6
votes
Self labeling comments
Other than Exemplary, it might be useful for the ability to self label a comment. While in some sense it might be desirable for anyone posting a comment that falls under such a category, and is self aware, to simply refrain from posting, some of the boundaries for labels such as joke and off-topic can be rather fuzzy.
Hello! I found this thread because I was wondering about self-labeling comments after reading this recent discussion about the etiquette of "thank you" comments on Tildes. (The thread helped me understand that "thank you" comments aren't really discouraged, they're just marked as noise to indicate that they don't need to bump the thread to everyone.)
I would love to be able to label my own "thank you" comments as "noise", or use a "whisper comment" function as described in the Gitlab issue discussion on this.
My UX suggestion for this is to have a checkbox near the "post comment" button that reads "label as 'noise' to prevent bumping the thread with your comment; recommended for 'thanks'".
(This is noise) I was reluctant about it too, but I thought bumping an old post would be better than creating a new post about this topic. I was about to do that, but I searched first and found this existing post.
The only issue I see with bumping-over-posting is, that voting for the thread we're commenting on remains disabled due to its age. At least individual comments all have their own voting-timer. Maybe some comment-activity based mechanic could be found to dynamically reactivate top-level-voting for revived posts.
This is technically unrealistic because when the voting is locked, records of who voted is discarded. IIRC this happens as soon as permissible in Canada. Hence there could be repeat votes after unlocking.
Hmm, that is unfortunate. Although it would be possible to change this for future posts only. Is there a good reason to discard the information who voted on what (without a user requesting account deletion or the like)? It seems to me that this artificially restricts the potential to develop certain new features for this platform.
Hi, it's great to see more users engage with Tildes' design and implementation!
I would encourage you to read the documentation linked in the site footer. I believe your question is addressed there, in a more official capacity than I can offer.
It is also good to read a thread before commenting. I think that stance is directed to top level comments, but when a topic is small and easy to read, it might be something to keep in mind.
Thanks for that, I was wondering why I couldn't vote on some posts! Now I know it's due to the post's age :)
To add to that I've seen it discussed, that self-labeling would also make sense for 'offtopic' and 'joke'.
I do agree that the checkbox-solution makes perfect sense for the noise label, to increase its visibility and proactively encourage its usage for 'thanks'-comments and the like. To include the other two cases a different UI-element would probably be better though, to avoid to many buttons below the comment textbox. Maybe the best way to go about this would be to include a noise-checkbox to label a comment before posting, and for all the other cases simply unlock the already existing 'Label' button for labeling comments after they have been posted with a restricted set of labels for one's own comments. Alternatively a dropdown menu would probably also do for the pre-post labelling if it is decided to include more than one label in this label-subset as well.
(For obvious reasons self-labeling as 'exemplary' or 'malice' should not be possible, although thinking about a usecase of someone actually self-labelling a comment as 'malice' is kinda funny.)
Already on Gitlab:
Feature request: label own comments as offtopic (maybe also joke and/or noise)
Thanks for doing some due diligence where I should have.
Because it didn't come up, is there any reason the capability to self label should be limited to anything other than Exemplary? For example, if someone was going to post something malicious and was self aware enough and had enough integrity (well...) to self label as malice, is there any reason to stop them?
I could see it potentially encouraging a**hole behavior as if self labeling was enough to justify it, but IDK. All the other labels are much less extreme but the principle might hold. Thoughts?
Edit: also, self labeling as malice enables someone who has had a change of heart to rebuke their past self. I don't know if that can be considered healthy, but I guess it's a use case.
NP. And yeah, I would definitely be worried that people being able to self-label with Malice would just encourage poor behavior for very little benefit. Whereas unlike Malice, comments that are Offtopic, Joke and even Noise (in some circumstances) can still be valuable, and perhaps even moreso if they could be self-labeled. E.g. When someone says "Thanks" to someone that helped them, that is technically "Noise" but not the kind that should be discouraged.
p.s. As for people using Malice to rebuke their own past comments, I don't see that as being particularly valuable, or likely to happen. Besides, in such cases, an edit to their comment explaining things, or even deleting their comment, would be the wiser move, IMO.
Right. Of all the labels, Malice is the one Tildes can't afford to encourage by any measure. I think a similar, less severe principle holds with joke, but as the social stigma for posting a joke is so much lower, I don't know if being able to self label would drive a change in the number of joke posts. It could probably be tested trivially if there was any interest.
Yeah, I feel similarly wary about allowing self-labeling using Joke. And even mentioned why in my comment on that Gitlab issue:
This may need to be placed on another thread but I think it would intresting to add a few other labels here like NSFW or Sensitive.
I cam across a comment on Tildes that didn't provide too much context on what they were talking about, only a term to Google, which led to a website that I felt really bad after visiting. The user didn't provide too much context but enough to intrigue me to Google.
I think offering that user the possibility to ponder if their comment may be harmful to some would be fair.
@Deimos, I think @panagiotis has proposed a good idea.
Is this thread the proper channel or would an Issue on GH work better?
This is the proper channel... or you can post them on Tildes Gitlab Issues tracker yourself if you have an account there. But nobody has to do that. I usually add them to Gitlab for people, but I somehow missed seeing your above suggestion. I'm currently lying down in bed already though, so it will have to wait until the morning. :P
p.s. @boxer_dogs_dance, it's probably better to ping me for things like this in the future, since I usually take care of adding issues to the Gitlab for Deimos.
Thanks. I will do that in future.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/808
Thanks a lot for this!
I have added an additional comment there.
Nsfw already exists as a special tag for threads, though that cannot be applied to comments.
In this situation, a comment warning of nsfw content is probably sufficient though I am not against a label either.
I very frequently wish to self label my comments Offtopic, yet I'm against this: I think it would encourage the making of such Joke or Noise comments and I don't really want that. Although, hmm, perhaps if it did make them collapsed immediately by default that wouldn't be too much of a problem...
This feature request was driven by an off-topic comment I felt had merit enough to post.