to the subject matter, or something in their life it reminded them of. This helps with the anonymity factor of online discourse by reminding us all that we're human. Of course, this does require that people treat affective thought as a valid form of knowledge. I think we have some work to do there, but people learn by example, and if we try to incorporate a more epistemologically inclusive attitude about what constitutes "good discussion," threads will naturally evolve in a way that invites more nuanced responses.
I have no idea how to find new, interesring content. Link aggregators and search engines killed it.
Merging ~space and ~science might help there.
Seconding more interest in ~hobbies.
I know there’s a lot of programming related projects that people talk about on here, but as someone with only basic programming skills they only appeal to me so much.
I’d like to see a more diverse collection of hobby projects, because I enjoy seeing what people are passionate about.
Uncommon opinion but more content that would go on ~life, more specifically about friendships and relationships would be interesting. Bonus points if they're your relationships. Otherwise, I'm not particularly concerned with the types of content currently here, although I do want more.... stuff.
My favorite is definitely ~talk so I always want more in there even though it's actually probably one of the most popular tildes already. I just enjoy the more casual conversation. Other than that I like any good articles, can be on basically any topic, so whenever I find an interesting read thanks to this site I am happy.