7
votes
Automatically archiving posts
Tildes seems to promote older threads much more than Reddit (which I like). With that said, will there be a feature similar to Reddit where after X length of time, the post is archived and can no longer be commented/voted on?
I am not sure whether this is actually a feature of Reddit, or just a way of reducing writes on the database for performance.
I kinda love the fact that old threads stay alive for so long.
Yeah, I use to on other sites respond to an old thread and everyone would yell at me. So I want to know, if it's fine to continue old threads?
I think it is. Just because you turned up late doesn't mean you can't join the discussion.
Related: if I comment on a post or another comment that is a week old or older, will people be annoyed by this? All the other forums and chat places I've been to get angry when someone does this so I've just been conditioned not to. The no archiving makes me think that's not an issue with the site but maybe it is to the user.
I think it's fine. The site is brand new and there are quite a few topics that existed before people joined, so bumping them back up and potentially re-starting discussion on an interesting subject isn't a bad thing.
If people don't want to see older bumped threads, they can use different sorting methods or change the time period dropdown. For example, they can even leave it on "activity" but set the time period to "last 24 hours" instead of the default "all time". That will still sort by activity, but only include topics that were made in the last day, instead of all of them. This will get even easier once it's possible to set your preferred defaults for the sorting.
I replied to a comment recently that was a few days or a week old, I just assumed that since there's not as much activity here as there is on places like reddit that it wouldn't bother anyone if I popped in to an older conversation.
I would lean towards no considering the default sort is by thread activity rather than post time stamp. I could see opinion changing though as the site grows. If the default sort is showing dialogue in obscure threads only a couple people care about, then you’ll likely have users setting their default sort to post time stamp rather than by recent thread activity. As long as that’s a setting users can toggle, I think everyone will be happy.
I think at the moment, because the community is only ~1000 people, the turnover on posts and activity drop off is not quite as quick as on Reddit, which is sort of relaxing, it encourages people to stick with ideas a little longer, keep conversations going. As much as I'm enjoying it, I imagine that will sort of go as the site traffic increases. As others have said, on other sites the archiving of older posts is mostly just for resource management, which ~ doesn't really need as much right now.