A few Off the Bat Thoughts about the Mechanics
Tags I can totally see nsfw.nude work, but do you think tagging will be done much further? It's relatively much work to tag a thing well, maybe some sort of cross-posting is more rewarding to the...
Tags
I can totally see nsfw.nude work, but do you think tagging will be done much further? It's relatively much work to tag a thing well, maybe some sort of cross-posting is more rewarding to the user. Essentially it might be the same thing, but the act of sharing to another tilde feels more rewarding than adding yet another tag.
Hierarchies in Tags and Tildes
Yes! I love hierarchies for how they scale.
Do you think the one-dimensional nature of such a "taxonomy" will get problematic, or is it merely a corner case? I might have "food > recipes" and "food > restaurants" or I might have "recipes > food" and "recipes > chemistry". Again I feel like cross-posting is essential to solve this duplication issue. Maybe this as another chance to improve on reddit: if cross-posts just reference a single post there would be just one big discussion.
Cfabbro is part of the team? "We were actually considering allowing multiple ways to access the same groups. E.g. ~literature and ~lit going to the same top level group" sounds good.
Comments
I think "most votes" has a strong bias towards early comments. Ideally you'd give a new comment the reason of doubt, and make it more visible until a good rating about is has been established. For this you'd have to track up-votes per "seen".
Sadly it's really hard to track these implicit down-votes ("read but not up-voted") and generally it obfuscates how the site works. I still think it's worth thinking about, especially if you might derive trust/reputation from the up-votes at some point.
Otherwise commenting on rising stories is the an easy way to farm karma (I tried it on HN to see how the down-vote mechanism works, which is unlocked at 200 karma). Here I also agree with you, that this process should not be 100% automatic.
Group-specific trust
If tildes are nested, will reputation (eventually) be inherited up the hierarchy?
Filter-Bubble (found your opinion in some discussion about it):
I agree again, good communities are bubbles. I think the "no-downvotes" will help a bit so controversial stuff can rise.
Links
I also like your decision to not allow text on links. I really like how HN moderators improve link-titles sometimes to get rid of clickbait or inaccuracies.
I will give some UX feedback later, when I got used to tildes a bit.