With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.

So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.

I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.

What do you think?

Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)

@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.

The Context

These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.

• Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.

• Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.

• Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.

If you complete:

• Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.

• Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.

• Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.

Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.

The Question

Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?

It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:

• Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.

• Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.

In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.

This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.

@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.

So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?

I wanted to label a comment as Exemplary today and when I clicked "Label" the option wasn't present. I've given Exemplary labels before, but it's been a while. I do know there's a cooldown, but I don't think I've given any out lately, so I wouldn't think that would apply.

I'm on Firefox, but I checked on both Chrome and Edge and I don't have the option there either.

Just noticed that the contents of expandable comments are automatically shown in the one-line summary when comments are collapsed; see here. Considering we often use them for spoiler comments, maybe this warrants changing this behavior? Or at the least it adds to the case for implementing dedicated spoiler tags within comments.

Right now, there is number of comments visible when on main/group page. What would you think about excluding comments that are collapsed by default, such as those labeled as noise? I'm disappointed when I see 7 comments at an article, but there is none actually relevant to the article itself. The disadvantage of this is that the site could feel more dead, especially in low-activity groups.

Should offtopic comments bump up topics? IMO, offtopic discussion is not “real” discussion. Seeing a topic at top with 7 new comments only to discover that all of it is offtopic, meta discussion, is annoying and disappointing.

As an example, there is one topic on the front page (don’t want to link it), that was bumped by the biggest offtopic discussion I’ve seen on Tildes so far. The discussion itself is not wrong, and is quite interesting, but it’s not about the post. The comment chain should IMO either be in it’s own topic, or not bump the topic up.

I try to tag comments whenever I come across them to help keep the site clean. The problem I'm coming across when doing so is that I'm not entirely sure when to use noise versus joke.

The truth is, I've never come across anything that's just noise-- it's always been a joke that just feels more like noise than a joke to me.

Is there an official definition for these tags? Are different actions performed based on what the tag is?