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New groups and site mechanics - 2021 edition
The last group request thread was last year. With all the meta-chat lately it might be time for a new one, and maybe expand a bit more in terms of site organization in general.
I mainly want to take this opportunity to make the recent meta feedback a bit more actionable: Which current problems can be solved via site mechanics? Will leave some thoughts in the comments.
Groups
General thought about groups: @Deimos, I would love to see you experiment a bit more. I believe there is a bit of a "build it and they will come" effect to groups, where having a group exist encourages contributions to it. Maybe we can do monthly experiments, if there's no uptake on a group, fold it back into a tag? Incidentally, this does have its own effect in pushing contributions and I think it's potentially a healthy mechanism to grow the site and find people who are interested in particular subjects.
Site mechanics
The Exemplary tag
I really like the "exemplary" mechanic, but at this point I feel it's fair to say it is not working as intended. Early on when I joined I did notice some people were pushing to write high quality comments, and using the "exemplary" label was a nice way of encouraging this. Now, I see it used a bit too much as a super-upvote, and I see people sometimes complaining or be upset that a comment they disagree with was exemplaried; as if to "twist the knife". This isn't healthy and I would like to see the mechanic reworked, not removed.
There are two changes I believe will help:
The goal is to encourage people to use exemplary as a positive reaction, but still keep it for exceptionally good posts. The timer is also a variable that can be played with if it's used too much / not enough.
Finally, if these changes to exemplary work well, I would also like to see it made available on posts themselves.
I'd like to reiterate the same thing I said in the 2019 thread. I am not a fan of the naming ~girltalk. ~women would be better imo.
Edited out snark.
I don't personally have a stake in the usage or not, but if the problem seems to be that "any" person can use such a tag that's meant to be used to reflect high quality content, there likely requires some barrier to earn its usage (per community). as an example, I know HackerNews has a downvote system and requires X number of votes and age to an account before they get access to the system. It doesn't stop abuse of the feature, but it ensure you have at least some form of goodwill in the community and that the tag is coming from someone less likely to use it in a combative matter (and if they are, that may say more about the community than the individual at that point).
However, I'm unsure if the site tracks such metrics (even invisibly, if only to prevent "vote farming"). Nor if it's in the site's interest to.
I am ambivalent in linking usernames to votes and tags however. For me personally, that'd more likely have me cease to use either feature (even if I have never actually used exemplary tags to begin with, and votes are also relatively rare).
Thanks for posting this, and I second all your suggestions. Although I would also like to link to (since the whole thing is worth reading) and quote a part of @chrysanth's comment in the other topic which has what I think is another solid suggestion:
I agree 100% that the Malice label needs to be reworked. And IMO even simply renaming it to "report" until it can be more thoroughly reworked might at least make it so people hopefully stop feeling so hesitant to use it.
Yes, I like the exemplary changes. Brings back a more personal touch, at the user's option.
Banned users get a message as to why they were banned.
I was referring to post deletions wrt. personal feedback.
While I absolutely get why having a space specifically for women is a good idea, this smacks of binary gender. I can't really articulate it, but it feels weird to have the three genders be woman, man, lgbt.
I've seen it divided before into (men)/(women and non-binary people) but I'm not sure if that's the right solution.
Do you think ~feminine/~masculine might work better? So those who lean that way are encompassed in the group? Or am I just reaching lol? It's hard to find the right way to be more encompassing, but it's definitely worth the effort to give it a gander even if it feels a little awkward at first. I definitely agree with your comment that making the three gender man/woman/LGBT feels weird.
Many nonbinary folk don't identify as fem or masc. I also don't think the nonbinary population here is large enough to warrant it's own space (it'll just be absent or blank for a long time). I think just ~men and ~women is fine and ~lgbt is where I personally would head if I wanted to participate in outside the binary gender discussion.
Tildes doesn't have the userbase to be more specific.
I disagree with the premise. If we went off our current user base, then there should be a group for issues regarding straight white cismen and not one for any other group because they're small. That doesn't seem like the right solution. While other demographics are smaller, is it not helpful for them to similarly have places to talk about relevant issues?
I thought about expanding my comment, but figured it was clear enough.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be specific groups for specific populations, just that Tildes doesn't have a userbase size that supports individual groups for every (or even a significant number) genders. No one wants a group that is a ghost town. I'm not even referring to the current population demographics of Tildes, just size.
For anything that concerns (cis because ~lgbt) men and women? I don't think so, most (like, 80-85%) of people here are men and there are enough women to post on a hypothetical tildes group like ~women.
For anything that concerns genders other than (cis) men and women. There's enough men (obviously) to handle a ~guytalk and enough women to handle a ~girltalk, but I don't think the size of the userbase (not even demographics, just size) here is adequate to support individual gender sub-tildes and would already be covered via ~lgbt.
Yeah, I know :(
Maybe I'm not reading the demography properly but one thing that keeps me from using tildes permanently is a complete lack of gardening or botany or even nature groups. Every other aggregator has some sort of place for us plant folks.
Fellow plant folk here, I think this would be great. Right now if I'd like to talk about my garden or plants I suppose it would go in ~hobbies?
Makes sense to me. With gardening season starting to ramp up, posting under ~hobbies with a gardening tag sounds prudent.
~botany,~agri, or ~plants would be fantastic.
I vote ~trees
Hehehe
That was one of the chillest places on the entire internet. I wonder if it still is, haven't been by there in ages.
As a mod of /r/trees for a time, I can tell you that while the place itself was pretty chill (there was some occasional snooty-ness as happens in any enthusiast group), it was an absolute chore to moderate. With the most violated rules being no memes, reposts, porn, or minors (in that general order). Inebriated individuals simply don't care about or bother to read the rules.
We modded the same subreddit :D
Indeed, there was a lot of daily gunk that needed to be scraped, as well as mod messages that needed to be dealt with. Sometimes my moderating became completely mechanical just to go through the queue. Everyone says it was chill, but from my perspective it felt like over half the people weren't happy with the moderators at the time because all I would see were the complaints.
I had absolutely zero interest in dealing with mod messages and just kept to the queue, comments, and new posts while there so can't speak to it, but complaints are a regular thing just about anywhere. No one messages the mods to say they're doing a good job.
everybody should be mod for a day. I mod /r/pizza and a few others that are all fairly relaxed subjects -- but there are always times where people are fighting, someone is being stalked, people want to argue about rules, etc.
The fact that people think our subs are chill is really the best compliment we can receive for our suffering :)
Ooooh, a plant group would be good.
Wow, I would love a nature group actually. The more general the better. Right now for hobby stuff there's ~hobbies and for some nature related things there's ~enviro but that's about it. Some options are:
~nature
~gardening
~plants
~botany
Not sure which would work best!
I don't know whether this is an issue best solved through culture or mechanics, but I think one thing that would help smooth over some of our frictions is more ways of expressing appreciation for other users. Right now we have the exemplary label which is nice but can also either be or even just appear weaponized (like @Adys mentioned in his comment). For example, how many times in a heated debate does the blue stripe on a comment seem more like a "take that" to the person arguing with that comment rather than a "this comment is awesome on its own merits"? Even if it's intended as the latter, I think it often comes across as the former, since we can't really know the intent behind its use.
We know that heated discourse and conflict often erode relationships between users and with the site itself, and I think we need some stuff that counters that -- something that says "hey, 6 people marked you as being an awesome user today" or "kfywre thinks you're splendid and a valuable member of this community".
I have honest, genuine, legitimate positive associations for nearly every frequent user here. If you comment on Tildes enough for your username to be recognizable across threads, then that means that I genuinely like you and appreciate you, but I doubt that most people here know that. There are probably people here who think I hate them based on disagreements we've had in the past, or just from grokking my general vibe and feeling that I'd be against them, and that is the last thing I want people to think! I genuinely like the people who I've had back-and-forths with here -- sometimes they're the ones I like the most, as our interactions have helped me see qualities in them that I don't see in myself, and I find that difference very valuable.
I ultimately want the awesome people on Tildes to be able to come online here and know that they're awesome, rather than coming online and hitting some social frictions and then bouncing out. Some of that I think is being addressed in other meta conversations here, but I also think preventing the bad isn't enough. Let's go all in on promoting the good too.
I'd like the exemplary function, without the visibility.
I like anonymously giving feedback on a post, and the functionality of exemplary behind the scenes could prove useful, especially if the visible feedback loop is killed.
I definitely support keeping the 8 hour limit though, even without visible feedback. Prevents spam and means people will only use it if they really feel it.
At my company, we have a system in place that sends "Hi-Fives" to other associates. To send one, you go to the associated site, enter the recipients name, choose from a list of pre-determined reasons and click send (with the optional ability to include a custom message). We might be able to try something similar out here to reinforce the idea you brought up. If we're talking about implementation details I don't think it should be done on a topic-discussion level. I think it would have more impact if it's done from the profile screen. I also think having a list of predetermined reasons to choose from would:
In the end (at my company) it's not much different than sending an email to the person, but it feels more personal. I received "Hi-Fives" and regular emails wishing me a "Happy Birthday" - the formatted email message with a (goofy but endearing) message felt much better than getting simply
We'd also have to change the culture here to accept the difference, and play it up. Which I think is the biggest part of the puzzle. Technically, it's no different from getting a nice PM right? WRONG these are completely different and can only be used for nice, wholesome purposes and if you're the recipient of one you should feel oh-so-great because that means you're a great human being worthy of respect, love, and all the nice things in the world.
I love this! If we had that kind of thing here, I would be hi-fiving people left and right. We’ve got so many awesome people on the site.
This is a wonderful direction to try to go.
It would be great if there was some kind of option on comments where I could indicate that I appreciate a person, not explicitly for that comment, but ... in the sense of "I'm glad you're here and this comment you wrote reminded me of that".
honestly a heart emoji react is the first thing that came to mind when you said this... I sometimes go out of my way to DM users and let them know I appreciate them but something I can just click on that makes this easier would be nice too
If you're familiar with discourse style forums, this strikes me a little bit like the 'heart' feature on those.
Exemplary seems really superfluous. The voting system already means that “good” or popular posts get accolades. I don’t think we need an exemplary highlight. If you want to go above and beyond to praise a post, send a PM.
I like the 'no way/need to respond' aspect of the exemplary notes.
I would enjoy something akin to exemplary but with extremely reduced visibility. I'm thinking about the concept of reputation on other sites, where you can award rep for posts you find useful, insightful, make a good point, etc. This should not affect sorting in any way and should just exist on the bottom near the vote count.
Agreed. The logical counter to the negative feedback loops is to build some positive ones that freshen the place up a bit.
I would love a high five feature. Reminds me of "thanks" features on forums.
I would love to see this and i think it would definitely make for some interesting cross pollination between communities. I don't know how impactful it would be at this size though, most people are subscribed to most groups i suspect.
This dovetails with some old chit chat about multi-homed threads, and the idea of a thread that moves from one community to the next, gathering different hivemind opinions from each group, and potentially guaranteeing ideas get challenged as it moves around. This might be able to take /r/all levels of exposure and keep the thread more productive, especially if the submission has its genesis in smaller communities and migrates into larger and larger ones before getting that sort of visibility. It'll already be populated by expert opinions and smaller in-group discussions before becoming a massive free-for-all for the out-group.
Now this, this makes really good sense I think.
I'd like to have a ~podcasts group.
I think this is a great idea! I would also love to see this.
Seconded. Podcasts make my job bearable.
~audio, with ~audio.books, ~audio.music, ~audio.podcasts.
~audio.books symlinks with ~books.audio
This is a fairly minor suggestion, and one that's come up before, but I'd love the ability to be able to post the occasional anonymous comment (or post?). I think the practice of making throwaway accounts on reddit is an emergent behavior because there was no official solution. It's tricky because anonymity is often a tool to enable conduct we wouldn't want to be held accountable for (abuse, flaming, spam, etc), but I've also found there are cases when I'd like to be able to share a perspective related to the industry I work in (lest it appear that I'm speaking on behalf of my employer), or based on my career, and I'd rather not have it linked to my named account.
edit with an unrelated suggestion: I'd love it if locked threads had just a one sentence summary of why they were locked. I've come across a few recently and while you can generally intuit what happened, I think it helps serve as a model for future behavior to know "this thread was locked because XYZ behavior made it shitty."
I agree, with an exception for political topics and minority-related topics, to avoid people claiming to be things they're not (alongside being able to mod those comments just the same as anyone else.) I think this take on the purpose of anonymity in this site from Deimos here would be best:
I’m all for anonymous posts, but they should be limited with a timer or another metric - particularly if they’re truly anonymous and not just hidden-username posts.
Let's tap ~music.streams. I think it's a great, top level general break for separating links to music itself from everything else in the ~music sphere. It'll also help people avoid the torrent of tracks that will appear via subscriptions. Judging from the general crankyness around here I think we need some good music. It has a superpower - it's immune to the very bullshit we're all mulling over today. These topics just never curse a music forum - everyone's brains have been smoothed out by the tunes.
Then after it floats for a while we'll see about a repackage of the submissions into things like a neverending ~tildes music playlist. Then you can just subscribe and consume the Tildes music orgy on your favorite streaming service, off-platform, when you aren't glued to a screen and the music can do the most good. ;)
This place is still too young for Eternal September.
I'm pretty +1 on this; I unsubscribed to ~music due to this and had to find the group again to post this amazing video essay on rap.
I don't think the vitriol and drama is lessened though, just focused on different topics. And even these topics themselves come up in music subs-- see any of the (genre)heads subs, and I regard those as some of the few decent large subs over there.
I love the idea of splitting the streams out and using that to create Tildes Radio basically, though.
The people fighting about genres are the unique curse of the music forums. None of the other stuff is ever more than a flutter unless there is a really, really controversial music track/video involved. Then it'll be about whatever that issue is - and universally less insane than any other thread on the topic you will ever see on a non-music forum. The worst you can ever find is a 'mild' flamewar, usually with the people fighting being jeered into submission in the comments by everyone else.
Of course, if it hits /r/all the bets are off, since that's not the music forum anymore, it's everyone.
This is a chicken and egg thing. The site will not be more sensitive to these matters if the relevant people aren’t here.
Also, it’s really worth noting that imposing a social justice orientation around any involvement or participation from marginalized groups can actually be quite off putting to many who just want a space to hang out. “Woke” or Social justicey types are a minority among minority groups. There are plenty of conservative or “traditionalist” women out there for example.
Making a space that’s friendly or comfortable for women or ethic or religious minorities is a distinct goal that is separate from making a “social justice oriented” space. Those attract completely different kinds of people. For another example, WorldStar was mostly Black but many of the participants on there would definitely not get along with social justice movements. Or, more specifically, a lot on online social justice posters wouldn’t get along with them.
The risk is that gender critical people find Tildes and dominate that group, and then spread toxicity to the rest of tildes.
There's not much risk of Tildes being as bad as Mumsnet or Twitter, but it could get pretty bad unless moderation is vigorous.
How though? There's a single admin who can unilaterally ban them. This isn't reddit or twitter where engagement is prioritized over quality posting. They couldn't make subforums to organize. So what are they gonna do besides shit the place up for a little while before getting jazzed?
Being on a hair trigger to react to anything that's even remotely adjacent to something someone in a gender critical crowd might say as if it's hatemongering or "stochastic terrorism" or whatever in itself will do a lot more damage than they do. Because that behavior tends to come from a good place so is a lot harder to ban.
A ~spirituality group (or something to that effect) for discussions and content about religion, faith, theology, etc.
Feature: I wish there was a toggle to hide/show video posts. I never watch videos on mobile, so I'd like to be able to easily filter those out.
+1 for that! I sometimes set my filter to not show posts tagged with video, but there are times when I want to watch videos and so turning it on and off in the settings each time is a pain. I would love a toggle for that.
This would be fun. I just wonder if there'd be enough activity to warrant pulling it out of the ~humanities and ~life mixup theology currently embodies.
I don't know. There are not a lot of religious/spiritual people on Tildes, and it is sometimes akward to introduce theses subjects on current groups. A dedicated group might help some feel more comfortable to talk about these matters.
I love the ~spirituality idea! I’ve been studying druidry the past couple of months, but from a secular/psychological perspective. Nowhere else seems like a good place to bring it up.
I agree that more, public tags would be nice. I know someone suggested a “harmful” tag for comments which have hurtful language but were not intentional.
Regarding new groups, I would like ~engineering. The group would focus on larger scale technology (e.g., nuclear reactors, bridges, chemical plants, the electric grid, automotive manufacturing plants, etc) vs the smaller scale/computing items which seem to dominate ~tech. I also wouldn’t mind a ~politics, to consolidate politically oriented discussion (especially of a high quality variety, cf. r/neutralpolitics or r/AskHistorians), but I understand if that opens up too many worms.
Maybe we should bring back a reddit classic: ಠ_ಠ
What mechanic helps you tell someone politely that their tone/phrasing or attitude stinks? How do we make the feedback constructive rather than antagonistic? The world may never know.
A hidden tone tag, from all but admins, with sub-tags tone.positive, tone.aggressive, etc.
Will make it easier for people to filter out negativity.
Edit: Clarified.
The only concern that immediately comes to me with private tags is potential for abuse. It seems like enabling users to send messages that are unseen by others, anonymous, and cannot be replied to is a bad move. I feel that if they could be replied to like a DM this might be better, and the person writing the tag would be directly confronting the user - but what better is this than DMs to begin with? Anonymizing the person writing the tag?
Not necessarily visible to the poster either. More just a hidden attribute that people who want to avoid negativity can filter on.
I'll edit accordingly.
I like this idea... @Gaywallet mentioned elsewhere using the malice tag to report comments but I feel like that tag assumes a level of bad faith which I amn't sure is present (maybe I'm not cynical enough). Harmful feels more forgiving, I guess.
+1 to this, I wrote in another thread about a tech.robotics, but ~engineering would be fantastic.
Also seconding ~engineering. If it were created I'd post quite a few videos to it :)
Your description of ~engineering sounds very different from what I would expect to see in a group with that name. Would ~mechanical_engineering (or ~engineering.mechanical?) or ~large_scale_engineering be a better name? I would expect ~engineering to include everything from computer and electrical engineering to environmental engineering to automotive etc.
I wasn’t intending to exclude what you mention. I guess I just want a firmer separation from ~tech (which seems dominated by computing and web related topics, both here and Reddit).
~engineering.mechanical will be great once ~engineering gets big enough.
Ah, I see. Yeah, that seems reasonable.
At this point we might as well. ~misc is practically all politics already. Let's change the name to ~politics and get it over with.
I still would keep ~misc. It’s nice to have a place where we can just chuck something if it doesn’t fit in another group. Which may be the case for a long time to come.
Agree 100%. Keep ~misc and move politics garbage out of there. And if there is resistance to putting it back in ~news, then just make ~politics a thing so I can unsubscribe already. ;-)
This discussion reminds me a little bit of what happened with /r/reddit.com, which was effectively a misc subreddit until it was closed.
With the volume of content on the site, I don't feel balkanizing any groups further is the way to go. There isn't content to justify it. If you can't scroll past one link you aren't interested in, that's on you, not the site.
I'd want fewer, more inclusive groups and more tags.
Here's an example: In approximately the same field we today have:
~anime
~arts
~books
~creative
~design
~games
~hobbies
~movies
~music
~tv
Together these 10 groups average 13 topics and 59 comments a day. That splitting must reduce discussion on the small amount of content the site has. That is not good.
If/when tildes becomes a big site, that's the time to make changes to suit a big site. Not now, where such an organization is harmful to the site.
Even if a few people with very specific interests want their own group, or want to exclude that one post from their listings every day. The cost/benefit is very heavily skewed to costing the site activity for little benefit.
A group averaging 1 post a day sounds fine to me at this size for a site? I have a hard time imagining losing or folding any of those groups you mentioned.
I also don't favour opening like 10 new groups at once, but like I said I suspect that activity may increase given more space and prompts for content. It's not guaranteed, but i have seen it happen for example when I managed some decently sized discord servers: more channels with specific topics increased the amount of overall messages users were sending because more users were finding their "home" and were comfortable contributing to those. There might be an aspect missing in tildes for that though, a reason to visit the groups individually rather than simply have them as categories.
The benchmark I used on reddit for dead vs alive when I was making the music multis was around five posts a month. That was from looking at several hundred music subreddits, most of them under 10k subs. A lot of those are dead now, but a lot more of them got pretty big and popular and busy. It seemed like a reasonable cutoff, and we can be more generous on a site this small than five a month.
If a group is flatly dead here for a prolonged period, we can just fold it back into the parent. I think that perhaps we can be more adventurous starting up smaller groups because it doesn't harm the site or cost us anything having less active groups around. It's only when there are hundreds of dead groups, vastly outnumbering the active ones, that it makes your website look like a wasteland. Nobody is suggesting that, though - just some level of turnover and experimentation.
I think we can definitely start more with subtopics, that might help prevent atomization while giving people more space to discuss their topics. Many of the proposals I’m seeing are for subtopics rather than full topics.
I agree with the fewer groups and more tags idea. To make this scale able though I think we also need a sort of “default” set of tags in each group that are prioritized in the UI somehow. For example if we merged books, movies, and TV into “storytelling” I’d like a book, movie, or TV tag to either be mandatory or suggested so strongly that people always put it there and always put it there in the same way.
Not sure where it would land, but it'd be nice to have a space to put podcasts.
I'd still love for us to have the ability to go to something like ~music.rap to automatically filter down music by rap -- which would also remove the need for formal subgroup creation. :)
We've talked about whisper comments and semi-private or fully-private side chains for conversation before. I was interested because it offers a way to cut down on the comment bloat that plagues larger threads in places like reddit.
It's an unexplored problem space, right? We usually have replies and direct messages... and that's it. We're locking ourselves into one-to-one or one-to-many modes of communication with nothing in between. One must either talk in private, or talk on the stage with everyone else.
Maybe it's just as simple as a 'private reply' box to get started.
Another idea would be to comment as an aside. Keep it all public, but shuffle it out of sight by default. Although I might just be describing the ability label your own comments as Noise, maybe with an adjustment to make Noisy threads not count as new activity and not bump the thread in the various listings?
That's intriguing! I really like that idea. Not sure what I would want it to look like, but a way to say, "I have something to say here, but it's tangential and I don't want to hijack the thread," would be useful in my opinion.
Seems like it could be useful as a community moderation feature. Something provided to trusted users, similar to tag and title editing powers.
And I don’t mean moderation like mod powers. More like a debate moderator thing.
What do you all think about keeping the "Exemplary" label, turning off the cooldown and anonymity, and making them publicly hidden?
I strongly agree with what others have said about "Exemplary" labels having been used as a sort of super-upvote, and on occasion I have felt tempted to do the same against my better judgement. My impression - and I don't think I was on this site when labels were first implemented, so that's all it is, just an impression - is that "Exemplaried" comments were intended to showcase particularly well-written or nice comments on Tildes. They certainly don't seem to have been used as such.
But getting an "Exemplary" label is nice. It's nice to know that someone appreciated your comment, especially if you put effort into expressing yourself clearly and concisely. It's nice to know that somebody thought what you said was interesting and well-expressed enough to write a quick note telling you so. I just feel like having them be public isn't particularly useful at best, and harmful to discussion at worst.
Why not just rely on being able to hide people’s posts? If you want a curated discourse experience the only fair and easy way to ensure it is you being able to curate it yourself. Don’t like a user? Bam they’re gone for you. Maybe if they’re that toxic they’ll be commenting to nobody once everyone has hidden them.
I suppose this is an idea that works best with Tildes at the state it is now: rather small.
Ideally I wouldn't want Tildes to ever get Reddit-size. Only slightly bigger than it is now, maybe two-fold.
One of the more unorthodox suggestions I have is that I think something like a Wikipedia talk page where you request tag addition or title editing would be a good idea. Currently you have to request Deimos to let you edit tags or PM someone who can edit tags (most obviously @mycketforvirrad). While there's nothing wrong with this, I think letting people request tag editing would be a lot more convenient, but more importantly, I think it would be a pretty good place to make a serious attempt at demo-ing the proposed trust system.
A small list of other things I would be interested in are:
A recurring topic on what you have you done with your friends and romantic partner(s?) It seems most people here have an SO of some sort, so I would be interested in people talking about what they do with them. Maybe that's just because a lot of places I visit often cater to and assume that the people that go to them don't have friends or a
girlfriendSO and I give that way too much room in my head because of that, but I think it would be cool.Labeling posts needs to come to the site eventually.
I think a ~speculation (in the general sense) where we talk about what we think will happen in the future ala r/futurewhatif but better modded would be interesting IMO.
People have often suggested to just do away with groups entirely, and I find that quite compelling as a makeshift way of having all the groups via having no groups.
I second @Adys, ~health.mental and ~health.fitness (or ~health.body) seems like a natural subdivision, and would likely encourage posting in both.
Subgroups in ~science would be welcome for the same reason (dedicated groups drive up activity, as seen with ~design and ~games.tabletop). I really like the organizational structure @Algernon_Asimov proposed:
Eventually, ~humanities might do well with a similar treatment (just sketching out ideas here):
~games.tabletop and ~games.game_design appear to have been split off from ~games since the last time group structure was brought up. I'm not a fan of this distinction - ~games.game_design is essentially dead, and ~games has become ~games.digital in effect. I'd propose deleting ~games.game_design (or rather, re-merging it with ~games) and the addition of a ~games.digital for much the same reason as ~music.streams would be nice - it filters out the overwhelming amount of homogeneous content occupying that general-purpose space.
A ~comp.unix group would be really nice to have. I don't have a strong reason for this, other than that I and others would enjoy it.
(oh, and the subscription colors in the groups page are broken, for anyone wondering)
Revisting this [June 2022]:
I'd still like ~health to be split into ~health.mental and ~health.physical. ~games.game_design is even more dead than it was before. I'd still like it to be replaced with ~games.digital. I'd also still appreciate a ~comp.unix group, though not as much as the others.
I've changed my mind on ~science and ~humanities subgroups (unless they start getting many more posts)
This was already tried. I don't remember exactly how long the trial period was but on September 5, 2019 those groups were added, and as far as I know, there were either (or both) not enough posts in each subgroup to justify their existence or some other issue which lead to the groups remerging. Unless you are proposing that those groups should split again?
The other point I want to make is that much of the differentiation of groups are probably better off handled with tags, but I think the current system would need to be adjusted slightly.
This wasn't meant to be targeted directly at you (@petrichor) but was just an idea I had while typing my reply.
I have a proposal, but there are some major problems that I list below. My proposal (maybe as only a temporary fix) is to have the ability to manually create custom "groups" on the sidebar which are in actuality just a filter/search that displays topics within the larger groups with those specific tags.
That way if someone is really only interested in ~science.social (either posting directly to the subgroup/specific tag or viewing only), they can click on their custom group and it would only show topics tagged with the science.social tag. I think then the issue would be having only science.social topics displayed on their home page while other non-science.social topics are hidden if they do not wish to see those or something. I'm not entirely sure of all the various edge cases or if I am being coherent at the moment.
Additionally, when a topic is posted after going into their custom/temporary ~science.social group (or whatever), that tag is automatically filled in when they wish to make a new post to that group.
There are a few huge problems with this idea. First someone would actually need to write the code and submit it. I am not a programmer and I subsequently have no idea the effort needed to implement this idea, but I imagine it is not a trivial thing especially considering this may only be a temporary or stop-gap measure to avoid having excess official groups. Another major problem is if everyone creates their own custom "groups" with bunches of various tags and posts then we will likely find ourselves in situation where not only would we have ~science and ~science.social tagged in posts but also posts with unrelated or unnecessary variations (e.g. ~science.socialsciences and misspellings/typos) . This might not be an issue if users agreed to the same conventions but that might be difficult to enforce. I think there might also need to be more tag clean-up being done. There are a few solutions to this particular issue that I have the start of some ideas for but nothing fully fleshed out.
There have been some synth enthusiasts on the site. (Though sadly, some have left :-(.) I would love to see a ~music.synth, or something like that. Not sure if there's critical mass for such a group yet, though. This is another case where some of the topics currently go into ~music, and some go into ~tech or ~comp, so it's a pain to keep up with them all.