Let's add (and rearrange?) some groups + a few notes about other short-term plans
Some really great feedback and ideas came out of the discussion we had about the group structure recently, and while I do want to work on implementing some things from that eventually, it won't happen immediately. I'm also not sure if the influx of new users is going to calm down somewhat (which might make some of those changes feel less necessary), but I guess we'll see what happens in the next couple of days as the third-party Reddit clients start actually shutting down.
Anyway, something that we can do immediately is create some new groups, and/or adjust some of the existing ones. This could encourage some more activity on certain subjects, and also make it easier for people to control what they see on Tildes through their group subscriptions. So I'm looking for input on where you feel there are currently gaps in the groups, or some new ones we could add that feel like we might have enough activity to get started.
I also just want to quickly mention a few other things I'm trying to work on in the near future (now that I'm finally almost caught up on all the email invite requests). They're things that stagnated over the last few years but are more important to update if the site's activity is going to increase again:
- Updating the open-source code and development environment, and ensuring people can get a local version running easily to be able to contribute fixes/changes.
- Reviewing and organizing the issues and existing merge requests in the GitLab repo, so it's more clear what changes are wanted/needed.
- Doing a pass through places like the Docs site and the group wikis to clean up and update some of the outdated information.
Let's try to keep the discussion in this topic more centered around suggestions for changes to the groups though, I just wanted to let you know some of the other things I'm hoping to do in the near future.
Thanks! And I've also given 5 invites to every current user, so feel free to use those if you know anyone else that would like to join: https://tildes.net/invite
I second that. However, I think one thing that needs to be addressed before we start going crazy with the subgroups is this Gitlab issue:
Don't show content from unsubscibed subgroups in parent group page
Since as it stands now, if someone is not subscribed to ~sports.hockey but they visit the ~sports group page, they would still see ~sports.hockey content there even though they likely don't want to. So each top-level group page with subgroups might need to be treated more like the front page in that regard.
I think if that can get worked out it would be a great change for the platform. As it continues to grow, each major sport will start to see it's own little community wanting to form.
I have little interest in "general sports" as a whole. I don't want to be getting posts from people posting about soccer, basketball, motorsports, tennis, etc. but would absolutely want to be getting posts about baseball and hockey. Being able to carve out those communities from the main ~sports would be a huge plus.
Or as Juan Uribe once put it: "More fooball! Oh sht! Fcking bullsht... unfckingbelievable... Baseball, that's what I want to watch."
You better believe it's more football.
Agreed. This is an essential change if we're going to start using sub-groups more.
I also suspect we will need a few more people with permissions to move posts between parent groups and subgroups depending on general interest...
If a post warrants enough interest in local.canada I would hope someone would move it up to the broader local group for broader consumption.
Do you think this would warrant a need to tag every post somewhat redundantly? Like, it may seem obvious for a post in ~sports.soccer to be a "soccer" tag by default. But if someone really doesn't want soccer news but some people may want to move big soccer news to ~sports (e.g. Pelé Dies), they may want to filter out "soccer" to cover for that ability to move.
There can also be the problem in reverse. Maybe someone isn't subbed to ~sports but is subscribed to ~sports.soccer. Maybe to solve this problem this "soccer" tag can be a special tag used for tracking? So while a post is moved to ~sports, it will still appear in a ~sports.soccer user's' feed. That is probably another feature request in and of itself.
Such an interesting thought. I know there were plans to bubble up posts automatically, but starting off with a simple manual process would really help figure out what is best here.
Wouldn't the optimal solution be to make it switchable in real time? From any page, I can choose to see everything or only anything at that level or lower that I'm subscribed to. I don't mind reading about sports other than the ones I'm most interested in, so having a version of ~sports that's everything would be a nice option. And if I want to focus on what I'm following, I load the subscribed-only view.
Of course, I can say that since I'm not actually going to be coding anything - I have no idea if it's actually reasonable.
Hmm... I actually like that idea; Having the ability to switch between a ~sports (all) and ~sports (subbed) views. Added that suggestion as a comment in the related Gitlab issue.
Not to draw too many comparisons to reddit, but it is somewhat of an unspoken (or in some cases, explicit) rule over there that if you're on one subreddit about a sport, you don't talk about results from other sports. So like, on r/formula1, if a former F1 driver won the Indy 500, you wouldn't post it on r/formula1 because you wouldn't be expecting to see results from another series there.
If you can see everything from all the subgroups by just looking at the parent group, a lot of people are going to see results for other sports that they may want to avoid.
We don't actually have any subgroups for individual sports yet, but if/when we do, I imagine that is something that is going to have to be decided on by the people that frequent those communities. But worth keeping in mind is that if it becomes an issue, there may be a solution that doesn't require a total prohibition, like perhaps just ensuring posts like that have a
spoiler.other_sporttag applied to them so people can filter them out if they want to avoid them. We have a lot more flexibility here than on reddit.Oh, definitely - a newer, growing platform can accommodate any number of solutions. I was only trying to point out that it might be a good idea to accommodate the desire to avoid seeing results from sporting events. I actually always kinda hated that the Formula 1 results would always be posted to r/formula1, especially on days where the race is at like 2 AM my time. I'm not going to watch it until the next day, so I'd have to avoid reddit until I did, and some habits are hard to break, like your early morning reddit browse.
Actually, it's posted as OT. There's literally one post right now there about the NASCAR winner (who isn't even a former F1 driver).
But yeah, here it's a matter of if there should be a single ~sports.motor, or have specific ~sports.motor.f1, ~sports.motor.superbikes, etc
absolutely this. I currently don't sub to ~sports but I'd like to sub to ~sports.motorsports if it got added.
You can do that today.
When looking at your landing page, only those groups and subgroups you are subscribed to show up.
E.g. Subscribe to ~tildes.official, unsubscribe to ~tildes, you will only see ~tildes.official on your home page.
@cfabbro was talking about one specific opposite use case where you unsubscribe to ~tildes.official but perhaps subscribe to ~tildes, then navigate to ~tildes (which is a distinct group from https://tildes.net/), and you get annoyed at still seeing ~tildes.official even though you are unsubscribed too it - it's not something I do, but clearly some folks do.
For you it shouldn't be a problem, if you navigate to ~sports, presumably you would expect to see anything posted to ~sports as well as any subscribed sub groups, and it wouldn't annoy you? I guess the question is, would you expect to only see subscribed sub groups when in ~sports, or all sub groups?
This probably becomes more important to fix, if we move away from the current Reddit-style and move to more a Forum-style.
Ah okay I wasn't aware it already worked like this! That's helpful then. I don't usually navigate directly to groups which I think is where the confusion originated.
One potential issue that no one has pointed out yet is the naming of the Association Football subgroup. On Reddit it was /r/soccer. The previous user suggested ~sports.soccer and you then added ~sports.football (presumably to mean American football), which both make sense. But currently, Association-football-related posts in ~sports get tagged as 'football' and not 'soccer'.
Not a huge deal of course, but I think this highlights one of the key differences between Tildes and Reddit. On Reddit, you could just create an /r/soccer and an /r/football and whichever becomes more popular ends up becoming the default subreddit for that sport. Which is exactly what happened, and the American football sub became /r/nfl, similar to how the main basketball sub became /r/nba instead of /r/basketball. On Tildes though, only one name can be chosen and there's a lot less ability for these things to develop organically. A decision will be made about whether it's ~sports.soccer or ~sports.football and that will be the end of it. Not saying that that's a bad thing, just what I've noticed so far.
Also, what happens when you have the subgroup ~sports.soccer and then people get fed up with seeing Premier League posts. Will a ~sports.premierleague get created to syphon off those posts? Could a sub-subgroup be created (i.e. ~sports.soccer.premierleague)?
Similarly, what if people in ~sports.motorsports don't care for F1 and only want to read about NASCAR? Can you block a tag on Tildes? Or would you instead subscribe to the tag NASCAR? That way you don't have to unsubscribe from every other motorsport in the ~sports.motorsports subgroup that you are not interested in.
What about subgroups for individual teams? Like if I wanted to subscribe to only my favorite team? On reddit there were tons of subreddits both large and small for individual teams, even sometimes multiple groups for the same team that fit different purposes (like one main subreddit for that team, then another one just for matchday-going information, then another for local fans of that team, etc. etc. etc.). How would Tildes deal with that when it gets more popular? Will everything just be under the umbrella term of ~sports.soccer or will there be subgroups inside of subgroups inside of subgroups?
I don't have any answers, and I'm not saying these are bad things or giant problems or anything like that, I'm just musing about subgroup naming and wondering how Tildes could handle the niche communities that arise within more generic groups.
You can currently do this in your user settings. It works across all groups, though, which may not be ideal for all usecases (but is good at straight up nuking particular tags from the frontpage). It also filters them out in a way that you can go back and see them if gou change gour mind.
I think the other part to this is sports as viewer and more sports as hobbies too. Would discussion of those fall under ~hobbies?
I also think this is a separation that should be made somehow. Many (Most?) people interested in sports are coming from the perspective of watching it. Might be nice to have at least one ~hobbies.sports subcategory for people who do sports ... if that takes off, maybe start separate subcategories for a few of the most popular sports.
Doesn't this just come down to the limitation that a post can only be in one group?
Wouldn't it be better just to do away with groups entirely and go tags-only?
Maybe.
But Deimos isn't proposing to recode Tildes right now. That would be more work than he has time for.
He's just working within the existing framework, to add a few more groups & sub-groups. He's increasing usability and flexibility in an achievable way.
I feel like doing it that way would simply be a workaround to user created groups. Something the site wants to avoid as of now.
It doesn't matter at the moment, but a big advantage of groups is clearly delineating moderation duties. if the site were to grow, someone in sports may not be as well equipped to moderate tech content, nor music content. being able to focus on, re-categorize, or remove content for a specific interest is much easier to conceptualize than nebulously being pigeonholed into certain tags.
on the more general topic: I wouldn't necessarily mind multiple posts to different groups. Maybe not sports posts to ~hobbies (while sports can be a hobby, it's such a popular one that it probably stands to benefit from being its own group), but I can envison different discussion coming from different groups for the same given link/post. I don't think we're at a scale where we need to answer this right now, though. Currently most people are subscribed to almost all groups.
~sports.wrestling
Assuming you mean pro wrestling, /r/squaredCircle is the main thing keeping me on Reddit, and I would love an alternative place to have a similar community. I don't know if it should be under ~sports or ~tv, though.
Yes exactly. I need a SquaredCircle replacement
I was thinking hobbies could use some expansion.
Should wrestling have its own ~wrestling sub? Or be under ~sports.wrestling, for example?
~sports.wrestling
There's no reason for wrestling to be treated differently to any other sport.
I am an American living in Europe, and one of the main uses I had for Reddit was the massive collection of info/advice/support I could find in the local community of whichever country I was living in.
/r/Hungary, /r/Netherlands ... and now /r/Germany are critical subreddits that I'm going to miss a lot.
I would love to see, at the very least, a ~local.EU group here, and even better would be ~local.Germany and etc.
A ~local.de community should definitely happen. /r/de was one of the first subreddits and the German-speaking community was an essential part of Reddit's early success and has continued to be so.
I think the more pragmatic solution to groups such as this is to integrate both English and German language post into a ~local.germany group with an additional option to filter by language a la Lemmy, which you set in your profile. This would mean that
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that premise, although I'll admit I'm a rather recent arrival here.
As someone previously active, to varying degrees, both on /germany and /de, they served very different functions.
Sure, you could group them together, as indeed you might group together different hobbies under ~hobbies, but if the topic of discussion is sub-groups then I think there is merit for them to be considered individually.
From my personal experience, /germany was more or less entirely foreigners (in this case meaning, people not in germany) and immigrants/expats/tourists (meaning people who don't primarily speak german but are (asking about things) within germany).
This leads to very different topics of discussion in the community, dealing with question of "[How] Do Germans [feel about] X", "Is there Y in Germany?", "How do I get Z bureaucratic process?", etc, with the occasional post about news/politics such as things flare up into international headlines.
Whereas /de was indeed a community of the germanophone countries (admittedly definitely weighted towards germany itself, by obvious disparity of populations), discussing actual subjects of interest to those people. To an extent it contained posts about every given topic, given that they (usually) were in german and targeted at people in the DACH countries, which led to the occasional other sub-reddits splintering off for dedicated topics in german, some of which fared ok, some didn't.
If you set aside all of that content which nominally would be more at home in some much bigger generic group/subreddit, but for the language, what remains is essentially news/politics of those countries, with the occasional international news, but back to german.
Sure, we could decide to subsume both of those, but in doing so we would be destroying and/or preventing a culture which, I at least, very much enjoyed.
I think a hypothetical ~local.germany would inevitably end up subsuming the r/germany type stuff (hopefully with fewer weird racists and people who make it their personality to hate on germany and tell others to leave) and most of the stuff on r/de would either be ~news or ~talk but in German (assuming we ever allow non-English posts, unlike now). r/de was a place for german speakers rather than a place about germany the way I think people would expect ~local.germany to be.
Disclaimer: I was subbed to both r/germany and r/de but my german sucks so I definitely used DeepL to translate comments on r/de embarrassingly often
But I think part of what made /de /de, as some for whom it made up over ten percent of his comments [Edit: And it actually becomes over 20 if you include some semi-serious german (-language and -)politics spin-offs as well], by karma, is that it was that combination. Of, arguably indeed, ~news and ~talk and a hypothetical ~politics, in german. Doubly so in a case of a site like Tildes which has a long way to grow, there aren't enough people to have ten different language variants for, say, German, and that's probably one of the bigger languages that would be relevant (as opposed to, say, Croatian or Basque). Whereas a ~local.dach might just be able to survive.
It's further complicated by the fact that beyond just being german language, it was indeed also germany/austria/switzerland focused. So it'd be essentially an overlap of both the german-language tag and any germany tag,
I mean currently this site is English-only. Since for sure the German-language community what made r/de and its related subs a coherent community, I think it's impossible to capture that until Deimos decides how to handle non-English posts on tildes (which afaik I don't think he's planning on doing as part of this round of changes). If anything, I think a German spin-off of tildes might serve that community better than either mixing their posts in among the English or sequestering all german language stuff in a subgroup. Ofc that requires a crifical mass of people interested in using and maintaining such a site though, which has its own cons.
That's a very fair assessment.
Now this I don't quite think I agree with, even beyond the matter of the critical mass.
I do think there is value in the overarching bigger website.
Even in this thread the matter of highly voted posts "percolating" upwards, was discussed. Even /de had that happen occasionally, if we compare that concept to the ascent to /all.
Fair enough, I just perceived the German language spaces as somewhat separate from the English language spaces on reddit so I figured it might be useful to have their own dedicated set of groups rather than a workaround using the same site as English. But I only dipped my toe in that side of reddit so you'd know better than me!
I mean, given a large enough community, maybe. But even on reddit that doesn't seem to have quite happened, so for it to happen here...
I really miss local subreddits. I think that new groups and a bunch of tags would be awesome.
Even just a ~local and then more specific tags would work too, so if I wanted to post about things happening in my country, state, or city I could add specific tags for those.
Why tags and not local.usa.ny.nyc?
That way I someone can subscribe to that and local.usa.ca.sf and see just those two subgroups if they visit local.
Because what criteria would one use for creating such a subgroup? Sure nyc is big enough, but what about some big city with almost no user here? Or some small one that has a surprisingly sizable community on tildes?
I think starting with ~local and region-specific tags would be a great start. Later all the nyc tags can be moved to ~local…nyc or whatever.
I don’t know why there needs to be a criteria, just let people create whatever subgroups they want.
But if there must be a criteria, you could have a subgroup for every country, and then within that each state, and then within that any recognized municipality. In Canada it could be province and then cities. Maybe you don’t create the individual city ones until enough people ask for it but if they do, you make it.
Cross cutting tags are an awful way to try to navigate the internet because you end up having to see a bunch of stuff you don’t care about, its basically everything that’s wrong with twitter though they call them hashtags.
From another comment of mine:
That's fine, you can have a bot that auto-removed inactive groups. It isn't an all-or-nothing proposition, you can allow the creation of new communities and then have a reaper that shuts them down if they don't take off or are abandoned.
Check out this comment by Deimos, where he explains why too many small groups would die from lack of interest.
It's not about cleaning them up afterward. It's about them not taking off in the first place.
Having sub topics fail to take off is not evidence of failure but evidence of trying. If most subtopics fail to take off and you have to reap them, no problem.
No different than startups where nost fail but a few make it to the other side.
I don't think it's necessarily a terrible idea, but you'd need more scalable moderation tools first. Something like a review queue for group names would be simple and relatively low-cost in terms of effort but beyond just group names there is an increase in the surface area for content moderation in general.
Also, group reaping would still be somewhat arbitrary like centralized group creation, but probably worse in terms of feel-bads.
I think as long as there’s a mechanism for users of a subreddit to oust power hungry mods that are acting in bad faith you can decentralize the mod function like reddit. The admins there are just too hands off however and when a mod goes bonkers and you can’t get rid of them people will just start a new parallel community to try to do the same thjng. Admins should be much more active about making sure mods are behaving in a healthy manner.
It may feel bad though by definition since it would only be happening in small inactive groups the amount of feel bad would be pretty minimal, and give ample notice that it’s coming so everyone is prepared for it.
Actually, it's more likely to work the other way around: mods will demote junior mods who are acting in bad faith, and even more senior mods will demote mid-level mods who act in bad faith, all the way up to the top of the moderator pyramid. Some demotions may even happen automatically, if algorithms detect that a moderator's decisions are being overridden too often by more senior moderators.
And, when you say "users" and "moderators", it's important to point out that most Tilders will have some degree of moderator power. For example, right now, every Tilder gets access to comment labels after 7 days on the site - and comment labels affect the sorting of comments in a the thread, which is a low-level form of moderation. We also have other types of moderators floating around Tildes, who can curate topics by: tagging them, editing their titles, and even moving them from one group to another. Again: it's low-to-mid-level moderation, but those "moderators" are operating right now. They're among us already.
I picture a pyramid of moderators, from low-level novitiates all the way up to the demigods just below our god Deimos, with that lowest step of the moderation pyramid including possibly up to about 90% of users. You can step up and down the pyramid depending how you use the mod tools you have access to. In the short-to-medium term, choosing moderators is likely to be a manual process, involving Deimos and maybe some hand-picked helpers but, over time, as more moderator tools are built, there will also be a mechanism to automatically give users access to higher-level mod tools as they demonstrate good-faith use of the mod tools they currently have access to. So... you might be one of these moderators, just by participating on Tildes.
That means moderators on Tildes won't be a separate group of people. They'll be blended into the user base.
Your concerns are based on how Reddit moderation works, but that's not how Tildes moderation will work. The problems you imagine probably won't happen here.
We discussed this extensively back in the early days of Tildes, in 2018/19. I'm summarising hundreds of comments from dozens of threads from that time. Of course, they were only theoretical discussions, and things might fall out differently as Deimos and any helper-developers build the planned tools.
It gets even messier than that I'm afraid.
Does Barcelona fit under ~local.spain.cataluña.barcelona , or ~local.catalunya.barcelona ? For Spanish/Catalan respectively. The community would most likely prefer to honour their local independent heritage, but Catalonia is part of Spain.
What about places that are more contentious?
Is Kashmir in India, Pakistan, or independent?
Does Tildes recognise Palestine and/or Taiwan?
Having the community decide communities creates ambivalence of responsibility. If that action is centralised, a decision needs to be made and can therefore be criticised.
I don't expect these questions to matter yet, and they may never even arise, but I find it sensible to consider fringe cases.
I think categorizations should be less rigid and kept simple. So if people submit a lot of posts about Barcelona to ~local.spain you can split it off to ~local.spain.barcelona (or even just ~local.barcelona).
First and foremost these groups should be based on topics and not technicalities. I don't see any reason for ~local.taiwan or ~local.palestine not to exist, because it doesn't have to be a political question at all. Whether people disagree on where a border lies does not change the fact that there is discourse about a common topic, if that makes sense.
The /r/newzealand and r/auckland are the main places I frequent on reddit. But that's partly for the community of people that participate there. Not sure it's something easily replicated by providing groups for it.
On group naming, I wonder if ~local, ~global, ~region as top level? To view all topics within the child group under
~localseems wrong when it's less local than the child groups. Which leads me to a ~global type thing. But ~global has other connotations in a technical sense (like global variables, etc).~*.pacific.newzealand aliased as ~*.pacific.nz.
~*.europe.switzerland aliased ~*.europe.ch.
~*.europe.eu (though EU stuff is probably more a ~politics thing).
Seeing other suggestions here,
~locale works well. it's not implied to be local when it's named locale.
~people...nz (people of nz)
We've also had previous suggestions of ~world and ~geo.
Yeah I thought ~earth briefly but that seems a bit too ambitious for our species and the site's long term survival.
There is precedent for temporary groups by the way, with advent of code.
would be limited to English-language discussion though, apparently, which is a bummer but understandable
Yes, as of now Tildes is English-only. Simply a moderation issue as of now, but I'd love for more languages to be supported one day.
You're just asking for fights by calling it soccer instead of football!
Probably does make sense though, otherwise you'd need ~sports.americanfootball
The football tag already is about football (AKA soccer), and american_football is for the US/Canadian sport with the same name. So I definitely think that same convention should be kept to encourage this site to be less American-centric.
Agreed. Nothing against the Americans, but it's nice that this site doesn't automatically default to thinking everyone is from the States, which was a problem with Reddit.
Soccer isn't just an American name though. It's commonly used in much, if not all, of Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand. That's like 85% of the (natively) English speaking world.
Respectfully, I don't think that's true in NZ. I only hear Americans here use soccer. Our association is called New Zealand Football.
https://www.nzfootball.co.nz/about/who-we-are-1/All-about-NZ-Football
You won't see the word soccer there anywhere. It is possible that more people are using more Americanisms (some places are calling their chips fries), but the word soccer for me is usually a tell that they're American.
EDIT: My kiwi wife says people do use soccer here sometimes, so I retract what I said partly. I don't know. I've mostly heard football, but ancedotal.
I appreciate the context, but even if all of NZ called it Soccer, it wouldn't really change my point. Kiwis are great but they're still only like 1.2% of the Anglosphere.
There's an urban/rural divide in Ireland as to whether football means soccer or GAA.
You're right and let's not forget that the word soccer originated in England. That particular word is not something that would bother me too much, but I still like the idea of emphasizing the international nature of the Tildes community and not defaulting to US terms.
I mean, yes, but in reference to the Football Association, the governing body of English football aka soccer.
Use country code top level domain if possible
~local.za ~local.sg ~local.de ~local.ca ~local.ph
It's not like we need to ration pixels. We can use ordinary human language for these names:
~local.southafrica
~local.singapore
~local.germany (or ~local.deutschland if we prefer)
~local.canada
~local.phillipines (or ~local.pilipinas if we prefer)
(Yes, I had to look up two of those codes. I don't quite know as much as Wikipedia does!)
These could also be aliased so that both direct to the same page.
About what?
And why couldn't people post this discussion in ~talk?
Let's get some combat sports in there too.
~sports.mma
~sports.boxing
~sports.wrestling
~sports.bjj
I'm honestly insulted by the lack of ~sports.sumo in your list.
The hyperlocal discussions is what I've missed. I moderate a couple of the local subreddits and we definitely need a structure for local news/community discussions the three ~locals would probably suffice right now, but state and city specific would be great once we get some structure put in place to handle the volume.
The sports ones are definitely needed as well.
Related to this, possibly ~news could use similar. One question may be how to break it down though. Having a separate one for every country might be excessive, but certain countries generate so much news that if there were just regions, they would dominate the region.
Yeah, there's a great conversation about how sub category tildes could work to float ideas up to the top. You can have ~local.usa.tx.houston and have articles from ~.Houston float all the way up to ~.local if it gains enough traction. I think that level of category is kinda cool. You could easily hide certain sub localities (e.g. only subscribe to ~local.usa.ny, and ignore all other hierarchies).
I personally think ~news would be based around topics rather than localization. That would provide some level of subcategorization that would allow for people to see news on topics they care about. This gets a little bit fuzzier, but to be honest super impactful things may be duplicated on the main feed, which I think is ok. There was some talk about how cross categories would work (like ~food.sandwiches.tomatoes and ~hobbies.gardening), where one may be posted as primary and another as secondary. Not sure how coding would work in that case.
I used my local sub a lot to find out what's going on and even meet people and I'd love to have that here (and I think a lot of other people in the sub would come here if it was available). But would it get weird suddenly having thousands of groups as granular as ~local.usa.maryland.baltimore when the site has been working with so few, "chunky" options?
Obviously, we would start from the top and work our way down.
As a first step, there might be a few groups for the most popular countries on Tildes: ~usa, etc.
As a later second step, there might be some sub-groups for the most popular provinces/states in each country: ~usa.md
As a much later third step, there might be some sub-sub-groups for the most popular cities in each province/state: ~usa.md.baltimore
(And, at each iteration, we could go back up a step and add province/states or countries that now need their own groups.)
We wouldn't jump to city-based groups as a first step!
For fairly populated areas with no major cities, there could be groups for the county, like ~local.usa.virginia.jamescityco (I know Williamsburg isn't technically part of James City but you share two borders and a public school system, so close enough, I guess?). And really sparse areas could just use the state group and tag their town name, or have maybe a subgroup for their geographic area, like ~local.usa.maryland.easternshore. I expect it would be state groups first with maybe an automatic subgroup for the largest city (or cities for Cali and Texas), then add on for populated counties/areas as it's seen that they're getting tagged a lot in the state group.
~engineering
I currently post engineering topics to ~science, but technically it's not a science, and engineers are not scientists. And I also feel like there is enough content to warrant its own group. https://tildes.net/?tag=engineering
~talk.casual
Just to warehouse all the casual discussions (which do have value to the community, IMO), and to allow people who aren't interested in that to unsubscribe from the group.
I'm not opposed to it, but I already think of ~talk as the most casual group on the site, and most topics that are more specific or in-depth end up inside the group for their subject instead of ~talk. What kind of thing would be left that would still go into ~talk but not ~talk.casual?
Another way of thinking of it: for the people that want to avoid those topics by unsubscribing from ~talk.casual, why aren't they currently just unsubscribing from ~talk?
Because not all topics in ~talk are actually casual in nature. E.g.
https://tildes.net/~talk/16zk/compassionate_interpretation
https://tildes.net/~talk?tag=health.mental
Etc.
Although right now the casual stuff often totally drowns out the more serious stuff. So giving it its own space should help the more serious stuff flourish.
Hmm, how about ~talk.serious?
Because serious discussions should be the default, IMO.
If I'm being honest, ~talk sounds very much suited to be a more casual location by default, similar in vein to r/CasualConversation. Much "serious" talk will by nature be directed to other areas such as ~science (for example, mental health studies). I firmly believe that we can have areas for both casual and serious discussion and that ~talk is a good place to be casual. I know that many people are somewhat put off by this site due to the level of conversation, which can appear pompous or impenetrable. A top level group with a more relaxed atmosphere might help tildes be more welcoming while ensuring the rest of the site retains a slightly higher level of discourse.
I'm with you on that and I see other people saying the same thing. I love how knowledgeable and courteous people are, but I would spend more time here if the atmosphere was just a little bit looser. Don't throw the site's philosophy out the window. Just warm things up some.
Like posting for example. I don't post because I feel like the standards are high and I should be careful. Same with comments really. I get that I'm not supposed to feel like I'm walking on eggshells, but I do a little bit. Makes me want to like, pass around drinks or an appetizer to get a vibe going.
I would rather have ~talk be serious by default, or have a ~talk.serious and ~talk.casual, rather than sequestering all serious discussion in to specific groups. One thing I really enjoy about tildes is the general, in-depth discussion on a wide variety of topics, and many topics that don’t fit into specific groups. If you push serious discussion to specific groups, we are going to lose the richness of discussion that can occur.
I'm opposed to a ~talk.casual channel just because I think it would encourage too much fluff. I like being subscribed to basically everything and minimize how much I filter, but I think the volume of casual chat would overwhelm basically everything else.
I wouldn't be opposed to a recurring "Happy Hour" thread that refreshes each day. Though I'd suggest it preserve nothing for posterity (for privacy reasons in a venue where people are likely to be unguarded and share personal details). So maybe have an archive of threads that go back a week or a month to preserve ongoing context but then purge the records from the database.
Also if anything gets out of hand or requires admin action the happy hour thread for that day should get locked. Thus there will be severe consequences for neglecting norms about respectful and courteous behavior.
I think this is the way, especially given the current mechanics of how sub-groups work. If there was a ~talk.casual, everyone subscribed to ~talk would get those posts, but if there was a ~talk.serious, people could skip the parent group and get the more serious discussions they wanted.
I'd much rather fix the subgroup mechanics, than create kludge groups to work around the brokenness.
Agreed, but one solution doesn't require any dev time, and one does. The groups can be adjusted once the functionality is there; these aren't carved in stone once they're made.
Small talk might end up being just as important to a healthy text forum as the serious stuff. I can't see that drowning out everything else in the votes like images do, but I can see it being sustainably busy over longer time periods. It's a bit 'spammy' - which is to say it may start to annoy the regular ~talk subscribers. We don't want to drive people out of ~talk to avoid it. On the other hand, it's an easy place for new folks to post and I don't think it would be wise to lose that. Instead we can invite it. Lurker conversion is a good thing imo.
The top level groups have to be where the highest standards get applied. Threads in a ~talk.casual that become great can kick up with exemplaries someday. ~talk can stay serious, like the serious tags on an askreddit thread.
One way a forum I used to visit dealt with this was a very casual page you had to sign in and opt in to see it and it had slightly relaxed rules compared to the rest of the site, it's posts weren't aggregated on the main page like posts in the rest of the forums rooms so that it didn't clutter things up (which was good, as it was very active). It was generally for much more casual topics and was also ephemeral in nature (posts were deleted 7 days after they had no activity).
I'm not sure something quite like it is right for Tildes, but it worked really well on that site (there wasn't really a problem with spam probably because the niche nature of the site limited usership) so I thought I'd describe it.
Yes I very much second ~talk.casual It would be a good place to have more casual and quicker pace discussion.
How about ~machines?
Then ~machines.cars is an obvious subtopic, with extensions for talking about any other kinds of machines you like.
It doesn't cover civil engineering, though. Hmmm.
I almost feel like cars/autos could wind up in several different spots. My initial thought would be it lands underneath hobbies (from an enthusiast perspective)...but from a mechanics angle, I could see machines as a parent too depending on the discussion.
I always figured that engineering related stuff would be under ~tech as it relates to technology.
IMO Engineering (the application of science and maths to solve problems) doesn't really count as "technology", although engineers often do use technology to achieve those ends, or produce new technology as a result.
I'm confused by this, the application of knowledge to solve problems is pretty much the definition of technology:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology
A stick, used as a tool, is technology. Customizing said stick, or combining it with something else, is engineering. No math or modern science necessary.
I get, though, that the word 'tech' doesn't mean that to many people.
Except go look at ~tech, and tell me how many posts you see that aren't just FAANG, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. posts. There's barely anything about engineering, cars, planes, drones, rockets, etc.
I get the logic, but "tech" simply has a connotation now to primarily mean consumer goods and services.
Wouldn't engineering be under ~tech?
~tech.engineering
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/177q/lets_add_and_rearrange_some_groups_a_few_notes_about_other_short_term_plans#comment-909g
I think of all "technology" as "applied science". It's all the same to me! :)
It's all about practical applications of science, whether we're building a cathedral, a car, a catheter, or a camera.
Not long ago I would have agreed with you, but I have recently been convinced that this is not an accurate description (specifically in the context of discussing engineering).
While modern engineering may rely heavily on science, engineering as a practice is not confined to applied science, assuming we are using science to mean the application of the scientific method and formulation of scientific hypotheses and theories. In fact, from a historical perspective, engineering was around long before the scientific method was in widespread use!
I heartily recommend Bill Hammack's initial video on the topic - Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained (youtube.com; 11m53s) - as well as the remaining videos in that The Things We Make playlist of which it is the first part.
Example of using heuristics learned through trial and error as opposed to through scientific theory:
Highlighting the difference between science and engineering
I was about to comment in a similar vein, but you summed it up better than I could.
Then ~tech should be renamed to ~applied_science, at least the topic name is more clear.
Currently from what I can see ~tech is mostly posts about random FAANG topics, and rarely anything related to engineering, machines, vehicles, physics (mechanics), etc.
There should definitely be top level groups for:
~engineering
~machines
And sub groups for:
~science.physics
~science.chemistry
~science.biology
etc.
I am inclined to agree that contemporary use of "tech" has become heavily aligned with modern computing technologies, computing technology careers, and computing technology companies.
As much as it is technically accurate that things like the combustion engine and telescopes represent technological advances, I don't think the typical user expects to see such topics categorized as "tech," nor is enthusiastic about posting about such topics in a category named tech.
Exactly. If you meet someone, and they say they are really into "tech" what comes to mind first?
A: Phones, tablets, laptops, and consoles
Or
B: Aeronautical engineering, building submarines, and designing the Mars rover
Absolutely. I have been seeing posts where people are thinking everything counts as technology and they are smart for saying so, but like bruh, it's a different kind of smart to realize that the language is fluid and people want to categorize things in a way that matches how we use language today.
Obligatory xkcd.
Love it!
I just wrote on that in a comment earlier today, I think this would be great! ~machines or ~hardware was also something that I thought could encompass a lot of very physical things perhaps even better than 'engineering'. Rockets, cars, hardware, computers, servers, robotics, satellites, etc.
As an engineering student I may be biased, but I think this would be great. There are certain topics that I would definitely post about there that I feel like don't really belong in other groups.
Maybe subgroups of ~tech should be the place for engineering? There’s precedent: an “institute of technology” is an engineering school.
The ~tech group isn’t great for engineering today, but adding subgroups might make it so? We should have ~tech.internet, ~tech.electronics, and ~tech.auto at least. And there probably should be ~tech.ai at least for a while. ~tech.structures would cover much of civil engineering. ~tech.aerospace might be a decent replacement for ~space?
Maybe ~tech.business for all the startup and tech company stuff?
Edit: how about ~tech.makers? This would parallel ~music.makers.
The thing is any engineering major if they want to discuss engineering is gonna say "Let's talk about engineering", not "Let's talk about tech".
Also if you need that many sub-groups to cover engineering, why not give it its own group.
Also it's easier for people uninterested in tech, or uninterested in engineering to unsubscribe from the unwanted group, vs. unsubscribing from a bunch of sub groups.
There's the question of whether you want engineering discussion in its own place or whether amateurs and professionals should mingle. I've been a professional software engineer (which maybe doesn't count as engineering :) and now I'm a hobbyist. I lean towards mingling.
So, for example, ~tech.auto might be a place where professionals and amateurs who work on cars hang out? Maybe there would need to be subgroups later.
Professional forums are good too, but is that what Tildes is trying for?
I mean there is nothing stopping people from posting in either place. The main thing to me is if I want to see posts about drones and stuff, they will be vastly overshadowed by a bunch of Silicon Valley tech articles (which is what already happens with ~tech) .
This is why I think we need the other subgroups like ~tech.business and ~tech.internet.
I mean there is nothing stopping people from posting in either place. The main thing to me is if I want to see posts about drones and stuff, they will be vastly overshadowed by a bunch of Silicon Valley tech articles (which is what already happens with ~tech) .
Please yes! It’s the one that constantly comes up in these threads :)
~diy might be a welcome addition if the thread yesterday is anything to go by.
A couple others I wouldn't mind seeing:
~history
~languages
~humanities.history and ~humanities.linguistics is more appropriate than new top-level groups, IMO. Since we already post those topics under ~humanities (since they are part of the humanities)
I would love ~humanities.history and ~humanities.linguistics, and would propose a ~humanities.philosophy to accompany them.
I see your point, but "humanities" is a little too abstract or academic for me to really want to post there. What I mean is it would take me a while to realize that my topic should go there. My major was one of the humanities, so you would think I would know. Maybe it's my work-addled brain, but it just doesn't click right away. I'm not saying labels should be dumbed-down, just intuitive and easy to understand.
It would help to have a label like ~humanities.linguistics, but I think that would still narrow the discussions. I hung out in r/linguistics for years and it was never as active as the other language-related subs. I think because linguistics is a high level thing, or at least a lot of people (rightly) see it that way. It attracted posts from linguistics students and casual linguists, people who wanted to study linguistics, and a few other people who were brave enough to pop in.
What you didn't find there were topics that the average person is more likely to be interested in. Things like "I'm writing something, is there a good word to say X." Or "why does this work like this." Advice about learning a language, or things you learned when you were studying a language. Just a whole range of topics that could spark really interesting discussions. Even simple questions can lead to great discussions. But you're not going to get as much of that if people feel like the label is over their heads.
I hope that doesn't come off as aggressive. It's just a topic I'm passionate about and spend a ton of time on.
A lot of this doesn't matter if there aren't a lot of other people who want to talk about language stuff. But I think the part about making labels easy to understand is generally applicable. ~creative, ~arts, and ~design are some that make me wonder "does this go there" and "which one do I choose." That could be one of the reasons those topics aren't used as much.
It is the top-level equivalent of "science". Science includes a lot of areas of study related to the physical world, while the humanities includes a lot of areas of study related to human culture.
It's unfortunate that the word "science" is more commonly known than the word "humanities", which makes "humanities" seem more abstract and academic - but they are the equivalent top-level containers for their different disciplines.
I agree with @cfabbro that ~humanities.language would be more accessible than ~humanities.linguistics, but I also agree with him that any group for language discussions belongs under the umbrella of humanities.
No worries. I didn't take your reply as aggressive, and I can see what you mean. ~humanities.language instead of using the formal linguistics title would probably encourage a bit more less formal discussions. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to that. But I think it should still be under the humanities group, since a top level ~languages group would imply that it's meant for people to communicate in other languages, which Tildes doesn't currently support.
Yeah, I did see that, plus the answers to the question recently about posting in other languages. All of what I'm talking about can be done, and usually is done in English. I miss being able to use English and German like in r/german, but I promise to be good.
If you guys ever had a use for someone who can speak/translate German or Spanish, I'd be willing to pitch in. Assuming I still have the time if it ever gets that far.
I've honestly never experienced this in actual linguistics discussions. You'll get examples in a language of interest, but even those are usually glossed and translated.
I do see that being an issue in language learning communities though -- I really hope we don't combine these! I'd be fine with subgroups like ~humanities.language.linguistics and ~humanities.language.learning but if language learning and actual linguistics are combined, any actual linguistics content gets completely drowned out. These tend to be surprisingly separate groups in terms of what they're interested in discussing in practice, so combining them into a single group without any division would be counter-productive imo.
Tildes is an English-only site, for, well, that it's impossible to moderate languages you don't know, yeah.
IMO language learning is best done IRL or in a more live-chat setting anyway.
I think ~hobbies encompasses ~diy pretty well.
DIY is not a hobby. Just because I had to build something or make something rather than buying it, doesn't mean that is something I do for fun.
Agreed. I'm about to patch some drywall in my house. It's not something I'm going to enjoy.
Putting it under hobbies made sense to me at first but this is actually a great point. Some DIY is a hobby, but certainly not all.
Another vote for some flavor of ~diy -- ideally broad enough so things like home improvement, homelab, etc could also go there.
Deeply excited about some language and/or linguistics group. Not just for polyglots but also for conlangs!
Yeah atm ~history and ~languages I guess would both fall under ~humanities? But humanities is such a broad spectrum of things that I'm intimidated to post language-learning or linguistics stuff there that might not interest a large portion of people there. The humanities seem less interconnected than the sciences in that way.
So is "science", but people cope with that.
sigh
It's an ongoing uphill battle to get the same recognition for the humanities, and even the word "humanities", that the sciences and "science" have. But I'm going to keep fighting it! :)
Eh I think the sciences often have more in common with each other than some of the humanities do, since they're generally at least unified by use of the scientific method. But I studied linguistics, which is a field that very much straddles the line between science and humanities to an extent that I've honestly just given up on categorizations like that ever making sense. Did get me a humanities scholarship at least.
You can’t please everybody. If everyone paused before posting because some people wouldn’t be interested, no one would ever post anything! There needs to be understanding from all users that a not insignificant amount of posts won’t be for them; thats why we have the ignore function, right?
This is true, but I think nevertheless there's an extent to which having a specific space dedicates to something can encourage people to post about it. ~humanities is also academic enough a term that a lot of people might not recognize that it's where history and language learning "belong". I wager when most people hear "humanities" they think of literature and maybe philosophy.
Anything posted in the wrong place would be moved there if it fits, and people are currently subscribed by default so they’re less likely to miss things. I was more speaking to you saying you were intimidated to post due to some not being interested, though! Post away, let people ignore as they want
And top tag filtering too.
I would like to have diy explicitly welcome by it having a separate group. But it would also make a great sense to me if ~tech had subgroups such as ~tech.ee for electronic engineering and related DIY submissions went there.
I posted more about my feelings here, but as a top level comment, I am beginning to question the benefit of having fixed groups in the first place. Clearly lots of folks are chaffing here at wanting their niches represented, displaying hesitancy in posting about their niches without such groups, and additionally folks are grappling with the weird situation of how to neatly categorize groups versus subgroups into some hierarchy -- which is a bit funny since human culture doesn't work that way and we're all just biased by our largely technical backgrounds.
I'm not saying your design for ~tildes group system is as reductionist as say a certain person's love of lobster hierarchies, but I think it does display a fundamental tension which might only get worse the larger this site becomes.
The trouble is that simply allowing people to create niche groups doesn't mean they have any chance of working, and can actually make things worse in some ways. Tildes is too small of a community to be able to support groups for most niche interests (by the nature of them being niche).
Even though the site is starting to feel busy in some ways, we need to remember that it's still actually very small. There have only been 23 topics on the entire site in the last day that got more than 10 comments. That's really not a lot of activity, and we don't need to go too far with trying to break off into a ton of niche groups that wouldn't actually have the population to support them.
As a random example, I play fighting games, so maybe I wish there was a community where I could talk to other people who play them. If I was able to create one, I do that, make a couple of posts, and... they get no responses. Maybe one or two at best, because that's all the other Tildes users that play those games and bothered to notice the group about it. Someone else starts playing a game a month later, goes to see if there's a group to discuss it, and finds a dead one that had 3 topics ever, where nobody's posted for weeks. That's discouraging, and they just decide there's clearly no interest in the subject here, and go somewhere else.
One of the reasons I like the hierarchy is because I believe it can help solve this problem of getting enough base activity to reach a point where it's self-sustaining. By having new groups built up from "inside" other ones (such as by being "promoted" from a tag in the parent group), it gives a source of users that can help get past that initial difficulty.
I tried to start multiple subreddits on Reddit over the years, and the only time they ever went anywhere is if you had a way of directing users regularly to the new one (such as pushing people from /r/gaming to /r/Games if they clearly wanted more in-depth non-image content), or if you got extremely lucky with massive attention from a popular comment in a default subreddit or something. Getting communities started is hard.
We had the same issues starting music subreddits early on. Getting up to 'critical mass' was challenging. Many of the subreddits didn't make it. They only came back around several years later when reddit had expanded massively after the digg migration. There was also a lot of duplication of groups - literally twenty subreddits dedicated to the blues in some fashion - if it had been one sub in the first place it would have been a lot more active and gotten off to a better start. Most of the music subs were lucky to get five posts a month.
How come it necessarily needs to reach some ideal of "critical mass", why can't people like #tag it and that helps organically organize content in a way that is easily searchable and inclusive of all related content associated to that tag without requiring it to be shoehorned into some artifical "subreddit"-type discrete category (Tilde?) that is really just a functionally-similar filtering mechanism at the end of the day.
Just inquisitive and eager to learn about the ecosystem here. There's definitely some amazing positives like the inherent civility and opportunity to talk things out in a good-faith manner as the baseline standard of discussion that we all mostly recognize and I have not run into any of the -isms so far in my discussions as far as I know. It can be very compelling how thoughtful people here are and seeking to understand first which is enjoyable to watch and try to emulate.
The tags do work that way now, one can click on any tag or use search to get results from multiple tags. That goes directly to the content itself bypassing groups completely. This gives us the freedom to delete and create groups, and play with group mechanics, without risking the content itself.
If I had to define what we're aiming for with groups, it would be a 'collection of humans with a shared interest' - in our case, with the content of that group being some specific subset of tags by default. Where the group differs from tags is that the group has its own identity for things like vote weight settings, having a sidebar and a wiki page they can edit, various moderation roles, earned trust levels per user, and being the target of the 'subscribe' action. There will probably be special moderation actions in various groups someday that are specific to that group's own needs - the ability to have their own 'labels' with unique moderation activity and even unique mechanics attached to each one. That would be a level of versatility and customization in the various moderation rules and group culture that no other community management software has ever had before.
Another way to think of this is that the 'group' is itself the 'user' of the Tildes software. It's not built for a you specifically, it's built for the collections of us that self-sort into the various groups by the virtues of our own interests. In general terms, it's intended to be optimized for human communities that are interested in an intelligent, self-govering online communication space.
Now, that said, there are absolutely other ways to build a view of things that doesn't involve the concept of a group the way we've got it set up now. In fact I think you'll find there are an awful lot of people here who love to talk about this stuff, myself and the site admin included. Deimos mentioned something about vectors a while back as a possible alternative, but he didn't expand on that further yet. The cool thing about this is that whatever mechanics we come up with can tie into the existing content via the tags in completely different ways, and even run in tandem with each other offering multiple ways to get at the content.
We're free to experiment with this stuff in the Tildes code without putting the content itself at risk, which was part of the goal so we would have some real freedom to find out what it means to have good social software. It's also part of why the code is under an extremely aggressive open source license. By virtue of connecting to any Tildes-based site, you are entitled to download the exact same source code that they are using at that moment on their production servers. People using this code cannot legally hide their changes to the code from this project.
As for critical mass, it's the 'evaporative cooling' effect. Nobody likes a slow group with no activity, so people 'evaporate' and move on to more interesting places, which lowers the activity, which creates a vicious feedback loop. Imzy allowed for unlimited group creation at the start, and very quickly it was nothing but thousands of inactive groups. It drove its own users away because it looked like a ghost town. It's possible we are leaning too far in the other direction to escape that problem, but I rather like it this way myself. We have an awful lot of groups right now and they are not all what I'd term highly active. It's also becoming clear that there is a value in keeping the community more integrated from a cultural norms standpoint which I think none of us saw coming - I certainly didn't.
Thank you for the extremely thoughtful and comprehensive answer. Was I making any sense, I'm having trouble articulating the essence of the point (insofar as there was some coherent point buried in there) that I'm trying to put to words.
Before I embarass myself any further, is there a good article or treatise I can read on these things? I definitely want to understand and be able to engage constructively and I hope my inquiry wasn't perceived in a negative light
In fact there are a lot of things you can read about it, but nothing at all that I'd actually term a proper scientific field of inquiry. Behavioral psychology of online communities is actively studied and published, but is also almost exclusively limited by studying things in the same after-the-fact manner as economics. It's hard to pull off something like a proper double blind scientific study of an online community and almost no one actually conducts experiments in this space, because it's all about making money, not solving the self-governance problem.
I'd start with this transcript of an old but ever relevant talk by Clay Shirky. He had the bright idea of summing up pretty much the entire history of social software pre-Facebook and so little has changed since (other than the company names) that it's frankly embarrassing for silicon valley. I guess you could say where that talk stops is where Tildes starts. Also, Deimos has helpfully linked a ton of other good reads around this topic in the announcement blog post. I think there are more in the docs pages.
Come to think of it, this stuff is a bit scattered around. Might be worth it to put all of the classics like The Website Obesity Crisis, If Your Website's Full Of Assholes, It's Your Fault, Haunted By Data, and We're Building A Dystopia Just To Make People Click On Ads on one page in the wiki... call it the Tildes' Sacred Scrolls or something like that. :)
There are some cases where I don't think it matters how active the group is, it's still better for it to exist. For example, I would like to be subscribed to ~sports.hockey. Instead, right now I have to either subscribe to ~sports and block a bunch of tags for sports I don't care about or just not subscribe to anything sports related at all. Likewise, I actively avoid most news, but still like to hear about major world events, so a ~news.world, or even ~news.world.important would be useful to me as a filter, regardless of activity.
This is kinda what I mean. I feel like if things were able to be tagged as an alternative or supplement to necessarily having to have a whole comprehensive preexisting Tilde/subcategory/subcommunity setup it would allow for a lot more granularity and topicality for people to find what they need in a convenient self-organizing way (they could still require they approve the #topic and then it prepopulates so you could select and see what is available to peruse when you type #____ or however it could be implemented.
Its nice too because that way you don't need to navigate to an arbitrary location in the hierarchy before you can post a submission (since you are probably expected to stay on topic) and risk not being able to post since you might not find where it is considered most appropriate to go. You can simply tag it with the logical top-level #topic and there's no need to go anywhere, it will sort itself in the correct place like in a Dictionary/HashMap or whatever.
Having a specialized (niche even) group invites those people to communicate. And even though posts might be low in amount the quality of discussions will be high, since only interested people will come. Let's say I want to discuss my favorite game, or genetic engineering papers, or German military history
Can I respectfully ask the reason for the prioritization of hierarchy and the measurement of its "success/failure" over a simpler loose organizing structure favoring topicality and currency?
Like if there's only two people who wanna discuss
#Epilepsy, I just wonder why its a lost cause just because that its not a large subcommunity/Tildes (at least yet) when all the searchers are looking for is to be able to discuss things and find content related to #epilepsy, and if possible, with another person who's also interested in that topic rather than there having to be an established and statistically-validated popular Tilde(s) already to which it must necessarily be subordinate or in some sense non-viable without.I'm sure there are very good reasons but I am curious about this topic and want to do what I can to understand the framework you've fashioned here. I do love Tildes and I wanna learn more about how it ticks :)
Here's to hoping that the tildes fighting game community launches off at some point! That's one of the few thing's I've been missing too.
Tildes sf6 club, maybe?
I would be down, that game owns my life right now!
There was a regular in r/ datacuration or maybe r/ datahoarder, possibly both, who proselytized about their preferred organization system. I forget the specifics but it was something along the lines of:
More subdirectories may be better in some contexts, but is it easier to locate things by traversing directories, searching, or filtering tags?
I’m sure the refining of top level groups and the addition of a handful more would be more beneficial than not, but maybe the focus should be on emphasizing the utility and flexibility of tags in the “onboarding” experience.
The lack of having the tag/filter element as part of the UI is part of what's making this thread so messy. I think if people could see it they'd understand the difference between tags and groups and why that difference exists. Once there is a tag ribbon present they will just 'get it' at a glance but it's hard to get across in text.
Groups are for people to gather around a topic, and then the tags allow them to subscribe to topic subcategories while avoiding other subcategories. We all know fifty subreddits that got sick of one topic or another and created other subreddits to manage it, where they'd banish meme posts or questions or images or whatever it was that had become so noisy in their own sub that it drowned out all other content. Here the tags will serve the same purpose without forcing the group to split to do it. It will also allow for the decisions about which tags become new subgroups to arise from choice instead of necessity like on reddit.
The best 'examples' I can give of this are some of the big subreddits. /r/NFL has the team banner across the top, /r/AskScience has the sidebar filter for areas of scientific study, and /r/Listentothis has a genre navigation bar. Of course, as those were CSS hacks they were only visible and functional if one visited them in a browser, with subreddit styles enabled, which meant almost no one used them even when they were new. Mobile users will have no idea that stuff ever existed.
Anyone can go to those subreddits with a web browser right now, and click on those nav elements to see how it sorts content. If you haven't got styles enabled, just log out, styles are the default on old.reddit. Over there it's just links and search hacks. Here it'll be subscription customization, turning tags on or off, and with them all the posts that share those tags.
There certainly does seem to be some hesitancy in posting when a perfect group to post in can’t be found, which having groups both does and doesn’t solve. Because the more groups you have, if you don’t have a group that fits, one might feel that they shouldn’t post about it at all.
we don't have neat hierarchies, but we very much do curate what sorts of content we want to consume. Even if they are all "news sites", Forbes is going to have a different feel from CNN, which is different from Reuters. But sites like TIldes may have all 3 linked here, with a variety of topics to cover.
Hierarchies aren't perfect, and a bad hierarchy only distracts, but they do solve a fundamental problem with consumption: how can I focus in (or opt out) on a specific topic? We can't really solve the "flavor" issue without creating a ban/allow list of sites to post to, but I don't think we're at that point as of now. So the next best thing we can do is try to group like content and make a "flavor" based on the discussion that surrounds it.
That's how I see the potential with subgroups. Not as an attempt at the perfect taxonomical organization of human culture. Simply as a way to take what may turn into a flavor of a Neapolitan mixture and turn it into Chocolate/Vanilla/Strawberry. There is no ideal ordering of these, but there will be preferences, and separation in this case can lead to even more specific discussion than one that is simply "ice cream".
Short term: Add some top-level groups
We're seeing a ton of controversy about what groups should be top-level versus nested.
In the short term given Tildes' current structure, my opinion is: Err on the side of more top-level groups which signals inclusivity, as that is part of Tildes' philosophy. Signal that we want participation from people and on topics that we haven't seen as much historically. ~women is a good start.
[Edit 3 days later: Perhaps adding ~women by itself might possibly have the opposite effect than intended. For this to feel right, it might need additional groups alongside it. Please see my followup comment and its replies.]
Long term: Tags
Before talking about medium term, I need to mention the long term goal in my mind. In the long term, I hope tags take front-and-center as discussed thoroughly in the previous topic and in particular this in-depth proposal by @gaufde.
As part of that long term plan, we must have a strong canonical hierarchy of tags. That is why from that technical viewpoint it's completely natural and beneficial to have the notion of e.g. [people.women] and [people.lgbt] tags.
Yet we don't have to tear down the top-level groups and inclusivity that we're championing.
Medium term: Group aliases
Enter group aliases. The top-level ~anime for example would become an "alias", and behind-the-scenes fetch content from the "canonical" hierarchical subgroups: ~tv.anime and ~movies.anime. Similarly ~lgbt would remain, and link to ~people.lgbt. And so on.
Long term again
In the future, debates won't be had over which groups should exist; everything that belongs on Tildes will exist in the hierarchical tagging system.
The debates will be over aliases. "Should ~women exist?" Can be answered by a simple checklist including "Does it promote inclusivity?" and "Is the name intuitive?" and "Does it follow sitewide rules on fluff etc.?"
IMO these will be way easier than today's debates, because we will have unlimited tags and aliases unlike today. Today we are extremely concerned with the number of groups—can't be too many or too few. We need entire topics spanning days/weeks just to decide to make a few groups.
We might need a Disambiguation feature like Wikipedia in some cases. Example: should ~eagles point to ~animals.eagles or ~music.bands.eagles or ~sports.nfl.eagles? In those cases we might want a special webpage to disambiguate by linking to all of the above; or we could just vote on it and pick one.
I welcome feedback and clarifications on this, as I probably overlooked some important cases. But I think the group alias feature will be a useful tool to transition from today's idea of groups to tomorrow's hierarchical tags, while keeping many of the benefits of both.
So now I'm having second thoughts on a ~women group after seeing opinions from women here in this topic. Echoing some opinions here, I'm now thinking it makes a whole lot of sense, instead, to find groups to appeal to women instead of just a blanket ~women group which may be counterproductive and feel less inclusive.
I seeked out an opinion from a woman instead of trying to guess at what groups are desirable. (As I should have done originally.)
From a contact who is a woman, who describes herself as very feminine, and gives advice to female friends on femininity. She took a look at Tildes' current groups and generously shared a full list of topics that would interest her.
I fully recognize this list is too long for the purposes of this topic; the intent is not to advocate adding all of them to Tildes in 2023. Rather to provide a data point. I also know some of these topics in particular will be loudly rejected by many of today's Tildes members. Even so, I thought it informative to post the full list without any preemptive pruning.
And needless to say, this individual's opinion does not speak for all women. Some women may find many of the below listed groups completely uninteresting and irrelevant to them.
~beauty (separate from ~fashion)
~beauty.makeup
~beauty.skin_care
~books.romantic
~design.arts_and_crafts
~design.decoration
~design.interior
~fashion
~fashion.accessories
~fashion.clothing
~fashion.jewelry
~fashion.purses
~fashion.shoes
~food.wine
~health.fitness
~health.fitness.yoga
~hobbies.baking
~hobbies.cooking
~hobbies.gardening
~life.parenting
~life.parenting.child_psychology
~life.parenting.education
~life.relationships
~life.self_help
~lifestyle
~lifestyle.art_galleries
~lifestyle.bakeries
~lifestyle.brunch
~lifestyle.cafes
~lifestyle.concerts
~lifestyle.nightclubs
~spirituality
~spirituality.astrology
~spirituality.meditation
~travel
~tv.celebrities
~tv.gossip
I agree that simply having more groups that potentially appeal to women would probably be ideal. However, worth keeping in mind is that ~women garnered quite a lot of support by the women on this site:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/16hc/women_of_tildes_do_we_want_or_need_a_designated_womens_space
And that's not the first time the group has been suggested or received a reasonable amount of support either. There are quite a few very long time members of this site who have requested the group multiple times now, and each time their request has been ignored. And IMO we really need to stop ignoring the request.
You're right. I made the mistake of making it an either-or question, which it's not.
I originally proposed a ~women group here, and then later looked at it through the lens of "If we kept all the groups today, only adding ~women, would that really help women feel more included?" and it felt like a "Wait, maybe not."
But if we added more likely-appealing-to-women groups, and also a ~women group, I can see how that might work out pretty well.
Hmm, I don't really like this proposal, or gaufde's, at all. And I don't really see this discussion as controversy to be avoided, I see it as a collaborative brainstorming and review session.
I like Tildes's existing categorization system and would not like to see it drastically changed: there are probably two or three suggestions in here out of the bunch I agree with. I like a small set of top-level groups, I like the occasional subgroups to promote discussion, I really like that there's a distinction between groups and tags. I like the existing non-hierarchical tagging system, I like that it's opinionated and incredibly consistent (thanks to a certain behind-the-scenes member), I like that every post on here is tagged with it in mind.
This isn't true. In particular there has been some discussion in this topic that certain top-level groups would perhaps signal the opposite of inclusivity (i.e ~people or more on-the-nose ~people.white).
This doesn't seem quite right to me. Content on Tildes in existing groups is not broadly split between entirely unrelated tags. I struggle to think of a case where fetching content from more than two or so subgroups is desirable: and think the majority of these aliases would be fetching posts from only one group.
I think the debates will be over hierarchy. For example: you have movies.anime and tv.anime. I disagree! I think anime is a separate category altogether from tv or anime! Which isn't very different from debates over existence, at all.
The controversy I'm seeing in this topic is arising because people are trying to have two different conversations at the same time. One focusing on group hierarchy, and another about what groups to advertise (via promoting top-level groups) to encourage diversity of users. These two ways of approaching the "groups issue" are causing strife because people are assuming it has to be one way or the other.
My proposal was to fix the controversy by pointing out we can have it both ways, by starting with more top-level groups in the short term in the interest of advertising/diversity, and then in the medium term moving those to appropriate subgroup hierarchies and converting the top-level groups to aliases.
You make a good point regarding the freeform tags which are easy to understand and useful. We don't have to assume that freeform tags will go away when we introduce hierarchical tags—which are basically another name for groups, just stressing that a topic can belong to multiple hierarchies simultaneously.
I believe it's possible for freeform tags, hierarchical tags, and aliases to all coexist. That picture isn't terribly different from today's Tildes. We'd need to make sure the UI is conveniently designed when their functionalities overlap and clear enough when they don't.
Yes, of course there will be debates on the hierarchy. IMO that is more of a bookkeeping issue: "We have anime, now where does it fit in the tree?" rather than "Should we have an anime group? What does that add over ~arts or ~tv?"—the latter question, which we must ask today, easily leading to drama and hurt feelings.
I was planning to sit down later in the evening and write something very similar so thanks for this comment because I'm amazingly lazy.
I'd like to add some things:
cabalsteering committee, users could contribute custom tag presets that could be browsed and followed,I am a musician. I love music. But I unsubscribed from the ~music group. Why? Because I'm not interested in song or band recommendations or discussions, or excitement about
$popular_artist's latest release. My interest is from a different angle: songwriting, theory, performance, audio equipment, audio software; things like that.On usenet the musician groups used to start with rec.music.makers - like rec.music.makers.guitar, rec.music.makers.percussion, etc. I would love to see that music.makers naming convention come back here, eventually.
Agree completely. ~music.makers is a great starting subgroup. Toss in ~music.listeners for the tracks/albums/genre subs and ~music.gear for the tech, what else are we missing?
Yeah ~music.makers and ~music.listeners (or even ~music.listentothis since so many of the mods are on here already ;) gets my vote too. I like the symmetry of it.
I think ~music.makers and ~music.listeners would be enough for now. Gear talk might find a natural home in either of those groups, depending on whether we're talking about production (instruments, consoles, microphones, DAWs and plugins, etc.) or listening (turntables, speakers, media player/library software, audiophile gear, etc.) Although I wouldn't be opposed to ~music.gear either.
Especially lately I have felt the need for something like this. Or ~talk.ask.
Perhaps ~music.songs as an alternative to ~music.discovery? It sounds a little more concrete.
~music.listeners wins I think. It's more 'tildes' than the rest, and it gives the impression that all of the people who want to listen to music should subscribe there. It also invites all of the genre and band-based communities under its umbrella. That gets all of the track sharing stuff out of the way of the rest of the music groups as well - something we never really managed on reddit.
I'm thinking ~music.makers and ~music.gear are the other two worth making. Makers beats 'hardware' and 'software' and 'theory' by keeping it about the human, so it wins. Gear is a good start to people talking about instruments and rigs.
Remember the human. That's the right way to organize a tildes hierarchy, I think. Better than reddit did it, and better than overly pedantic micro-groups that really only matter to people who obsess over taxonomy. These group threads are always a glorious mess. :)
Just want to also chime in and say I think a group for music makers could be really valuable. I like the idea of ~music.gear as well even though I think one could argue that gear talk could be contained within ~music.makers since it would be a relevant topic for (most?) people in there. But maybe it makes sense in case gear talk would otherwise clutter ~music.makers?
Gear is a big part of what musicians talk about when they discuss making music. ~music.makers seems like it could be a good catch-all group for sharing our projects, and discussion about gear, recording/composing process, performance, music theory, etc.
Let's skip making the gear one for now and see how that goes in makers. It seems like gear might become a subgroup there someday.
To continue with bike-shedding, possibly ~music.recordings?
It excludes unrecorded live shows, but maybe that's okay? You can't share them anyway.
I suggested elsewhere ~music.listen as a place for posting things you think other people would like to or should listen to. This encompasses music videos because almost no one watches a music video with no sound and the purpose of the video is usually the music (and if it isn’t, perhaps it belongs in another group anyway)
Hmm, I don't know then. ~music.files seems too much like a warez site.
I guess "discovery" works even though it's not as obvious. You can always look.
~music.reviews might encourage people to actually write something saying what they like about a
songfile rather than just dropping a link. Tildes is supposed to be about discussion. It's a bit formal, though.How about ~music.picks? Or are people going to think it's a niche group about string instrument paraphernalia? 😂
~animals could be about pets, wildlife, or zoology
(Posting my suggestions separately so you can vote for them.)
I love this!
I want my awws and my animals being bros fixes, haha.
r/aww and r/animalsbeingbros content is unlikely to find a home here; they’re almost exclusively bite-sized image/video content with very little substantial discussion.
I don’t think either fits Tildes very well. But you might be able to find an equivalent on Lemmy though! It wouldn’t surprise me if more cute-animal-lovers found their way to the fediverse.
To be honest, Lemmy is much too fractured for my tastes. I do enjoy the more solid front that Tildes provides, and fail to see why Tildes should be automatically unaccommodating to "quick hit" subjects where appropriate.
For example, just as Reddit does, categorize or otherwise tag areas where discussions are required in order to post, and then allow areas where it doesn't have to be thought-provoking. Sometimes folks just want a quick hit of a topic or to feel good when reading social media and don't want or need more. Having a safe space for that is better than forcing people to look for it elsewhere, where there is a lot of predatory datamining, closed-minded forced feeds, and other bad social media trends.
Again, no one is threatening the fantastic discussions and forums available already here on Tildes, and as the founding documents state, even being new here, I'm very much in favor of prioritizing those discussions. It's just it'd also be nice to have other ways to contribute in a less obliging manner, as well.
I totally understand and I’m also new here. What I’m finding over the past few weeks is that I’m no longer spending countless hours just scrolling through, and watching, content I don’t really care about that much. Whenever I do need a fix of easy content, I’m visiting lemmy or kbin or whatever.
In general, I really enjoy no longer spending all my time on an aggregation site like Reddit. I’ve been spending a lot more time on different websites, just like I did before Reddit. I’ve been visiting all these nice and unique corners of the web that I thought were no longer maintained. A lot of them were linked from Tildes, but a lot I’ve also found linking through those sites. I’ve also started going back to a car forum that is still active, which scratches another itch.
So I’m grateful for the way I was forced to reset my habits. I spend way less time on my phone and am enjoying myself more online than I was in the last few years. I hope you’ll find your way soon, too!
I don’t, for reasons Deimos has touched on in the past (I’d link if i wasn’t on my phone in bed about to fall asleep)
I really liked the ideas of a ~people group, as an Asian American, it would be really nice to talk to others about issues pertaining to Asian Americans as a whole!--
Edit:
After reading the other comments, I think I'd prefer the idea that @dubteedub mentioned, having a seperate ~women and ~bipoc group would be more inclusive. After thinking about it there, (especially as a straight, model minority man), I think I overlooked the importance to bring visibility and diversity in a more prominent way.
Yeah idk how it would be best to organize them but it would be good to have spaces dedicated to women and poc similar to how we have ~lgbt. It also would probably help make this place feel way less like it's full of only white dudes tbh.
As a cis hetero white dude, I fully endorse this and any other efforts to provide a space for these and similar groups.
I mention this in a top level comment, but I think we would have ~people, move ~lgbt under it (~people.lgbt) and from there organize groups as needed/possible. Not as a way of burying it, but just for consistent organization.
This sort of ignores the issue I think you're hinting at where if a space isn't easily found it sort of doesn't exist. The feeling of not being full of white dudes probably as important as actually increasing site diversity, so perhaps efficient organization should be the second priority in some exceptions.
My one qualm with ~people is that I worry about the top-level group itself being largely useless and getting filled with a bunch of stuff that drowns out content from the relevant groups. But idk what I'd really recommend as an alternative so I'll leave that judgment up to Deimos lol
I mean, the original theory was that the toplevel would get bubble-up content from the subgroups, rather than being the location for posts directly (IIRC).
It would function as a best-of, and that has its own value when the site is larger.
It's not really a best-of if everything in all its subgroups ends up there though.
Thats currently the function yes. Remember we're in alpha here.
Bubble-up logic probably gets implemented sometime when subgroups become the default posting level.
Maybe ~identity or ~demographics make more sense than ~people?
One can subscribe to ~a.b and not to ~a, so I don’t see an inherent problem here.
At least as it currently stands, though, by default you're subscribed to all top-level groups. And in general it seems counterproductive to have a top-level group that is itself not useful for anything -- there's not a ton of "common ground" to post under a label like ~people imo
I'd find it interesting to see what's the most popular discussions across the entire space but wouldn't necessarily want to subscribe to it or its sub-groups. I do very much approve of its existence, though.
And in retrospect, I think a ~people.men group could be very helpful. I'd like to be able to talk about masculinity sometimes, though my personal leanings are very much more r/menslib and not r/mensrights, if you know what I mean.
As a man (ahem) I'm not super comfortable making special discussion areas for (presumably) majority groups. Which is not to say there aren't good discussions to be had about men's issues, just that I'd rather make the place more inviting for marginalized people first. I'd feel real squicky about the existence of a ~whitepeople group too. In my experience places like that tend to attract some really distasteful conversations.
The one nice thing about creating a men’s group is that it indicates that the default isn’t men (even if it’s probably the majority on this site currently).
I agree with you about a white specific group, but I think it’s a little different. There are men’s issues which aren’t misogynistic, but I can’t really think of a white people issue that isn’t racist (or at least a dog whistle)
I personally frown upon the idea to have a group named 'women', as that would imply that all the other groups are for men. Unless of course there was 'men' to counteract that. But I'm still a little suspicious on how inclusive these groups would prove to be. I'm a woman but I'm often ostracised and excluded from women's groups because I'm not.. womanly enough. On the other hand, if lots of women feel uncomfortable without a women-specific group, then it would be better to have one.
I agree, I think I would feel a little sidelined if there was a woman’s group without a corresponding men’s one. Like “here, this little corner of our site is for you and the rest is for us”. I know logically that is not what’s being said but I’m sure plenty of women have had this sense of othering elsewhere. (I feel the same way about the existence of “man caves” in a house. Is the rest of the house not for you?!)
I’m not someone who’s ever felt a need for a woman’s group personally, so I’m probably not the best to speak on what it’s for, but I would like to see a feminism group that men feel welcome to contribute to. I’d like to see women’s health just posted under ~health, for example. This feels like a respectful enough website that this would be possible - in other places we’ve needed a place to keep out the creeps and harassers but I don’t get that vibe here.
Sidelined indeed. I came on Tildes very excited for what it is, but had I seen ~women in the sidebar, my excitement would have quickly deflated. In my opinion, women should be taken for granted as much as men are. I agree with you on the health topics too.
Human rights for men, women, lgbt+ folks etc. are legitimately separate topics that might deserve their respective groups. I'm too fresh of a user to suggest an appropriate format though as I just signed up today.
I agree that whenever some topics are legitimately gender specific
~
There's really not a need for symmetry here. A ~black group shouldn't justify a ~white either. Tilde's userbase is overwhelmingly white and male. The entire website is a huge "white and male" group.
Sure, there may be a reason for a group about issues regarding men, but appeasing to a misguided sense of equivalency is not a good justification for its existence.
False equivalency. What reason could there be for a white group that isn’t racist? On the other hand, there are reasons for a men’s group that aren’t misogynistic. How are men going to tackle the issues of toxic masculinity, for example? That can’t happen in a women’s group. We’re your allies in that regard but we can’t do the work for you.
“Tilde's userbase is overwhelmingly white and male. The entire website is a huge "white and male" group.” Yes this is my issue. It feels like saying all this is ours, you can have that little tiny bit for you.
There are many non racist groups that are not on Tildes. Not being racist is not enough reason for a group to be created.
One thing to have in my mind is that on Tildes "why not?" is generally not enough reason for a group to exist. So the criteria to make a group might be something like this instead: "is there enough reason, demand, or content for that group to exist?".
If you wish for ~men or ~white, you are free argue your case. If just don't think that the existence of ~women or ~black would automatically make ~men and ~white desirable groups to have on Tildes.
I’m not entirely sure you’re arguing in good faith here as you’ve ignored a lot of what I said and misrepresented the rest. Hope you have a nice day (I mean that in a genuine, not sarcastic way despite how it might sound!) but I’m going to end here.
I assure you that I always argue in good faith, but I unfortunately cannot guarantee that I'll always argue well :(
I hope you have an excellent day as well :)
Ah I’m sorry for not being more charitable in my interpretation!
That's totally okay. I clearly misunderstood what you wrote in such a profound way that there was no way for you to think of anything else. I am actually ADHD, and I try my best, but sometimes even medication fails me. It is I who apologize, my friend.
At the risk of this becoming noise, I just want to say how nice it is to disagree with someone and come out the other side being friendly with each other. What a great site this is :)
That's the kind of noise I want. I really try to be nice to everyone here, but one thing to have in mind is that almost every Tildes user was once a Reddit user. So it's not that we're any better than others, we are largely the same people, but we are now in an environment that encourages us to be kinder and less combative.
And welcome to Tildes ;)
Taking part of what I’ve said out of context to start an argument? You must’ve been a redditor 😉
I mean, there's helpful conversations to be had about whiteness and the experience of being white that aren't even vaguely about white pride. But any subgroup centered around an identity group can fall into hate for members of an outgroup, and none of that is going to be tolerated at Tildes, regardless of group.
The thing about “white” as a group is that it doesn’t have any distinct markers or shared identity aside from the fact that it excludes non-Whites. Insofar as there is a shared identity that isn’t noxious, it’s in some specific culture (Italian, Anglo/WASP, Bavarian, Southern (US), Scotch-Irish, Occitaine, etc.) I don’t think many would object to groups for specific cultures in that way because there’s some actual cultural stuff and shared experiences there that aren’t just based on being “not ethnic” that people can talk about. But there is no really meaningful form of a “white” culture. The closest you’d get is WASP culture but that’s. a distinct ethno-cultural group. We’re past the historical period of that being the default for what it is to be White.
There is not much point to ~whitepeople (besides talking about sunburns, as I joked about), but as mentioned, there are plenty of topics that do make sense for a men subgroup. But it is not of great priority I believe, and would love to see a ~women (~people.women, to be precise) first and foremost, as they do deserve a separate place in the generally male-oriented online space
oh yeah I loved r/menslib. Would have to be carefully moderated but I like the idea of having a space dedicated to men's issues.
I'm transmasc as well which flavors that -- a lot of supposedly-inclusive "everyone but cis men" spaces have a "you're actually woman-lite" vibe towards trans men due to their exclusion of cis men. A men's group couls be useful for trans guys to discuss things that they have in common with cis men in an open way. Plus, generally I think having groups for everyone but men has kinda an "othering" vibe to it. Like men are the default and everything else is special, y'know?
I'm just one guy, but I've been struggling on the topic of how to be a man my entire adult life. Trans-men have my undying respect for diving into the briar patch that is modern masculinity and making it work for them.
And if anyone thinks that you aren't welcome, nuts to them.
Aw thank you, that's really kind of you! I'm nonbinary so my entire gender identity has been wrestling with whether I'm a man or a woman or whatever and trying to navigate how I feel and what I want from those labels. So I kind of have a foot in both worlds and simultaneously in neither. It's confusing in a lot of respects, but it does allow me a bit more freedom to pick and choose what parts of masculinity I want and which parts I can do without.
One of the things I really liked about r/menslib was how productive discussions between cis men, trans men, and women could be there while addressing men's issues bc it allowed for so many different angles of viewing the same problem.
At the moment, I suppose, such discussion could go in ~talk tagged with
men.Yes, but given the level of dismissiveness I've seen in this thread regarding discussions related to people who are in the majority, I'd really feel safer having a separate space to discuss such things where I wouldn't be intruding on their experience of the site.
I think that's a feature request? There could be top-level groups you can't post to, which are just for organizing the list. I guess that's more of a folder.
I think the recommendation from the previous similar thread of a people supergroup with potentially specific subgroups sounds excellent, so ~lgbt could be placed under people, and I very much would like to see a ~people.women open at least for now, as simply through statistics I’m sure many people ought to be interested in that.
Groups on Tildes are meant to group content more than people. ~people makes no sense. I like how our groups currently work, and that would change the website on a fundamental level.
~people would make Tildes a lot more like Reddit. I don't like that at all.
I agree! My edit has more so highlighted what I think might be better as groups, maybe I should strike-through my original comment.
Please don’t sell yourself and your struggle short. Plenty of Asian men experience racism, a different kind perhaps but no one has a monopoly on suffering
While true, and I have a lot of stories and experience with racism, I think it's also important to point out that I "am closer to default" than most people who are less fortunate than I, especially when discussing safe spaces for minority groups.
I really don't like it, it's the same line of thinking that is fueling growing rates of anti-Asian crime in the US which is sadly often perpetrated by those groups who you say are less fortunate than yourself. You are of course free to label yourself and place yourself within a hierarchy as you want but I would only ask that you consider how saying these things out loud could possibly reinforce an inherently racist narrative that perpetuates and promotes exclusionary and hateful attitudes against Asians. There's no need for already oppressed minorities to fight each other
Thank you for pointing it out. I do want to point out that anti-Asian crime is still perpetrated by majority white people. I feel like a lot of rhetoric nowadays have been pushing a "Black vs Asian" narrative and I feel like that definitely contributes to the infighting of oppressed minorities.
My source, even though it's a couple of years out of date
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/viral-images-show-people-color-anti-asian-perpetrators-misses-big-n1270821
Thank you, I’ll give it a read and maybe adjust my own conceived notions
Instead of ~women, maybe ~tildettes? :P I've seen a few suggestions for naming the women's group thrown around in the past, thought I'd throw my idea out there.
Edit: I hear you, we want to be more serious in this neck of the woods. It wasn't a super serious suggestion, I just liked the way it sounded and it seemed more inclusive to all "femme" individuals and might make it more appealing for various genders to post (many women's issues also apply to trans men and non-binary folk). I do worry from time to time that Tildes is a bit too militantly averse to whimsy, to our detriment. I've seen a lot of comments saying they are too intimidated to post or comment due to feeling inadequate, which could be stifling a lot of the discussion we are trying to foster.
I like the creative naming but I understand it might make it more confusing for newcomers when they join, no? At a glance it might seem "lolrandom" or maybe even demeaning? I'm not a woman though so I think someone else might have to chime in for me.
Absolutely zero offense intended - in fact, thank you for triggering these thoughts! - but I think the idea of a group that could be called "women" being called "tildettes" is a good example of the precise opposite of what I'd personally like to see from Tildes. I would love a space specifically to discuss women's issues but more importantly for myself personally - read discussions regarding women's issues and have a place where topics are approached from a feminist lens. I'd say that applies to any topic of interest I have that could pop up as a group or sublabel of some kind, but being a woman myself, this one obviously hits on the disparity between the two approaches. I'm equally interested in the topic of gender studies as a whole, including men's issues, as well as all things related to sex and sexuality and gender identity, despite being straight myself, so trying to find a balance is important to me.
The vast majority of any site's population are lurkers who are there to consume content, not create it, and direct participation in the comment section is something of a bonus, or at least less common than simple consumption. The ability to group content in a clear and concise manner from the perspective of a user looking to browse for a bit seems more valuable to me for the site than labeling groups in the name of general discussion space for people of specific identities or interest groups, especially with Tildes' system of democratic grouping. We can't make a direct comparison, but to help get my clumsy point across - ~science isn't for scientists, but posts that fall under the topic of science, and the nature/culture of the site and participation should be what ensures that actual scientists' comments and opinions are given the respect they deserve, and that representation doesn't fall under the wayside. I'd honestly be more comfortable as a woman with a group about women, that inherently recognizes the value of women's voices in particular, instead of one for women. I think there is a lot of value to be had in introducing the idea of expanding the ~talk grouping that would be relevant here.
Actually, that's a good point, and this is a useful way of putting it. A hypothetical ~women group would not be for women, but about issues that relate to women.
This reminds me of a note I saw on a niche subreddit: "Allies and friends are also welcome here, but the focus of this subreddit is <these people> and their issues, concerns, and thoughts."
That's creative and cute, but I think the cutesy vibe of "tildettes" might come off as demeaning to some people. Obviously I don't think that's your intent but it could definitely be read that way.
Some creative naming would certainly be fun! Despite being somewhat new here that doesn’t seem to fit in very well with current conventions that Tildes seems to follow :(.
That kind of creativity might play better in tags which are more transient. I think top-level names benefit from clarity, however, I do agree I really liked the meta-humor found in a lot of the sub names on reddit. I don't want us on this platform to be a bunch of humorless curmudgeons.
One concern with creating top-level groups like this is that it it both emphasizes the importance of those groups while also creating the perception that any identity that didn’t make the cut is less important. The disabled community comes mind as an example.
There’s also the issue that marginalized groups can be location dependent. The experience of specifically poc wont be the same in the US as it is in Asia or Africa, while there may be similarities for life/advice to a racial/ethnic minority community in many locations regardless of exact demographics.
I think this is why I’m leaning towards preferring the top-level people group. If we have ~people and immediate create important sub-groups like ~people.bipoc, ~people.lgbt, etc. then it is super easy to expand the scope of these identity-based groups in the future.
If it didn’t exist yet, where would someone looking for a group focused on people with disabilities post? If ~lgbt and ~bipoc exist but ~people_with_disabilities doesn’t where do they turn to? ~talk? ~life?
If the identity groups are sub-groups, then if ~people.with_disabilities doesn’t exist, someone could still post in ~people and add a tag. I feel like their post would be more at home there than them trying to figure out what other top-level group they should use.
I am sensitive to the idea that this feels a lot like demoting ~lgbt as it currently stands. I don’t like that aspect. I also like the idea of signaling that Tildes is inclusive and actively trying to build these communities, but I guess that ultimately the tidy hierarchy feels more manageable in the long-term. It will help avoid some messy discussions down the road of when to add new top-level groups.
That’s where I’m at right now, but I’d love to hear from others who have the opposite opinion or have flipped opinions.
@CosmicDefect, @CannibalisticApple, @cfabbro, @dubteedub, @phoenixrises
Honestly, this highlights I think a weakness of the ~tildes platform. I feel a natural hesitancy to post on my niches because there doesn't exist a place for them directly and I can't just go and make one. Perhaps this is because I'm overly "trained" by reddit having used it for more than 10 years, but I feel the pressure to not "post in the wrong place" nonetheless.
To that end, because tags and groups overlap so much, and niches are relegated by necessity to tags... let me ask a question: Are groups necessary at all? Why not just have "tags" which you subscribe to (let the current default groups just be tags) and keep the functionality that anybody and anyone can make a tag. The more popular tags will naturally accumulate followers and the niche groups can grow organically without pestering @deimos for a nod of legitimacy. Subscribing to a tag could be as simple as clicking on it, maybe click again to unsubscribe, and lastly "neutral" which just means you'll see it if there is an accompanying tag you're already subbed to.
I don't know if this solution is elegant or workable, but I feel like groups are just too restrictive at the moment.
I think if ~tildes actually becomes big, the limited directory of groups will become problematic in all areas and not just for communities with a shared identity like ~lgbt. Ultimately, I assume, ~lgbt got the nod to be a top level group because it was assumed to be large enough to be self-sustaining and that historically lgbt folks have used the internet for community in ways other identities haven't done so. To put it another way, lgbt spaces are often inflated in size and commitment by users because they don't get to express themselves in normal life either because of privacy or even personal safety. This is something other identities generally don't deal with.
To add another question: Is a tidy hierarchy helpful for users (either through UX or psychologically) or does it just appeal to our desire to neatly box things? I'm skeptical "demoting" all such groups to ~people.lgbt and ~people.blind or ~people.deaf or ~people.asianamerican because then what is ~people even for? The "leftovers"?
That doesn't feel welcoming much.
If Tildes actually becomes big, then the directory of groups and sub-groups will expand to meet demand.
There was some early hypothetical discussions about decentralising the ability to create groups and sub-groups - but not to individuals. Given the intended communal moderation model of Tildes, there'll be a lot of moderators floating around. Senior experienced moderators, acting in council, will create groups and sub-groups as they see the need. But that's a looong way off, and there'll be a lot of thought applied to the topic between now and then.
However, even before that theoretical model becomes reality, Deimos will still periodically add new groups and sub-groups in response to popular demand... exactly as he's doing with this post. This is the third time he's done this in the history of Tildes, and the only reason it's happened so few times is because of the stagnation of Tildes between 2020 and May 2023. It happened in July 2018 (requests and announcement) and in July 2019 (requests and announcement), when Tildes was active. If Tildes remains active again now, these posts about new groups & sub-groups will become more common.
cc: @gaufde
There’s a feature on the site roadmap for the “top” topics in a subgroup to bubble up to the parent group. Once that’s implemented, this example case ~people would become the highlights of the identity subgroups plus topics with tags that haven’t been “promoted” to a full subgroup left.
That sounds like a cool system to organically make communities. I'm excited if that's the case.
The bubbling up system is one of the things I am most excited for to! I think it is also probably necessary for a higher-level group like ~people to make any sense.
However, I do like what @lou mentioned in another comment
Maybe any higher-level group ultimately pigeon holes things in a way that isn’t great. I also played with the idea of a top-level ~identities group but that might just introduce a different set of connotations that are still not great.
I feel very similar. Also, as a white male, I haven't a clue what I'd even want to read, let alone post about if something like ~identities.white or ~people.white existed. Even the names of such groups kind of makes my skin crawl because of the connotations (and what nearly every similar such forum on reddit and elsewhere actually was about). I'm not like "self-hating" or anything, but something like ~polish or ~arizona makes far more sense for my own personal identity and without the inadvertent dog whistle inviting in confederate users. But I totally understand why a minority group with a far more cohesive shared experience might do wonderful things with their own groups.
This fundamental fracture in our cultural lexicon basically prevents the neatly ordered nested groupings and subgroupings each person with the heart of a programmer here wants -- because not all categories within a subset carry the same importance or weight.
I would self-label this comment as joke, but to answer it in good faith: it would be chock-full of sunburn-related discussions :D
Sincerely: A white guy who recently turned red and now in the process of "moulting"
I’m pretty sure these would never exist for exactly those reasons. Groups like that seem to only be centered around hate, intolerance, etc. ~polish on the other hand would be a great addition since it is actually about a culture!
Actually, I think this example also demonstrates how hierarchies can be a mixed bag. Imagine a world where ~people.polish, ~identities.polish, and ~local.polish all existed with slightly different flavors of content.
If these different groups were effectively just tags, and you could multi-post then this system might work well! If these are separate groups with distinct sub-cultures then this could get super confusing.
The more I wrestle with the idea of hierarchical structures the more confused I get. I think maybe the relevance of hierarchy on Tildes won’t be easily understood until some of the more fundamental mechanics of the site are fully fleshed out.
I think with a bubbling systems, multiposting could work if you post in a primary community, and have the option to post a reference elsewhere. The reference links to the original discussion, but only "bubbles up" to the parent group in the original community.
I like what you are getting at. It seems this categorization problem is one that we will constantly be running up against. Maybe that is why all other platforms have basically just left it up to users to create whatever spaces they want.
I guess this whole thread is really just a side-effect of this different direction Tildes is trying.
I think this will largely depend on how the site mechanisms end up working. If we have a bubbling-up mechanism that has been mentioned then this group would become a somewhat curated selection of all the content in sub groups. That could be nice. However, if it really is just used as a ‘leftovers’ group then it would not be serving a good purpose and could end up being damaging.
"Plenty" is once a month or so, so not particularly popping. In comparison ~lgbt has had the same number of posts in 4 months the disabilities tag has had since late 2019. So, it's not a particularly strong reason to demote ~lgbt to ~people.lgbt in my eyes. Or to rephrase: Is the lack of disabilities related posts because a lack of interest or a lack of designated space discouraging posting?
For me it's a third reason - I already get enough difficult replies when I talk about disability in comments; makes me pretty hesitant to make posts about it, which have even higher visibility.
Certain types of ableism are pretty socially accepted, which makes it easy for them to slide under the radar of any website's rules, even relatively welcoming sites.
I've only been on Tildes for a little bit, but my understanding of the "goal" behind the platform is not necessarily to foster "communities of people", like Reddit and other social medias do, but to foster discussion on a wide array of topics.
By creating (sub)groups that are too specific — ~people.lgbt, ~sports.football, ~comp.javascript, etc. — I think you'd cause users to subscribe to an array of specific groups that reflects their "identity", and then those specific groups would become communities of people (in particular, communities of a certain type of person), rather than a grouping of different discussion topics. The echo chamber effect and other social phenomena can occur from this.
So I suppose my question is: is the end goal of Tildes to foster communities, and then deal with all of the pros and cons than can arise from that; or is the end goal of Tildes to foster discussion about anything and everything, with groups, subgroups, and tags that are simply used to help organise the discussions points into topics?
I personally advocate the second option, but as I said, I'm new here.
Edit: Spelling + a missing sentence.
I mean... as an accessibility advocate at my job and in general, why not? ~accessibility sounds like a great place to post content about accessibility as a whole, and the problems the disabled groups face, and the victories that they get in legislation and otherwise.
I get what you mean, but on the other hand there's more to being disabled than accessibility - and disability isn't a bad word.
As an example, how would an article on "do not resuscitate" orders being placed on disabled people at the beginning of the pandemic without their knowledge fit into an accessibility group? There's no service or activity being denied - just enaction of ableism and eugenics.
A focus on accessibility specifically has the potential to influence the types of articles shared, which means a lot of important issues could go undiscussed.
~lgbt must be a top level group.
On another note, ~people makes no sense. Groups are meant to group content. Not people.
~lgbt is for LGBT content, not just LGBT people.
I've advocated for it elsewhere, ~society should be the top level group with specific groups of content nested. It makes sense and offers a bigger area where people can be exposed to topics from all levels and niches of society. I really hesitate for this site to take the Reddit approach and just become echo chambers and divisive groups
Well, things pertaining to society. Women's rights movements, LGBT concerns, representation for minorities, crime and justice reform, gender studies, cultural interaction and visibility, community development, religion, etc. I don't think that ~society at all lends itself to being "a place to cram a bunch of subtopics into without any purpose," it clearly has a well defined purpose that is inclusive to a legitimate area of fields of study as well as lives lived.
To who? To you maybe. But I am an LGBT POC and I'm not saying that at all to express more right to talk about something than anyone else but only to show that I'm at least arguing in good faith and on equal footing and to me it's no less different than having ~LGBT or ~bipoc or whatever, those are all spaces for those people to talk amongst themselves
~society comes with the advantage that it covers a wider breadth of topics. Many people will not subscribe to ~LGBT because they have no affiliation or interest so they will miss out on all those topics. If ~LGBT were part of a larger section, people would be exposed to things they would have already missed, alongside so many other group topics that are, by definition, exclusionary and other. To me that is a big part of what the internet has been getting wrong for the last decade, in-groups create spaces for representation, safety, and like-mindedness only to end up with echo chambers, rage factories, and a greater sense of separation and otherness. Perhaps on Tildes a new way could be found.
Another problem that I saw all too often on Reddit is that there just isn't enough content generated for minority groups. Having ultra-dedicated spaces for smaller populations tends to create 24/7 news media effect, where lower-quality content is generated and extremist content proliferates in order to fill the gaps. Having a larger place to capture all this related content, as how societies interact with eachother and with themselves does apply to everyone, will still supply enough content to satisfy subscribers.
The question is not how to create new spaces for marginalized people to go but how to create spaces that give marginalized people both a voice and an audience as well as building a place that creates inclusion and diversity - not exclusion and barriers to understanding
I agree with you, I think putting what is essentially all minority groups in a drawer isn't a great idea.
To be fair to the idea, I think the idea behind ~peoples or ~society group isn't so much to have a functional top-level group as it is to have an interesting place for conversations from all walks of life to bubble up into. That's a neat idea, although I think it's outweighed by the issues you outline.
As a note, instead of ~disabled, i think a better word would be ~accessibility! I love talking about accessibility and making things more open to everyone, and would love to post findings, wins, and difficulties to a group like that.
This is definitely the right name for such a group!
Thanks. I was having trouble with this name in one of my posts
I think I initially thought of this as a strength since it could help people create groups that don’t exist yet via the tag -> group promotion mechanism that might (eventually?) exist. The variation as explained in your words would not be good though.
I would love this to change too! This has also historically been a big problem with a variety of online platforms.
I think that I was really liking the hierarchical structure because to me it signals an easy way for related groups to begin to organically separate from each other as the site grows. However, leaning too far into this idea is also probably not the right answer either since if a hierarchy eventually gets 6-levels deep than that seems like a sign things are getting too complicated.
I think the small number of groups and not allowing users to create their own groups had me thinking that top-level groups are somewhat discouraged. Maybe that isn’t the case and maybe that is the wrong approach to begin with.
————————————
Sorry about the ping. I’ll try to remember that for the future. I just saw a lot of good discussion on the parallel parts of the thread and I wanted to understand those approaches better but still respond to the parent comment I chose.
———————————
Edit: personally I appreciate pings! I find that it helps me to track discussions better since Tildes doesn’t notify people about sibling posts, only direct replies.
I think that is a very bad interpretation of this. I still think that a ~people with several important minority subgroups would be a good idea (at the minimum, lgbt and women). If a bubbling up method gets implemented then someone who is not a part of a minority group can just subscribe to ~people and be exposed to and get to know all the most important posts from every minority group there is.
For example, I am not part of the lgbt community, but I am reasonably interested in legislation, events, certain discussions as plenty of my friends are. I would not subscribe directly to ~lgbt, but would definitely take a look at its top posts if something truly high value/grave importance surfaces (for the benefit of said friends). For me, subscribing to ~people would be the ideal amount of info, I believe.
While I also saw that you mentioned this "tidier hierarchy" part, I think it is an important consideration -- if more and more minority subgroups were to exist the top-level would quickly get overrun, and I do believe it is a benefit to have at least some basic hierarchy there (if for no other reason, to ease discovery of communities. I have never liked going through a litany of human-collected subreddit listings to find the occasional gems). If ~lgbt, then why not ~women. If ~women, why not ~native_americans, etc? That would quickly overrun the top-level.
You've given me an idea! (So I'll blame you when everyone hates it, like they hate many of my ideas.)
What if the top-level group was called something like ~minorities (I'm sure someone else can think of a better name)? It's explicitly a place for under-represented voices and discriminated groups to gather and discuss their issues.
For example:
~minorities.sexuality
~minorites.transgender
~minorities.women
~minorities.indigenous
... and whatever else people think is necessary.
This also removes the problem that I address elsewhere in this thread about having to balance out minority groups with majority groups, so that it doesn't look like majority groups are the default. We don't need to have this balance if we explicitly state that there's a Tildes group only for minorities.
Well, for one, women aren't a minority. They're a marginalized group but technically the majority. The same technically goes for Asians as well.
But honestly this is just the same as ~people but more brazen about shoving minorities into their own separate box rather than allowing them to have a few top-level groups for their (extremely diverse and different from each other) discussions. It's extremely othering and honestly gives the site a vibe that I'm not a fan of. One of the reasons I looked into tildes in the first place was because I saw it had ~lgbt as a top-level group, which was a strong signal that lgbt issues were worth discussing here and wouldn't be sidelined. ~minorities does the opposite by lumping a bunch of disparate groups together solely based on not being white cis men.
Thank you for articulating something I felt but couldn't put into words! What does a ~people post look like? "Anyone on Tildes need to eat food to survive?"
I agree, though I also think it's a byproduct of the tech-focused spaces where the initial rounds of invite codes seemed to go out. For most of this site's existence, the topics with the most consistent engagement were the ones that were along the lines of, "How do you like to customize your weird little operating system when you do your clickity clacks?" or something like that. I don't know it never appealed to me, but obviously that type of stuff seemed to draw more white dudes. We need more spaces for women and non-white groups and imo places like ~women and ~bipoc are the bare minimum. Ideally, we would have more groups that indirectly appeal to underrepresented demographics the same way ~tech seems to indirectly appeal to white guys, but that is more of a chicken and the egg thing.
I really hope this doesn't happen. We've lost too many good contributors for similar reasons.
~people is not the right approach but ~society very much would be
I've been thinking about this line a lot. I wanted to let you know that I think it would be a great loss if you, or people that don't feel they fit the majority here, would leave. Diversity on online platforms is very much appreciated by me, a straight white male. I already spend too much time in my bubble, being able to easily interact with different people is amazing.
Coming out hard against ~bipoc
Firstly, it's American-centric but it's too divisive. As a POC myself, it says to me that my experiences are less than for neither being black or indigenous. These safe spaces on Reddit quickly became toxic and created exclusionary mindsets which later evolved into witch hunts and brigading.
While I am open to the idea of ~feminsim or ~poc as wider topics that are less exclusionary, I don't agree with them in principle. I'd much rather see ~society be a place where we can all view and be exposed to different ideas including POC, BIPOC, and feminist views as well as men's mental health, etc.
The ~LGBT group itself is difficult for me to speak on. I am LGBT so it's nice to see it available but I am personally much more interested in creating non-exclusive communities and am an advocate for society to evolve to become more inclusive for everyone. In-groups have successfully advocated for themselves and their inclusion in the real world but I think that the internet has up-ended this. Negative aspects of both the conservative and progressive movements are being amplified and it's literally destroying the state of American society, I feel like this site has a good chance to do things differently and find radical ways to be inclusive rather than divisive.
And just to add another vote, I am perfectly fine with ~LGBT being "demoted." We can't have a top group for every special-interest group that exists
What do you think about a ~culture group? POC and BIPOC is very US-centric, it'd be interesting if such a group could encompass ex. indigenous peoples outside of the States.
~culture would not particularly scream "put stuff relevant to POC experiences here" but that would be fixed rather easily by having a description.
I mean, Roma people and migrants of African, Middle Eastern, or Asian descent (e.g. Pakistani) face big problems in my European country too (Greece), and all of the above could more or less be considered People of Colo(u)r.
(E.g.: See my recent comment history)
Then again, I'm not part of these groups – I'm Greek-Bulgarian – so I will leave the actual judgement to them!
I really do like the idea, but the label rubs me the wrong way a bit - POC is such an American-centric term, I never hear it where I live. And although I get it is an umbrella term in the same way ~lgbt is, the linguist in me goes "what about all the people conceptually represented by this but not literally represented by this" :-P
Honestly I think that is preferred! Yeah I read a comment about moving the LGBT group under people and I thought that it would make it less visible, which I wouldn't like.
Subgroups are perfectly visible. But there are other good reasons for ~lgbt to remain as a top level group.
~lgbt is a special interests group on a sensitive topic. You would want someone to be part of it only they do it knowingly and willingly, and not as a consequence of subscribing to another top group.
FYI, I didn't vote on your original comment because I 100% agree with @dubteedub and really reaaaaaaaallly don't think moving ~lgbt would be beneficial. Now that you have edited it to mention your support of the same, I have voted on it though. ;)
Sorry about that! Haha yeah It gives me a lot to introspect about, if that was my default initial thought. I think I was just excited about the prospects of new places for me to learn more about other diasporas other than my own. But yes, keep ~lgbt, add ~women and ~bipoc, final answer!!!
As a POC I dislike the idea of a ~bipoc group for similar but inverted reasons for why I said ~white doesn’t make sense as a group..
In the same way there’s no “there” there with Whiteness because it’s solely a category defined by what it excludes rather than having anything meaningful about itself, there’s no “there” there for being BIPOC aside from the shared experience of being excluded. Such a venue has nothing to discuss but various grievances around exclusion and, TBH, I’m kind of tired of the only narrative we tell about minority experiences centered around being hard done by. But we don’t just sit around all day thinking about how excluded we are (some people do, but they’re a distinct subgroup). That is a small part of life as a non-white person.
That sort of narrative somehow manages to make White people the actors/protagonists of the story despite ostensibly being about other groups, which is why you usually only see such approaches being pushed in White dominated spaces trying to be “diverse.”
100 times yes. I’ll also chime in as a gay POC and say that these spaces bring more harm than good because at their core they’re exclusionary, divisive, and focus on being different or other. I don’t want this site to evolve into another Reddit and, let’s face it, these types of subs quickly became the most toxic on that site
I don't necessarily think that that's the case, though! I think there's so many things form BIPOC culture that is unknown and not celebrated enough that we can always bring up. For example, during Chinese New Year I'd love to wish people fortune and just share a bit of my culture with others who might be curious. Of course, I don't want to be just relegated to a teacher, but being able to post positivity from my own culture can help shine a light on the Asian American diaspora and build empathy for the struggles we face through shared, similar experience.
In that case I’d just put that on something like ~talk.ABC. Because it’s not a BIPOC culture, it’s specifically an Asian American thing. A Black person has as much connection to it as a White person does.
The whole f'n site is basically a combination of people.white and people.straight and people.cismen. So we definitely don't need specific groups for those. :P
Honestly, I cannot 100% agree.
Men are not less in need of a place to discuss their experiences than women IMO.
If anything, men have a more difficult time finding places in meatspace to chat with other men. Men don't even try to start any kind of new mens clubs in real life nowadays, due to chatter like this that makes them feel like they do not deserve such a thing.
Online is all we have, to the limited extent that this is even true.
Maybe I will end up on the receiving end of some shit for saying so, but I would absolutely have comments to make if there were for example,
people.womenand not alsopeople.men.It is probably useful to note here that on the other site that I shall not name, both mens and womens sections exist with varying degrees of success and toxicity, very much depending on effective moderation.
I’m repeating myself here as I said this elsewhere, but there are genuine topics of interest for men that aren’t misogynistic. It’s hard to think of topics for straight people or white people that aren’t homophobic or racist, or dog whistles for those, or that would more appropriately come under another group umbrella
I do not, and believe me I hesitated to make the post as it is.
I am not advocating for a straight group or a white group, but I am advocating that if women get one, men should get one.
If you really want to break my balls about it, we can do a whole thing, but that is how I feel.
I don't think that it's a tit-for-tat sort of situation, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have a place to talk about heterosexuality and how it fits into our lives? Most popular representation of straight relationships are toxic as fuck, and I wouldn't mind a place to talk about that in an environment that wouldn't bother people who aren't interested.
Ok, and you could say that about everything that gets posted, right? We're here talking about groups that we would like to add. You were dismissive of ~straight as a group, and so I offered a reason why it would be useful to have it separated out. I mean, I'm personally in the Tag Anarchy faction, but if we're going to have groups representing various identities do you want the straight white cis male topics to always be in the top level, or would you like to have a place for those to be where people can discuss those issues that have meaning to them somewhere where you can opt to see them or not as you please?
I think this is a weakness of Tildes...What doesn't technically fall under ~life?
Birth, school, work, retirement, death.
Dating, relationships, sex, STDs.
Health, fitness, depression, medicine.
...
So many different topics can be just crammed into ~life.
The original proposal for a group that ended up being ~life was for a group called ~personal - but Deimos thought that the name ~personal "has some other implications that might be a little off".
Do you believe there is a difference between an identity sharing on a topic not centered on identity - though the contribution may be influenced by that identity - versus a sharing something directly related to that identity or its experience?
To me, there does seem to be a difference. eg (Forgive my use of stereotypes for illustration) A knitting hobbyist group that’s primarily women and a women’s emotional support group. Same identity, but only one is specifically about the experience and life of that identity.
With that in mind, I don’t see a reason to gatekeep what identities get special sections specifically about themselves regardless of broader demographics.
It's not so much about the group itself, but the message it sends by simply having those particular groups, and having them as at top-level to indicate their status, and how welcome people in those demographics are here.
~lgbt, ~women, and ~bipoc sends a clear message of inclusion, and allows for people in those groups to feel like they have a relatively safe space to interact with each other without fear of bigotry. Whereas putting them all under the umbrella of ~people and including ~people.men and ~people.white and ~people.straight sends a pretty negative message in the other direction due to how so many of those communities have turned out elsewhere on the net; toxic shitholes. E.g. If I saw any site with ~people.men or ~people.white or ~people.straight specific groups, I would be INCREDIBLY wary of joining it.
cc: @Deimos, because I think this is genuinely of paramount importance.
I like @AgnesNutter's point elsewhere in this thread: creating a men's group explicitly demonstrates that men are not the default.
Some digressions:
Here in Australia, we have the Australian Football League, for playing our local variation of football. A few years ago, they spun off a women's league: Australian Football League Women. So now we have the AFL and the AFLW. And a lot of people (guess who?) object very strongly if you suggest that the men's competition should be referred to as the AFLM. Oh no! The default "AFL" spot is held by men, and the women's competition is just a spin-off.
Similarly, /r/News became about the USA, because Americans own the internet. Hence the creation of /r/WorldNews for the rest of us. Again: the default spot of is held by the dominant player, with everyone else being relegated to a spin-off. Creating a /r/USAnews would have sent the message that the USA is not the default owner of /r/News.
Having ~people.women without a corresponding ~people.men would send the message that men are the default owners of ~people and women deserve only a spin-off. However, creating a ~people.men as well makes it explicit that men are not the default owners of ~people.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am a man, and have been a man my whole life.
I was thinking on a different path, that the mental gymnastics necessary to justify that people.women should be a valid discussion path while people.men should not, would be nothing short of Olympic level, the result is the the same.
Each of this (approximately) half of humans should certainly be afforded equal opportunity to have the discussions they feel are relevant to their peers, whether that means the groups are created or not.
Funnily enough I was thinking about how on the ABC they started making a point to say “mens ashes” as well as “women’s ashes” when reporting the cricket scores, and I noticed and appreciated it. It’s nice to feel like we’re on an even level instead of being the other!
On the other hand, not giving topics like discussing aspects of good/bad masculinity, male mentorship, male domestic abuse, etc the same safe identity space can both feel to men like it’s re-enforcing that notion that it’s unimportant while also making site as a whole feel more male-default as those topics get pushed into the general groups while the women topics are segmented.
I think Tildes has shown though its technical design, its philosophical policies, and community moderation through guidance and labels that it at least has a fighting chance for well run spaces for any identity. To me, it falls under “Trust people, but punish abusers”. If they start to go to hell, they get pruned by the benevolent dictator and the experiment ends.
Great post. I love the idea of having a sort of r/menslib space here. To jump off of not just what you're saying but the broader conversation in this topic:
Yes, Tildes is male-dominated, but one of the things I've loved about my time here is that it has seemed to aggregate a lot of guys who are deeply thoughtful and reflective on things. As a guy, being able to share space with them here has been valuable to me, and as a gay guy, it's been particularly nice because these are the kinds of guys that I don't have to worry about.
This might come as a surprise to many given how far we've come in such a short amount of time, but it's still somewhat of a novelty in my life for me to hang around with a bunch of mostly straight dudes and not have to worry about homophobia or judgment from them -- or, more subtly, being seen as "less than" in some oblique way. Rewind the clock just fifteen years, and I was having to actively manage the settings I put myself in for my own personal safety. I'm someone who has had a number of guys make active threats against me once they found out I was gay. Ever walk into a bar and have to scan the room for threats first-thing? That used to be me, every time I went out.
The old reddit that we all, including myself, used to love? It was filled with people calling each other "fags".
Tildes hasn't been like that for me at all. There's been a positive, fraternal quality to my time here, and that has been particularly valuable to me and I hope others as well.
I definitely get how it comes with its own problems and how it isn't seen as fundamentally welcoming to other demographics, and I don't necessarily know what to do about that. What I do know is that one of the things that bothers me, particularly about a lot of queer advocacy (and I say this as someone who is very deep in those woods) is that it has a way of replicating the "shut up and put up with it" thread of toxic masculinity, often unknowingly.
We know that systemic sexism and rigid gender roles and expectations hurt everyone. This doesn't mean they hurt everyone equally, and I'm not trying to draw some false equivalence here, but men as a class of people are categorically impacted in negative ways because of the way our society and our world handles gender. A lot of queer advocacy is aimed at dismantling that (which I love), but this advocacy also tends to find ways to sort of dismiss or disregard impacts on men because others have it worse.
Telling cis straight guys that their opinions and thoughts on things don't matter; that their personhood is interchangeable with others because of their identity; that they need to effectively sit down and shut up -- not only are all of these passively supporting one of the main tenets of toxic masculinity, but they go against so much of queer advocacy that has fought against these very paradigms. It is infuriating for me if my personhood is treated as interchangeable with that of other gay guys. It's patronizing to me when I'm in a space where guys deny me my voice because I'm not "one of them". Queer advocacy has actively worked to undo those paradigms, which is part of the reason I'm able to feel so comfortable in and among all the guys on Tildes in the first place. It's not justice to me to simply invert the targets of these mechanisms, though. We need to continue to eradicate those mechanisms in the first place, and it's important them we examine that as they apply to men, rather than ignore them because we see men at the top and therefore immune from damage.
I once made some
askthreads about gender, giving people the space to talk about gender-related difficulties.They were posted in that order, and I thought the thread about the difficulties of being a man was very valuable. It didn't generate the sort of toxicity we see in other men-focused spaces online.
The thread about being a woman was less successful though. Several guys chipped in their thoughts. Some jokes were posted (and removed). I've seen comments since from women on the site who felt pushed away because of that and chose not to respond.
I want Tildes to be a place where we can have a rich depth of conversation on all of these topics, because I want everyone, including men, to have the opportunity to unpack their lives and gender in thoughtful and supportive ways. However, I also don't want the existence of that to drive away others, particularly women, or impact them negatively.
When I see comments on here talking about a men's space, I'm of two minds.
For one, I really, genuinely want that kind of space. I see how it could be a positive and enriching space for guys. I'm also aware of the larger backdrop of men's spaces online and how a great number of them are outright awful. I want this to be a place where we can do better than those, in part because we have a lot of people who want to be better than those.
On the other hand, I see how it can have some knock-on effects that impact other people negatively, and I don't want to dismiss those either. I want Tildes to be a space where everyone can feel comfortable, and that especially includes women, trans people, and other demographics who feel those knock-on effects the strongest.
What I will say is, to all the women and my fellow queer people that I love and advocate for on the regular, please take a moment to think about how a dismissal of men, their experiences -- and especially their concerns -- plays right into the hands of a toxic masculinity that tells men to act tough (especially in the face of criticism), not express themselves, and in general "close in" on themselves and, often, others around them.
I think a lot of the advocacy we see and replicate online in this area is of the adversarial, oppositional style that works great for generating engagement for social media networks but that is toxic to genuine interpersonal relationships and understanding. One of the big lies of oppositional sexism is that men and women are fundamentally different, at odds, and involved in a zero-sum system where advancements for one only come at expense of the other. We are at a place where we can move past that flawed and caustic understanding of gender if we choose to, and I see a denial of men's needs as a relic of that type of thinking. One of the most important lanes for queer advocacy has been the broader understanding that all people everywhere are far more similar than they are different and that it's more powerful for us to be united in our perspectives rather than divided. This doesn't mean that differences don't exist, but it does mean that highlighting difference should used as a method for support and understanding rather than denial or dismissal. It's the idea of inclusion, writ-large.
To me, there's a better way to handle this issue than flippantly dismissing men because they are the majority. I promise I'm not saying that because I don't care about others or want to dismiss their feelings either.
What that means for this site might mean a men's group, but it might not. I genuinely don't know. But I think one of the ways this site could make progress on it is by choosing not to meet cis straight white guys as a category with a default negativity or the digital equivalent of eye-rolling. We should definitely be vigilant when their perspectives run the risk of drowning out or overriding others, but acting as if that's some sort of fundamental community constant rather than something we can choose to consider, act on, and work through is counterproductive to me.
I really like this perspective!
Part of me wonders if having identity-based groups inherently highlights differences in a way that isn’t great. I shared some of my own experiences and observations about what happens when a society focuses too much on identity affinity in this comment.
I think a men’s group could have potential, but I think I’d prefer a more general group for everyone, which might help mitigate some of the moderation concerns @cfabbro has expressed. What would you think of something like ~society.liberation? There is probably a better name than that, but hopefully you get the idea.
I think it's on us to see past the idea that highlighting distinct groups is a negative. Something like ~society.liberation is nice as an ideal, but it also has a way of watering things down. There's a definitely benefit to precise, affirmative spaces (see: people passionately articulating their affinity for ~lgbt). What I think we have to move past is the idea that having, say, a women's space on Tildes is fundamentally an affront to men or that, if we make a single space about a single thing, then we have to make those same spaces for everyone and everything in the interest of equality.
This goes both ways too. I think it's possible to have a men's space on Tildes without it being an affront to women, but I think if we choose to do that we have to be very careful about how we do that. Ideals are not separable from our own community here and wider culture as well, so we have to be aware of the current internet landscape in which the presence of men's spaces is often a hostile signal to women. As such, even creating a positive male space on Tildes could discourage women from participating or joining the site, and given that we are already so heavily male, that's something we cannot take lightly.
I'm not particularly convinced of this. There were plenty of regular female contributors in r/menslib, way more than the equivalent number of non-troll male contributors in any of the women's subs. I myself joined that sub when I identified as a cis woman. I think a men's space on tildes would only be likely to discourage women from joining/participating if it were either poorly moderated or so much more active than the corresponding women's space that it makes the latter look perfunctory. It would also give somewhere to relocate posts by men that could otherwise be placed in ~women and make it seem dominated by male perspectives.
I honestly think if we want to increase the number of women participating on tildes, a ~women group is good but having more groups dedicated to interests that are more common among women would go farther.
As a female contributor to /r/menslib, I completely agree. If anything, I spent time in the male-focused space of /r/menslib specifically because it was a safe, sane haven in a sea of hateful misogyny. The thought of a healthy male space discouraging people from participating is very sad to me.
On another note, I enjoy Tildes because I noticed right away that reasonable conversations about gender were being had here, and Tildes seems to be the right flavor of progressivism to allow for discussions of feminism and discussions of men's issues with little need to build protective boundaries around them, so far.
Whatever ends up happening, I hope we focus on making the entire space comfortable for women to discuss anything, rather than having groups like ~women. Because, like you allude to, how many topics that women discuss really need to be under the umbrella of "woman," when the interest or topic itself is the important thing? Even more "femme" topics like makeup or haircare are actually gender neutral. /r/makeupaddiction, /r/skincareaddiction, /r/curlyhair, etc. all had countless male and non-binary users over the years. Videogames with large female audiences had subs - they were gender neutral as well.
Even subs like /r/witchesvspatriarchy were open to all genders. I believe this very strongly - Most healthy online spaces are gender neutral, with softly enforced norms, like requiring men to be thoughtful and polite when commenting on women's issues, or using tags to indicate what type of decorum should be used in the comments.
There are definitely issues and experiences that impact women exclusively, but in a healthy forum, they should usually be fine as a general topic. When something applies to around 50% of the population, it feels pretty general to me.
Maybe a group like ~feminism might do a more effective job of signalling that this is a place that values women and their contributions without it looking like we expext women's issues to exclusively be cordoned off in their own subgroup. It would still give a dedicated space to discuss things that impact women specifically on a political level (discussions about patriarchy, toxic masculinity, etc.) but would allow for, for instance, women's health to remain in ~health and such.
I do generally agree with your philosophy though -- even a hypothetical ~women I see as being open for all to comment but softly enforcing those norms much like r/witchesvspatriarchy did. So far I've gotten a good impression of Tildes on that front by and large.
I think this is a really really good point, and something that is probably missing from most of the group suggestions so far. Can you think of any groups in particular that we could add that would help with that?
The existing suggestion for ~style was actually what made me think of this! I personally would also love some expanded sub-categories in ~hobbies, like ~hobbies.fiberarts in particular would help fill a pretty female-dominated niche imo. Other than that I don't have more specific suggestions though -- hopefully several women can chime in with ideas they have of groups that seem missing.
I hate it. And I'll be totally honest, like @dubteedub also already said elsewhere, if ~lgbt is removed or "demoted" by being rolled into another group, I would seriously consider leaving Tildes. I really really really don't like making ultimatums, since they are fundamentally unfair, but this is something I feel so incredibly strongly about that I am willing to put my foot down (cc: @Deimos, I love you, man... but I am dead serious about this).
~lgbt has felt like my home here on Tildes for over 5 years, and if it disappears or gets demoted, I will probably disappear too. We've already lost so many other LGBT+ community members over the years (many of whom I consider friends, and met here on Tildes) for various reasons (some overblown, some legitimate), so losing ~lgbt would likely be the last straw for me. And I highly doubt dubteedub and I are the only people who would feel that way.
And I think another comment I just made applies here too, so I will simply copy it:
So if others value the LGBT+ community members' contributions here on Tildes, I strongly recommend they reconsidering making all these suggestions about fundamentally changing ~lgbt. And for all the same reasons why ~lgbt is so fundamentally important, I think creating a similar home for ~bipoc (or ~poc), ~women, and other marginalized group is too.
I read @dubteedub's comment with the ultimatum, and I read yours, and I'm not going to lie, both of them made me pretty profoundly sad.
You mentioned yourself that ultimatums are unfair, and I agree -- especially in this case. We're in a brainstorming session where the whole purpose is to bounce around ideas without really committing to anything, so drawing such an abrupt and hostile line in the sand feels unnecessary and counterproductive. It brings a rigidity to something that's intentionally a fluid process.
Also, as far as I'm aware, @Deimos hasn't said anything about any changes to ~lgbt at all, so publicly calling him on the carpet about it feels icky to me -- indicting him for something that he hasn't done but giving everyone else the impression that he has. It feels like a way of levying unsubstantiated accusations. It's like if I said "cfabbro, if you send me abusive PMs, I will leave this site". You've never once sent me an abusive PM or said anything awful to me at all -- everything you ever say to me both publicly and privately is positive! But wow does that one single line create the perception in everyone else that you're a bad person. That wouldn't be fair of me to do to you, and, in the same way, I don't think y'all are being fair to Deimos here either.
I'll also add that ultimatums themselves tend to be a negative or potentially even abusive communication method. Making an ultimatum means you're attempting to control someone else's behavior via what's essentially a threat. They have their place in certain, relatively extreme or serious circumstances, but I honestly don't believe they're a good form of general boundary setting, especially in a larger community rather than in individual relationships.
I'm trying to be as fair as I can in saying this, and I'm hoping our positive relationship can temper some of the sting of what I'm about to say, but you and dubteedub, in making those ultimatums, have both effectively communicated to everyone else here that your feelings should supersede everyone else's because you two have chosen the nuclear option, and I genuinely do not believe this topic warrants the nuclear option. I don't think it's fair to everyone else's ideas to pull focus in that way -- not when all we're doing is merely considering possibilities, but especially not when it comes time to actually make decisions.
I personally love ~lgbt but I don't think reconfiguring it slightly, even if it went to something like ~people.lgbt, would be a "demotion". Tildes has never been about a rigid hierarchy of topics, and look at all of the problems we're running into independent of this issue when we try to apply that kind of thinking! I didn't feel "demoted" when ~creative.timasomo was made -- it was actually heartwarming to me. I think a lot of people in this conversation are conflating position in a taxonomy with value or importance, and it is possible to be several levels deep and still be visible, valuable, and noteworthy -- ask any old Usenet user about their former favorite community.
I trust that LGBT people will still have space on this site here even if the label on that changes, and if the label on that needs to change in order to make room for other people and ideas on the site, then I'm happy to have that happen (and I say all of this as someone who very much values having ~lgbt here). The problem with the ultimatums is that it makes me feel like my position on a community that I love and have been a part of for years is less valuable than yours or dubteetub's. Wouldn't it be better if we could examine the tension that exists between our positions, talk about it, pull it apart, and try to see each other's perspectives?
Articulating my position, as well as trying to understand yours, is hard for me when I face explicit ultimatums in direct opposition to it. It feels like someone's setting up the fuse to a bomb and going "don't light it! -- don't you DARE light it!". The easiest move for me is then to just to not go anywhere near it for fear of setting it off, but doing so chills discussion and hinders understanding. I’d rather the bomb not be there in the first place. I didn't chime in earlier for fear of setting some stuff off. I remain worried about doing so with this very comment right here. I don't want you or dubteedub to leave. I like both of you! I think each of you are valuable contributors here, and you yourself are, outside of Deimos, probably the "face" of Tildes to many if not most of the people here. You two are crucially important, but there are also lots of other people, like myself, with stake in this too, and I think it's important that we consider that stake equitably.
I get what you're saying. I truly do. And I also appreciate your own more nuanced, tempered, and insightful response to the above comment (which I even exemplaried, since it's genuinely better than mine in all respects). And I also know what I said is harsh, and is totally unfair (to @gaufde and @Deimos especially). But at this point I am honestly so insanely frustrated, and frankly infuriated, at all the people who keep suggesting fundamentally altering ~lgbt, and shitting all over the ~women, ~bipoc, and similar group suggestions due to misunderstand its fundamental benefits, or being "unfair" to the majority, that I am past the point of caring if I am being harsh and unfair.
Absolute equality of representation is a great ideal, but that's all it is, an unrealistic and counterproductive ideal. And so long as inequality still exists and marginalized groups are still under constant attack, all that "absolute equality" accomplishes is de-prioritize and undermine the genuine problems faced by those marginalized groups. It's the same reason why "All lives matter" is problematic, and mostly just used as a dogwhistle spouted off in response to "Black Lives Matter" by racist and incredibly ignorant people.
And if ~lgbt disappears, or gets "demoted", I genuinely will be forced to consider leaving this site to find somewhere else where explicit and clear support is more valuable than "absolute equality" and "debate" over these issues. That's not a threat, it's just a sad fact. I have tried to find the middle ground in most things, but this is one where I simply cannot.
Yes, but unfortunately he also hasn't said or done anything to finally quash these repeated debates over ~lgbt either, which recur whenever the topic of new groups and ~lgbt comes up. Reactive administration and moderation, rather than proactive, only gets you so far. And the simple fact that these exact same suggestions and arguments about ~lgbt keeps happening here over and over is enough to put a lot of people off this site, and move to somewhere we don't have to keep arguing about such things (like beehaw, which has "LGBTQ+", "Disability and Accessibility", "Neurodivergence", "Feminism" and "People of Color" groups and moderators that aren't afraid to offend people who dislike the idea of those marginalized groups being explicitly catered to and supported).
This helped me much better understand where you were coming from. Thanks for sharing, and I'm sorry you're hurting. I also should have realized that before I said anything in the first place.
The read I've had of this thread has been a bit different than yours, I think. I've seen the same things you have for people advocating for equal spaces and against stuff like ~bipoc or ~women, but I've also seen a lot of good advocacy for reasons why we should have those (yours included). The person who made the original suggestion even edited their comment to say they changed their mind! There's a lot of affirming, positive stuff in here.
Also, I think even the voices advocating against some of the distinct groups are doing so under the lens of equality, not discrimination. There's a huge difference for me between someone striving for an ideal but falling short in outcomes versus someone who outright rejects that ideal in the first place. I see a lot of comments from people striving for that ideal (but whose outcomes I disagree with) and very few who are trying to "all lives matter" our community.
I think my more positive read is what threw me off so much when I saw your comment, because I genuinely assumed you were coming from relatively the same place. If I'd known how much you were hurting, I would have approached things very differently. Sorry about that, and thank you for having the patience to clarify that for me -- especially in light of my harshness.
That's fair -- an explicit statement from him would go a long way. I've always taken the existence of ~lgbt itself to be his definitive word on our belonging here, in addition to witnessing him remove explicitly anti-LGBT content. Deimos has always been a definitive ally from my perspective.
I guess what I still don't fully understand is the sense that he's going to suddenly turn on a dime and take that away from us. We've had our queer roadbumps along the way, but those have tended to be difficult problems with scope well beyond just Tildes or Deimos. Along that way though, we've also had a contingent of dedicated queer users who have stuck with the site and poured a lot into it, both in ~lgbt and outside of it. I just don't see it as likely in the slightest that he'll suddenly about-face and become hostile to us or to our space here.
I have known @Deimos for a very very long time...So I know he's a genuinely good person. Better than me in so so soooo many ways. But recently I have seen so many things change for the worse, and so many of our hard won rights attacked and get stripped away from us, that I'm just scared that even Tildes isn't safe anymore, and ~lgbt might get taken from us too. (and now I'm crying) :(
Noone's taking ~lgbt away from us. Noone is even threatening to take ~lgbt away from us.
All that people are proposing is shifting ~lgbt to another place, where it will be treated equally with groups for all other minority groups. I don't think that's a tragedy, or worth leaving Tildes over.
As for Deimos not saying anything about these suggestions... he hasn't said anything about any suggestions in this thread. That doesn't mean he agrees with, or disagrees with, any of them. It just means he's watching, reading, and making his own decisions.
The other day, I thought of this thread, and similar ones, as Deimos outsourcing his creativity to the multi-mind he has available to him. We're like a chorus of voices in his head, throwing out suggestions and mulling over those suggestions, so that he can skim the cream off the top. Everything we say is grist for his mill.
But the final decision is still his, so if you trust his judgement, you have nothing to worry about. And, I've seen nothing in the five years I've been on Tildes to indicate that we can't trust Deimos' judgement in these matters. You say you've known him longer; I assume you have a better sense of his judgement, and you wouldn't be here supporting his pet project 5 years on, if you didn't trust his judgement.
We're safe here, even if ~lgbt isn't a top-level group.
I find this whole ordeal around ~people and ~society upsetting as well, and I say that as a straight man who frequently has been on the other side of ~lgbt drama.
Not once has anyone suggested ~games should be put into ~hobbies.games or ~comp into ~tech.comp or any other myriad of possible taxonomy minutia. I don’t think it’s intentional but I’d ask people to reflect on why and what it is exactly they’re trying to accomplish.
Fuck, you're making me cry too. ::internet hug::
Things are definitely dark for us queer people right now, which makes those of us who are willing to shine bright all the more important. Beacons drive away darkness, give others hope, and guide people to safety.
You are a beam of light. And even when it exhausts you, you have continued to shine, against all odds, bright and bold.
Thanks, kfwyre. That means a lot coming from you, since I really do greatly admire you. Your calmness, empathy, and eloquence, even in the face of highly charged and emotional topics is something I genuinely aspire to. ❤️ :)
Hey cfabbro,
I’m really sorry you are hurting so much.
I’ve been engaging in this conversation in the ways I best know how. I’ll admit I took a very academic approach that ultimately didn’t consider how you or others currently use the space here on Tildes.
We clearly don’t agree about all the specifics that have been discussed, but I think we probably share more in ideals than we disagree in these differences.
I am hopeful about Tildes being an online space where people can more effectively and safely have these types of tough discussions. I want to do the best I can to contribute to that in all ways possible.
With that in mind, I have two responses. One, is if you have space and energy I’d love to hear more about what you have seen change here on Tildes and how that relates to ~lgbt. I know there are lots of scary changes coming from places like the US Supreme Court, but I don’t have the Tildes-specific context if that makes sense.
Second, is I’d love to offer my support. I don’t really know what that means, but feel free to PM me, even if it is just to say hi, or leave me alone, or whatever.
I would honestly prefer not to dredge up a bunch of old drama, especially since much of the context has been lost/deleted/removed, and many of the more antagonistic users were banned, left the site, or have chilled out since then. And I also don't want to give the wrong impression. Things have also actually been pretty damn good here the last few years, and I do genuinely trust Deimos. However, seeing so many suggestions about altering ~lgbt genuinely made me fearful. Maybe I'm just being overly emotional and paranoid, but I can't help it. ~lgbt is something I value tremendously. I have met a ton of incredible people though it, many of whom I now consider friends, and still talk to outside Tildes. And so I don't want to see it altered merely because people are more concerned with perfect taxonomy, or don't understand why having it as a top-level group is so goddamn important.
In any case, thanks for the support. I really do appreciate it. And sorry for reacting so strongly, and being so harsh towards you. Seeing the ~society.liberation suggestion unfortunately just brought to the surface one of my absolute worst fears.
p.s. And I'm really sorry to you too, @Deimos. I really do trust you, and know you have the community's best interests are heart... but all these discussions about altering ~lgbt has me genuinely afraid of losing it, and that has probably unbalanced me more than it should have. I'm also sorry for pinging you so much, and bringing a bunch of drama to this topic. I know you're only just getting your feet back under your when it comes to Tildes, and working on it again, and so I hope my behavior here hasn't undermined that. I'm also sorry for publicly making an ultimatum, but ~lgbt is the group I value most on this site, so this whole thing has me genuinely fearful over its future on this site.
I respect that!
I totally understand and stand behind all the reasons and principles behind these beliefs. I just didn’t see the final conclusions as so easily cut and dry, and opening up discussions is the best way I know how to better understand other viewpoints.
I really appreciate the apology and the explanation. I now understand where that fear and fight was coming from much better.
This might be partly my bad. I never meant this idea to be an either-or situation with ~lgbt. I thought of it more of a yes-and type deal, but maybe that wasn’t clear given some of the other discussion points I had opened.
Thanks, daychilde. Your support and kind words really does mean a lot. It's honestly hard to believe you're so new here given how fond I am of you already too. Your positivity is infectious, and your story is genuinely inspirational. ❤️ :)
I would really stress we not conflate the arguments for or against ~lgbt or ~women with ~bipoc. I have no skin in the game regarding the former two and, consequently, just don’t have an opinion on it. Taxonomically I think it makes sense to have them nested under a larger category but I see the merit in the representational benefits of a mild deviation from convention. I’ve argued as much for a ~women group previously.
That all said, I think ~bipoc suggestion is fundamentally different in kind for the reasons I’ve said previously. The very frequency of the suggestion in here makes the place seem extremely “white liberal” to me and puts me off. I think the fact that we are only ever identified based on narratives of victimization are well intentioned, but actively harmful. This sort of thing doesn’t actually represent the communities that fall under the umbrella, it solely represents a specific format for “woke” politics. It will be subject to all the negative issues that make having a dedicated ~politics group a bad idea.
There are shared experiences between ~lgbt people and ~women that give them some real fodder for discussions. They’re active subcultures (and in the case of women, shared experiences among half of humanity). BIPOC has nothing to talk about but grievance narratives. It’s extremely unhealthy for people who participate in such discussions and does a disservice to representation by functionally stereotyping us all as a “victim class.”
Counterpoint, from @dubteedub:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/177q/lets_add_and_rearrange_some_groups_a_few_notes_about_other_short_term_plans#comment-94fc
So despite how you personally feel about it being too "woke" and "white liberal", we're actively losing potentially valuable voices from those demographics because we have no spaces for BIPOC people here.
That user came here specifically to find a space for Black people though. A ~bipoc group wouldn’t be that either.
This is what I’m saying, such spaces aren’t for BIPOC people, they’re for people interested in a specific category of political issues that intersect with the identities of bipoc people. But people are more than that. YellowRose didn’t want a bipoc group, she wanted a Black group.
The very fact that so many people think just lumping all racial and ethnic minorities into one undifferentiated lump is what’s going to actively lose such voices because it reads as painfully out of touch.
I’ll agree with @NaraVara here — why not just create a ~black group?
I think an important part of any minority community is dealing with the experience of being othered, but a ~bipoc group is pretty much only going to be defined by that, in a way that ironically helps cement the black (or brown etc.) experience to being othered.
Not to mention it’s little utility for non-Americans, whereas something like ~indian could include both Indians and people of Indian descent pretty easily?
I’m not saying I’m correct here, just my thoughts.
IMO having @dubteedub reach out to @theyellowrose and all the other poc reddit mods he knows to get their opinions might be the best thing to do here. But given how connected dub is to that world already, and how he was the one that suggested ~poc or ~bipoc in the first place, I suspect we probably already know the answer.
p.s. Worth pointing out is also that beehaw has a poc/"People of color" community, and alyaza (who is one of the admins there) is black herself.
I’m sure we can find plenty of people who agree and disagree? I’m not sure that answers the question.
I don’t want to sound like I’m decrying the term, BIPOC, I think it’s totally fine and has it’s uses. I think having such a space on Tildes would be totally fine if there is a demand for it.
I just don’t know if we want the default group for X to so explicitly hoist expectations onto them to be posting about their life as a racial minority with all the other racial minorities whom they share a group and possibly little else with.
By making "demand" a requirement, you're creating a Catch-22 situation, IMO. If most BIPOC who visit Tildes immediately leave afterwards because there is no ~poc or ~bipoc group (like yellowrose did), how can there ever be enough of a demand for it!?
A large part of the reason we have such a disproportionate amount of LGBT+ people here, and they have actually stuck around all these years, is very likely because of ~lgbt. And ~lgbt could also be narrowly defined as "explicitly hoisting expectations onto them to be posting about their life as an LGBT+ person with all the other LGBT+ people whom hey share a group and possibly little else with" and yet nobody complains about that being an issue. Not every LGBT+ person shares the same life experiences, has the same values, or holds the same opinions. We're not a monolith, and yet we can all still find value in having the group to focus on what we do share with each other.
Oh I’m definitely in favour of making a ~black group, and possibly more. But sticking all racial minorities in a single group isn’t helpful IMO, for reasons I’ve outlined above. I’m not necessarily opposed to ~bipoc, in addition to a ~black group, if enough people want a shared space to discuss being a racial minority.
That’s a fair point, although I’m under the impression the users of ~lgbt have a larger sense of shared identity than would necessarily be present in ~bipoc. Additionally, ~lgbt is inherently global, while ~bipoc isn’t.
Again, just my opinion, I’m definitely open to changing my mind!
So by that same logic, we should break up ~lgbt into ~lesbian, ~gay, ~bisexual, ~transdgender, ~queer, ~intersex, ~asexual unless enough people express a desire to want a shared space to discuss being LGBT+?
By rejecting the umbrella group, and demanding individual groups for each, you're greatly decreasing the odds we will ever have enough users on here from each individual minority group to ever justify those individual groups existence here, since those groups would likely be ghost towns at present... just like ~gay, ~bisexual, ~transdgender, ~queer, ~intersex, ~asexual likely would be.
Racial and gender/sexuality issues are fundamentally different to the point where I don’t think this analogy holds.
People’s race/ethnicity is tied to a panoply of different cultural markers tied to their upbringings. Sexual identity is a discrete subculture (or set of subcultures) you get inducted into when you discover that about yourself. There is more cultural variation between different POC groups individually than there is between gays and straights and that cultural background even conditions one’s specific experiences and how they express their identity as an lgbt person (and as a straight person too).
I agree that race/ethnicity is tied to a panoply of different cultural markers, but you have completely ignored the primary point of my comment.
So how do we deal with that issue, if not by creating an umbrella group to start with?
p.s. I want to make it perfectly clear, I would totally support individual groups for all the various people of color and cultures around the world. In fact, I would absolutely love to see that! I just worry that at present there might not be enough users here to keep any of them active. And if people go to a group like that, and see the last time a topic was posted was X months ago, that would probably be rather discouraging to see so have the exact opposite effect we want, which is to encourage them to stick around here.
I simply don’t think it’s true. I don’t think an umbrella group actually addresses the issue in any way and it’s not why racial minorities are staying or going.
I have to stress again, people don’t identify as BIPOC in the way people identify as LGBT. It’s a way to categorize a set of shared political interests (which is why I said it’s a bad idea the same way ~politics is), it’s not a personal identity. Nobody sees themselves in this except a small clade of activists and in their case, they’re seeing their political identity reflected, not their cultural one.
In fact, most of the individual groups we’d call BIPOC can be mutually antagonistic to each other in the real world. The whole reason POC was changed to BIPOC was a result of that sort of positional jockeying for influence.
The actual issue with not enough people from different minority groups is a combination of just not enough people and persistent founder effects. You’d need to recruit people from places that don’t have the typical techie slant to change it, but they won’t stay or go because there is a ~bipoc group. Seeing such a thing doesn’t make anyone feel like they belong.
Practically everyone here, myself included, would do almost anything to ensure you remain a part of this community. Not only are you a great individual member and person, but you do so much for Tildes in an unofficial capacity - around even before the site, closest of all to Deimos, a public face on and off site, gitlab issue creator, general site shepherd, and more.
As a result, particularly with your level of involvement with Tildes “duties” and Deimos, an ultimatum from you elevates a regular comment to something tantamount to an administrative decree. This specific context aside, if that is a tool you’re going to employ, I think it would be best if you became part of the administration officially if possible rather than continue to be considered an “ordinary” user with that kind of power.
Yeah, I wouldn't be totally opposed to a group for men if it was well moderated (which would be asking a lot of Deimos). The others, absolutely not though. And I still think subgrouping them all is the wrong approach.
I would love a group for positive masculinity, but that group likely takes some more strict moderation to ensure they don’t get “hijacked.”
Yeah, I totally agree with this
I am a woman and feminist who supports a (very well moderated, as mentioned above) men’s space. When men’s issues are discussed there is starting to be the recognition that the patriarchy is causing the issues and that feminism can help. But there’s also often an undertone of sort of bitterness that feminists have fought to make things better for women but haven’t done anything for men (which isn’t true but is I think a perception among many), and it leads to this sort of idea that it’s up to women to fix it. That if we wanted to, we could make society a better place for men too. But men also need to be doing that work; it isn’t fair to ask for better without fighting for it. We need spaces where men can talk to each other about things like toxic masculinity and, crucially, start working together to dismantle those ideals. A space for women isn’t really the place to do that; a place for feminism might be if we had that group, but I think that name puts some men off from contributing. I hope that isn’t too rambly or contentious; I hope I don’t have to caveat “not all men” but I will just in case.
I do think this should only happen once or if moderation is diversified as it will need such careful monitoring that I don’t think it’s feasible currently. It would be way too much work for one person.
As a gay men, I tend to avoid men-only spaces on the internet. One of the main things they seem to talk about is women, and their interactions with women - and that alienates me.
So, when we say "men's space", I see that as code for "straight men's space". Not that I necessarily object to that sort of group (I'm in favour of spaces dedicated to gay men, so it would be hypocritical to deny straight men a similar dedicated space), but I think it needs to be publicly acknowledged that that's what we're creating.
Is bipoc mainstream enough now that most people who qualify would want to use it?
(Sincere question, I had to look it up.)
@dubteedub would probably be the better person to ask that, considering their involvement in /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and various other subreddits like it. But given they're the one that suggested it, I think the answer is kinda obvious.
I was wondering more about other people it’s supposed to include like Native Americans. Maybe they’d prefer their own group, if there were any here to ask? Not that I know anything, but here’s the first result from Google:
Seems like we know black people are here?
(And with that I am going leave this up to someone else to decide.)
Never let perfect be the enemy of good. If Indigenous people want their own group, that's cool. But ~bipoc is still a good place to start, IMO.
I would just like to interject that I had to google "bipoc". Maybe I'm really ignorant, but is that a well-known acronym? Does it make sense outside the US? And is the acronym sufficiently inclusive of Latin Americans and Asians?
It's a relatively new term, mostly used in the US/Canada right now, so that's not surprising you haven't heard of it. But yes, the POC (people of color) part includes Latin Americans and Asians.
I do think the american higher level groupings are a bad idea for a site with a global audience. e.g. BIPOC and AAPI are often the top level categories used in american attempts to be inclusive, but that ignores the countries where the indigineous people are what the americans call pacific islanders, for example. I think either tildes group per ethnic group (e.g. ~people.black ~people.nativeamerican ~people.latino ) or full aggregation (~people) may make more sense than using the American specific groupings. I guess the deciding factor is how much this is a "build these spaces to attract people", vs just dividing up the posts that are already here.
I'd also prefer ~people to ~minorities for the same reason. Do US-native latin americans feel that seperated from those in latin american majority countries in south america? My impression is that is not true. ~minorities also feels like a bit of a "othering" category in general too?
With the South Asian community there is a strong division between diaspora South Asians raised in the Anglosphere (US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc.) and South Asians from the homelands. I know for a fact a similar dynamic exists with diaspora vs. mainland Chinese as well. I'm unsure about other groups though.
But how many non-immigrant Pacific Islanders does this website actually have? And would they even be offended by the existence of a ~poc group? In contrast, the lack of a ~poc does seem to be a sore point for the Black Americans that are already here.
Just because this website is technically a "global" website doesn't automatically mean that every nationality is equally represented on here. We should be catering to the audience we have, not to some hypothetical audience that we don't. I mean, I don't hear anyone arguing for a ~China group despite China making up nearly a fifth of the world's population.
I don’t think Black Americans want a POC group. I think they want a Black group and wouldn’t be interested if I showed up and turned it into the Indian culture channel.
I see. Would it be a good idea to use a relatively new term for a top-level group?
Why not? This is a Canadian site after all, and it is an officially recognize term used even by the Canadian government. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. And it's not like there is another fully inclusive alternative.
Just cause I didn't know it, and spent quite a few hours seeing it here and there before googling :P
This is going pretty far into the weeds, but I was curious about Canadian official use of “bipoc” and looked into it. I see a scattering of official articles that use it. There is an anti-racism lexicon from the department of national defence that mildly discourages use:
I didn’t find a whole lot of official usage for “Black Canadians” either. There is a page in Libraries and Archives.
There is a lot more about Indigenous Peoples.
How is that discouraging its use? All it’s saying is being more specific is ideal. However making a group for every demographic under the bipoc umbrella is unlikely the work here at present since we don’t have the user base for it. So while ~bipoc isn’t ideal it’s still better than nothing. So I will reiterate: “Never let perfect be the enemy of good”
Just in the sense that other words seem to be preferred when applicable.
The reason I looked into it is that, although it’s not all that practical, I’m thinking about a geographic scheme and I was wondering if “bipoc” was used more in Canada than other places. Then something like ~life.canada.bipoc would be more popular among Canadians than I expect ~life.usa.bipoc would be.
Something like ~life.minorities would be absurdly vague, but does let people decide for themselves what counts as a minority experience.
Unfortunately it’s not that welcoming either, and I worry that it would mostly attract content about rather than by minorities, just because, when someone sees a link that seems to fit, it’s a logical place to put it.
TBH I think you’re getting so lost in the weeds with definitions and taxonomy concerns that you’re entirely missing the forest for the trees at this point. A ~bipoc group isn’t just about getting the terminology or taxonomy perfect, or even about the content that would be posted there. It’s just as much about signalling that this is a safe, inclusive, and welcoming online community for BIPOC to participate, similar to how ~lgbt does that for LGBT+ people. And also similar to ~lgbt, if we wanted it to be “perfect” it should probably be changed to ~lgbtqia, but being perfect is not the main drive. Those groups merely existing, and being top level, have tremendous value even if they aren’t “perfect”.
cc. this thread here
That's a decent compromise. But I still think it misses the mark because of this (from my comment above):
I agree, and that's what I would hope a description + what the posts in the group would look like to accomplish.
Yes! I edited my comment with my new thoughts, I think that it makes more sense for sure. I think minority viewpoints being front and center will say a lot more about the community than having a small "corner" where minority voices are sequestered.
Yeah, and to a larger point, I dislike the emphasize on reductive categorization of groups here. I don't see a problem with having some modest overlap in some top level groups. Not everything needs to be nested.
Maybe I am alone in this but ~life as a label isn't clear to me. I have no clue what to post in there or what to expect when visiting it, because as a term it's super broad.
Maybe it's my Reddit habits shining through, but if I wanted to ask other women for advice on a female issue, I would appreciate a ~ women group, but I would also look for a group like ~relationships more broadly. But maybe when people say ~people that's what they mean? I would love a group dedicated to stuff like 'my roommate is a nightmare, how do I address their behaviour'
To contextualise this group for you: the original proposal for a group that ended up being ~life was for a group called ~personal - but Deimos thought that the name ~personal "has some other implications that might be a little off".
I personally agree. A ~people group sounded good to me up until discussion started to move ~lgbt to it as a subgroup. Something about that just doesn't feel right, and I think your point about them being essentially buried is it. While it would be nice to look at a ~people and be able to see glimpses of all the different groups in one space (the main appeal in my opinion), it would also be so easy to just... Hide them away and ignore them. Even though you can already technically do that by just unsubscribing, somehow it just feels different.
I really dislike this American notion about "dominated by the perspective by straight white men", you know @deimos is a white man right?.
I agree there should be a group for each identity but let's not turn Tildes polarized as Reddit.
Why did they feel pushed out? LGTB has its own group since Tildes inception.
That's some read I'll look into it, thanks.
I'm curious how much do people actually use the groups to stay orangized? Coming over from reddit, the pace of Tildes is a lot slower. 90% of the time I'm just hitting the front page and clicking on whatever looks interesting. I'm not usually feeling like I'm drowning in stuff I don't care about, and the stuff I do will probably be on the front page too.
I think part of the reason Tildes is so slow is precisely because we don't have enough groups, so people don't know where best to post (since the groups are so broad), don't feel they have a "home" here, don't want to post something super niche for fear nobody interested in the subject will see it, and/or they don't want to overwhelm the front page. Those are all pretty common complaints, and worries that people have expressed.
And if that turns out not to be the case, it's not difficult to fold subgroups back into their groups. So there is little harm in at least attempting to add more groups/subgroups and seeing if that encourages more content to be posted.
On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned it's going to slow down further with additional groups, as we stratify the userbase and everybody filters down to less-populated corners of the site.
I think that’s unlikely. I would post a lot more if I would feel better about discussing niche topics.
I'm honestly curious how this plays out. My intuition is that it would slow down, but we might end up with a big burst in content. Social software is hard to predict that way. Is it possible we made the opposite mistake that Imzy made? They created too many ghost towns, perhaps we've been bottling things up too much.
A handful of subgroups isn't stratification. It's just helping get a more tailored subscription to the main topic. The groups are hardly ten levels deep like they'd get on usenet, and they aren't scattered to the four winds like on reddit either - they will share exemplary content with their parents. We need to see how that works in practice.
I think so long as only a handful of groups get added (even if all the suggestions here are added that is still only 20 or so groups) it should be fine. There is only one way to find out though. :P
As is I think it's fine as long as these subgroups are carefully considered and manually added. the organization isn't necessarily about silo-ing the site off into subgroups like reddit. More to tailor down some topics and encourage more discussion. To list a few examples I read here today:
I am one of those people and this is why I am reticent about tildes overall. I totally respect wherever Deimos want to take things, so I am not going to say anything about it. If I browse a site like reddit, the subreddit in a way represent the total newsfeed and the goings on. In that sense it gives a more succinct and focused picture of whatever the subreddit is about. I am not sure if TIldes can ever have that? If we scale up Tildes and it's traffic, won't say games just become a very fast pace feed of video game related tags, where users has to expend more effort "catching" the relevant topics they want?
and how would one then kickstart a community on tildes? As in how do you communicate to people that there are people with x niche interest on here? It seems like the motivation of tildes is first and foremost a broad conversation, and then you need to take a leap of faith that the right people are present.
In World of Warcraft, you can't just create a guild yourself. You need to get a number of people together and pay some gold. There's a minimum community investment required. Same thing here for group creation - and right now that investment is just this conversation. Someday it'll be something else, but this is an alpha software, so a lot of the components are bare minimum stubs or handled by tweaking things in the database itself. Someday we'll have a discussion thread about what kind of group finder and group creation mechanisms we want to use, and it'll get built.
If Tildes does grow to the point where hundreds or thousands of groups are actually viable, then things will very likely change in the group creation process here to accommodate that. Perhaps via automatic weekly/monthly polling, or proposals, or trial periods for more niche subject groups, or any combination of those, or any number of other ways it can be approached. So I think your fears are a bit unfounded, since how it works now is not how it is likely to always be. Although I strongly suspect it will never be like it is on reddit where anyone can create a group with the click of a button and name it whatever they like. That just doesn't feel like it would fit with the "high-quality discussion" philosophy of the site.
Strongly agree with this -- using ~sports as an example, there's plenty of potential news/discussion posts that would fit perfectly in a subgroup but feel too sport-specific to go in a general topic like that, so they just don't get posted at all. Per-game threads for NFL or NBA games, for example, would be totally appropriate in their respective groups, but way too spammy for a general sports group. Same goes for questions pertaining to specific hobbies, communities, etc.
I'm too new to have an informed opinion, but I do think that if we have many granular groups, each group will feel very empty with our current lower population. I'll probably stay on the front page just for the serendipity of it, which I think is one of tildes strengths right now.
I think you're right about the reading end of it, though I do think the amount of posts might be approaching the higher end of where this is the best way to read, for me at least.
The feedback I have been seeing a lot of though, is from people wanting to post and not feeling like there is an obviously good place where their post belongs. Lots of discussions end up happening about where it would then be best to shoehorn the post, but I would guess that for every one of those discussions that happens, several other folks just say fuck it and they don't post.
I agree with this. A bunch of the groups being suggested in this thread are probably going to be dead on arrival. If one group has a lot of action, I understand splitting it. But given that most groups are quiet, I don’t see the point.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I hit the front page, but my front page is curated based on the groups I am subscribed to. Even with the short list of groups that already exist, there are a small handful that I just absolutely do not care about. There are a few more that I wish were broken down more so I didn't have to block a whole bunch of tags (e.g. I would like to be subscribe to only ~sports.hockey and ~news.world + ~news.us.or instead of ~sports and ~news).
I'm with you on that one. Oftentimes when I go into a particular group in order to post something, it's either completely empty or only has one or two posts in the last 24 hours. I only ever go to the main page to browse
More thoughts on handling groups and inclusivity
One very active discussion that has been happening in this thread is how to best handle groups for marginalized people. This also gets tied up with discussions about hierarchical structures and promoting inclusivity. I have been puzzling though this a bunch, and I think I finally have a new idea I am ready to share.
Principles
These are the core principles that I think most everyone will agree are important to this discussion.
Tildes should be promoting diversity of people
People bring up the fact that the population of Tildes is largely white, male, and somewhat techie. I think there are some statistics on this, but I don’t know how current they are. Lots of people would like to see more types of people join as the site grows
Tildes should be promoting diversity of conversation topics
Similar to the above point, many discussions here have a similar tone and set of topic focuses. This is probably related in part to the population. However, I think that it is important to separate the idea that more diversity in post topics is different than diversity in people. We are all human and there are some human-centric topics that could be better emphasized regardless of the population
People belonging to minority groups should feel welcomed, included, and like they have appropriate spaces for sensitive discussions.
In some ways this is a mechanism towards achieving the first two goals. However, it can also be a topic that fosters some tense reactions so we need to keep it in mind as a primary goal.
Tildes should not default to US-centric or North American ways of thinking
This comes up a lot in relation to sport names, news cycles, etc. Again, I think this is a mechanism for helping to achieve the first two goals, but since it is a trap that a largely US-centric population can fall into I think that it needs to be highlighted.
What is the core principle we want to promote?
I initially joined the conversation focused on discussing whether or not identity groups like ~lgbt, ~women, ~poc, etc. should be top-level groups or arranged together using something like ~people.lgbt. There are lots of opinions in this space, and some people are very absolutist on both sides of the debate. However, after more reflection I am increasingly convinced that we might have been barking up the wrong tree so to speak.
While well-meaning, I think that the push to create more identity groups might backfire. Principles 1 and 2 are to encourage diversity in both population and topics. Creating more identity groups like ~lgbt seems like an easy way to signal that these people exist which might help with principle 1. However, I don’t think that adding groups for specific identities will really help with principle 2. Let me explain.
Identity groups can be toxic too
@TreeFiddyFiddy pointed out that groups like ~lgbt can become toxic in their own ways. From this comment:
I have seen this type of behavior myself. The college I attended, like many, tried to promote diversity and inclusion by having lots of affinity groups on campus. However, I think this really backfired since it lead to a lot of tribalism. People quickly self-segregated into small communities that they felt comfortable in. What was supposed to help make marginalized people feel more comfortable on campus ended up just making it so that on campus politics and debates were dominated by various bands of like-minded people fighting with the same rhetoric over and over again.
Identity groups are exclusionary
Another side effect was that these identity groups started to feel more and more exclusionary. I have a mixed heritage. Because of that I never really felt comfortable engaging in the identity groups related to my heritage. It felt like I wasn’t _______ enough to fit in culturally. Therefore, it seemed like identity groups promoted some level of extremism.
Additionally, sometimes attending events put on by these affinity groups lead to some strange signaling. I once went to the queer resource center with some friends for an event that we all wanted to attend together. While there, an acquaintance welcomed me but also assumed that my presence meant that I identified as queer too. I didn’t mind this mistake, but it also made me feel like that wasn’t a place that I should go to alone since I just had to identify myself as an outsider.
Now, let’s look at how this pertains to Tildes. As an example, let’s look at issues a trans person might face. If they are in the middle of transitioning and have some medical problems where does that discussion belong?
If it goes into a group like ~lgbt, ~trans_experience, or something else like that, then it is likely that post will only be seen by other people who have self-identified as a part of those groups. This further separates a marginalized community and makes it so that these important discussions don’t appear in the same places as everyone else’s discussions do.
Now, imagine that the trans person felt comfortable sharing in a more general group like ~health.surgery. Now, that person is operating in the same spaces as every one else. The are not other anymore. Instead, they are another unique human sharing lived experiences with everyone else.
I know multi-posting mechanics could help this particular example, but we are not there yet.
Flipping the approach
I think we need to flip this conversation on its head and take a more human approach. Over in the ‘Is there anything you don't like about Tildes?’ topic @JackKerouacsLiver made some excellent points. I want to focus on this one though:
If we want to promote diversity maybe we should focus on diversity of thoughts and topics first which will in turn invite more diverse populations. In short, I think principle 2 is actually more important than principle 1.
Take this example from JackKerouacsLiver:
Would creating a ~women group really solve this problem? Maybe. It certainly looks good in the list of groups. However, the tone of the group will have a large impact on whether or not people stick around and we have already seen how that can disintegrate. Let me repeat, this could backfire on users in marginalized groups and the larger population might not see it if self-segregation gets bad.
Now, what if we instead focused on creating groups that emphasize other modes of communication besides logic? What if we create groups that radically focus on common human experiences?
My group suggestions
Alright, this isn’t going to be perfect, but let’s give this a shot.
To start with, let’s create a fully inclusive group for discussing big and personal issues. I think @TreeFiddyFiddy nailed it with the suggestion for ~society which would discuss:
@Macha points out that terms/groups like ~bipoc or ~aapi are US-centric. I haven’t touched on principle 4 at all, but I put it there because I think lots of people want to take a more globally inclusive view on Tildes and it is relevant for sorting identity groups. I’m not sure what the appropriate higher level would be ~people.bipoc? ~identities.bipoc? ~affinities.bipoc? We can discuss more, but I think this points is towards creating a higher-level group.
Another reason to prefer a higher-level group like ~people is that it helps de-emphasize the path towards tribalism that has been repeated so many times.
So, now we get to the new stuff. How do we create radically inclusive groups based on shared human experiences? I’ll start by providing my own suggestion, but I hope others will chime in here.
~emotional_support or ~empathy
Everyone needs a bit of this at times. This could be a fully inclusive group for all people to seek out different perspectives on things they are going through. The nice thing about this group is it would support the types of discussions people might expect to have in ~people.women, ~people.men, ~life.relationships, etc. However, instead of segregating people based on what they are, in includes everyone based on what we all experience. It might also mean we need less sub-groups in ~people.
That is it. That is my suggestion.
Down the road we can add other groups or sub groups as needed. For example, people may want a place to talk about menstruation. That should not go under ~people.women since some men bleed. Therefore, there may come a time when something like ~health.hygiene is necessary.
For now though, I think I’m most interested in figuring out how we can foster more discussion diversity in ways that also effectively promotes population diversity and discourages tribalism
This is really well thought out and contains some of the thoughts I had that I couldn’t express as clearly or eloquently! The whole ethos of tildes being respectful and open should, hopefully, mean that people don’t need to find a small niche to post in, because they hopefully will not face extra scrutiny or harassment for posting in the larger groups. That’s the ideal, anyway, right? I like the idea that I might learn something about a community I’m not part of because someone’s posted in ~health or ~life.
Of course I’m approaching this from a place of privilege where I generally don’t have to worry about being harassed for what I post. I am a woman, but I’m also white and straight and cis. I’m also being selfish - this way of posting would be for the benefit of people like me, though I hope that it would also help with making these groups “unothered“ to the wider population. This can only work if those people in the affected populations would feel comfortable here posting in wider groups, and I can absolutely understand if they aren’t - I imagine a lot of people have faced online and real life harassment for who they are, and that this will naturally make them reluctant to expose themselves in this way. I’ll be interested to hear some input from people in these communities about how they feel here, and what they’d prefer!
Yeah, this is definitely a big concern. I think historically this hasn’t gone too well which is why the separate groups started to begin with. Maybe that is still where we are at in society, but I really hope we can move away from tribalism. It would be great to get more input from more people.
Maybe there are some new moderation mechanisms that we could create to help.
For example, even if a malicious comment eventually gets removed the OP will probably see it in their notifications. Maybe there is a way for other users to label comments as as “hide-immediately” in the hope of preventing the OP from having to see that until an admin can respond and decide what to do.
The other big issue is that sometimes one person helping themselves to something can discourage others from doing the same. For example, in this comment @kfwyre shared how some men commenting on a post aimed at women affected people:
Maybe we could figure out a community moderation tool that effectively says wait your turn or something like that. It could be similar to the Offtopic label but be more aimed at creating space in the conversation for people that are more reticent to speak up.
Maybe these are all naïve hopes, but it would be really exciting if we could create a more generally inclusive system.
Having read into the thread further and seen all the very good reasons that members of that community want their own space, I think I was being naive about it. It’s nice to imagine we might have this utopic space where people are just people and anyone can post anywhere, but that denies the need for the community that builds up around these spaces.
I do like where you’re going with extra moderation tools, though.
I am personally opposed to any geolocalized groups, and strongly believe they should remain as tags. That is for reasons I previously explained. Quoting myself:
I would like to advocate for ~spirituality (or something in that vein). While the study of spirituality by other disciplines may be thought of as going under ~humanities, spirituality is a field in itself, which, I believe, should have its own group. We have seen a few very active threads on the subject, and I believe we have enough new users to provide content for it.
Additionally, it would be helpful for the religious or spirituality-minded to have a place for discussion of their beliefs and practices, without necessarily inviting heated discussions regarding the actuality of those beliefs, and also to avoid triggering collective trauma in those that had negative experiences with religion.
I would also like to propose ~race, for the same reasons that we have ~lgbt.
Or, maybe, putting both under ~lifeforget that.I am a proponent of nesting groups as much as possible instead of having lots of top-level groups, and I greatly admire the way groups are already work. So, instead of ~engineering, I would very much prefer ~design.engineering. And, instead of ~space, I would find it would be more logical and practical to have ~science.space.
Subgroups are listed alongside top groups, so it's not like they're subclass citizens anyway.
Nowadays, with the imbrication of mediums, I find the distinction between film and television less and less relevant. I wonder if it would be better to have a top category for ~video content (which might also be ~visual, ~AV, or something to that effect), with subgroups for specific subtypes, such as ~video.series, ~video.series.anime, ~video.movies, ~video.streaming, etc. That might pose an issue when celluloid was more of a thing, but, nowadays, most new movies actually are shot on video anyway.
If done correctly, adding more subgroups can have the benefit of making the topmost group more relevant, interesting, and, in my view, more logical as well.
I think the benefit of local groups comes from people wanting advice more so than posting articles. Wanting product advice or asking about something to do with the legal system is going to be extremely localised, for example, or even posts with recommendations (we had one recently which was about using food banks, which is going to vary by country if they even exist)
On reddit they are mostly about helping people find each other and share information with each other based on sharing a city or country. It's less about where news gets posted, and we will probably have cross-homed threads someday so that the examples lou pointed out above could appear in both those groups and the local groups, coming to subscribers by two paths instead of one.
The community subs originally were that, now they are just news reposting, complaining and the occasional question that gets downvoted to oblivion. It just feels like people are trying to recreate their little subs when it obviously hasn't really been part of this website. Why does that have to be here?
Yeah, local groups are great for asking just that, more local questions, asking for advice on work, life, legal issues or local government that could abd almost definitely does vary wildly across the world. Also better for posting more local news articles for people to be aware of.
An example is that I work for the national auditor in Scotland. We produce lots of reports throughout the year but the two flagship reports are the NHS Overview and the Local Government Overview. These get picked up heavily in the Scottish and sometimes UK news cycles and the information in the reports is really only relevant for those living in Scotland and sometimes the rest of the UK. I wouldn't like to clog ~news with these reports once they're published but being able to post to ~local.uk would see it get to people who are more likely to be interested in the report.
I disagree about the local groups. They could be great for finding resources local to users, sharing local news that wouldn't be relevant in the larger news group (e.g. the busses in your city will not be running next week due to XYZ), or even organizing irl groups like book clubs or community food pantries.
I've just moved to a new country (Sweden) and I'd love to talk to users from this country about things specific to Sweden that wouldn't likely be useful outside of Sweden. I suppose resources could go under ~life, news could go under ~news, and the group organization could go under the topic most relevant to the group, like ~books for a book club. It seems like that would both clog up the larger groups with conversations that aren't relevant to the majority of users, while also reducing the concentration of target eyes on each post which also reduces like likelihood of achieving the post's goal. I absolutely don't want to read about minor bus transportation hiccups in America or the UK but I absolutely do want to read about the ones happening here.
I am kind of new here, it's possible that tags solve this completely and I just haven't figured it out yet.
It is certainly not my place to dismiss your needs, and I cannot ignore the utility that local groups might have.
However, it is important to understand that not every need we have is necessarily compatible or beneficial to Tildes as a whole.
Hopefully we can find a way to satisfy both your needs and some of my own expectations on how the site should work as well.
And welcome to Tildes :)
I was only using my needs as an example of a useful situation, I certainly don't expect the site to cater to them. There are plenty of other situations like missing persons, job searches or users looking to get familiar with an area before they move/visit that I have no need of, but which can help people.
I apologize if centering it on my experience was inappropriate, but please don't let that distract you from the substance of the rest of my comment.
Maybe ~religion, then subgroup in religion for their teaching and sprituality?
I'd prefer ~spirituality because it already includes everyone, including people with a spiritual practice that is entirely their own and don't belong to any religion or named tradition.
Many religions are not inclusive (not an insult) and spirituality has other connotations which makes it not a great catch-all for religion discussion or people wishing to discuss their faith. To put it another way, nobody would bat an eye at ~religion.islam and it would be immediately and unambiguously understood but ~spirituality.islam might confuse some people as to the group's purpose.
Spirituality is really a separate thing from religion. It includes a ton of stuff like scripture, ritual, heirarchy and community which are partly linked to, but not within the spiritual aspects of faith practice.
Discussions that are more specific to religion on an intellectual level can still remain under ~humanities if that is the case since theology is essentially humanities.
I wouldn't expect for ~spirituality to have a bunch of subgroups for specific religions, I don't think we're big enough for that and maybe never will. Our user base may be somewhat spiritual, but, historically, the crowd that we attract is not super religious and most are either atheists or have no interest in the subject.
I think you're misunderstanding the distinction between religion practice and a more formal scholarly field like theology. People wishing to discuss their faiths are rarely theologians and things theologians care about aren't what your average practitioner cares about. To put it another way, if I'm talking about my clergy, congregation, what bible I should use, or whether I like the Pope, that certainly fits under religion, but isn't necessarily spiritual.
Unlike something like ~hobbies where the knitters are probably happy to chill with the bird watchers, nobody is going to want to post personal stuff about their faith in a catch all religion forum. It's uncomfortable and not conducive to civility. Either you separate these groups or ~tildes will not have anything but academic religion discussions regardless of size. Maybe that's fine, but 'dem's the breaks.
I think people might be uncomfortable creating topics, but if someone started a megathread for a religion with a suitable introduction, it might be separation enough?
It’s not that much separation regardless. We’re all using the same website.
A Tildes group is not a mathematical concept. Elements that are not necessarily contained in its name can still be part of it. ~spirituality can have content about things that users view as closely associated with spirituality, such as clergy, congregation, the Bible, or the pope.
Just to give an example, ~martialarts wouldn't be limited to talking about actual martial arts techniques. It could also house a discussion about the state of conservation of dojos, the best brands of kimonos, and the organizational structure of the World Karate Federation.
If we were too orthodox about groups, the number of groups would multiply into infinity.
My perspective is the one which on-boards people most easily, rather than finding some categorical purity. I just don't think ~spirituality covers that well especially since a religion has many aspects which aren't spiritual, and some religions are entirely devoid of spirituality to begin with.
r/religion is basically a catch all religion forum, and its only problem is being spammed with low-effort atheist trolls (not saying that I think atheists shouldn't be allowed to post on there), and due to Tildes design I wouldn't see that being a problem. And I would happily post about buddhism on such a group, and would like reading about other faiths.
Good point. So what about ~faith instead? cc: @lou
Faith is basically generalization of Christian conceptions of what God is to others. “Faith” isn’t central to the religious practices of eastern traditions. Schools such as Nyaya Vaisheshika would explicitly reject the idea as being irrational.
I think ~spirituality is fine. The religious aspects that aren’t spiritual are cultural and those elements can be discussed in ~life or ~humanities.
That is a possibility for sure, although I would favor the broader category if possible. "Faith" seems highly relevant, but, even based on a previous conversation of ours, it is my understanding that it is possible for people to have a spiritual practice that is not particularly faith-based. At the same time, I understand that "spirituality" has connotations that might be unfavorable in some situations as well.
I don't feel that is the case for me. For example I consider myself quite religiously observant but not spiritual. Does that make sense?
Yes, of course, it makes sense. However, religion itself is generally linked to some kind of spirituality, while spirituality is quite often not linked to religion. Just because spirituality is a much broader concept.
So, even though you're religious yet not spiritual, you will probably agree that whatever religion you ascribe to is, itself, profoundly spiritual.
That does seem to be the Western consensus, yes. Perhaps it's a worthwhile experiment to try what you propose, then!
I was just thinking, I very much enjoy the posts at r/AcademicBiblical. They are scholars not preachers. If we had a spot for them, I would offer some of them my invites.
Edit: perhaps in a humanities top-level, as mentioned here.
The problem is that not every country or region's local topics have the world fame of Manchester United, Neil Gaiman, or the London Underground.
To take the example of Ireland, posts about Katie Taylor, Eoin Colfer or the LUAS would just disappear into a /r/sports, /r/books or /r/transportnews type thing. Because the vast vast majority of the world doesn't care. And they don't have to. But that doesn't mean nobody does, and those users would like a space where such content doesn't get lost.
Now tildes isn't that big at the moment, everyone sees pretty much every post unless they've gone out of the way to unsubscribe from a group. To the point that the voting/ranking system on posts is a bit superfluous. But if this is about creating groups to attract audiences, that doesn't seem to be the consideration.
Maybe it's an argument for being able to subscribe to tags too. Like I'd never subscribe to ~sports. I don't really care about the premiership, the nfl or the mlb. But hey, if there was a ~places.ireland (and I agree it wouldn't make the cut for a first wave like this, but on the other hand r/ireland was one of the first regional spaces on reddit ), maybe I would like to hear about Katie Taylor's achievements.
I would agree that some of the currently existing groups should likely be under a larger umbrella as you're describing. Engineering works under ~design, but might also go okay under ~life since it's a profession.
My suggestion for further helping consolidation and re-organizing based on your final point might instead be to create an overarching group of ~media - then we can have ~media.books, ~media.music, ~media.video (which will have media.video.tv [all non-animation series or one-off episodes should be here], ~media.video.movies, and ~media.video.animation [that has in turn ~media.video.animation.anime]). With this structure, Tags as they are currently could be used to seek content across all media if it's in the broader categories but perhaps might not have enough volume for its own group at that point. (IE search for tag "Sailor Moon" under all media, or maybe you just search for "art.fanart" in the ~media category, and maybe not the article about how Sailor Moon fanart is destroying precious childrens' minds from ~science, lol.)
I will also comment I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a ~games.video_games yet. I feel like just looking at recent volume it probably would be warranted to have its own category.
That is because the top level ~games is mostly videogames.
While logical, I think ~media could make for some overly long hierarchies.
I actually think a ~local makes sense but I don’t think the site has anywhere near the userbase to support getting granular about it and probably won’t for a very long time. You’ll need an active userbase in the millions for something like that IMO. For now it’s better to just tag your location in ~talk or ~life for specific advice.
A space to share and discuss local news would be nice, but I don’t think that place is Tildes. It should be a local news blog or forum managed and moderated by people from that community.
What content would go in this group? Just the non-terrestrial sciences, such as cosmology, astronomy, and planetology? Or all topics related to science and technological developments in travelling to space?
Agreed. Space travel and exploration in the zeitgeist is as much a cultural sphere of discussion as much as a technological or scientific one. ~space should not be a subset of ~science.
In my mind, everything. It's too confusing otherwise. Either in ~space or ~science.space.
I already made a separate suggestion for ~space.science and ~space.exploration - to allow you to keep all your space-related topics together, and to allow those of us who don't care about a billionaire building a penis-substitute to send into orbit, to be able to see the science-only topics.
Something very interesting is happening in this thread and it's giving me ideas. Time for me to ramble a bit.
Let's talk about the hierarchy. We're familiar with usenet structure and we just kinda imported that through a 'subreddits' mental filter and went straight for the taxonomy. The STEM is heavy in this group and that's just 'the way' it's done in academia and tech. But this isn't a library, though it may one day contain several. This is a social software system.
There's a new opinion here in this thread I hadn't considered before. Dub and lou are right, and I'm an idiot for not seeing it myself sooner. This taxonomic approach is not the only option, and in a social software, I think it might even be a poor choice. It took me far too long to realize why I like ~music.makers and ~music.listeners. Those groups exist in the real world itself. Music lovers, divided into fans and musicians, more or less. This division is based on the human - the natural 'tribes' or behaviors, not on a science-minded taxonomy.
When I think about the hierarchy this way, I don't mind it so much. It bothers me less than the scientific approach. A top level group is just that - a group of humans that share a common interest. Those groups already exist in the real world, and if they exist there, they probably deserve a top level group here. Then they get to develop their own taxonomies and subgroups based on them for themselves, along whatever natural lines already exist in those groups. Those groups and sub groups are the ones that need a sidebar and a wiki page. It's very flexible, creating and destroying and merging groups does not lose track of the posts themselves. They are still around, and the tag views can be used to revisit them. We can play with this and try it ten different ways if we need to, and not risk the content at all.
The only real 'problem' with a lot of top level groups is that the nice directory gets messy. That was always going to happen, just like usenet. We can build a group finder in a dozen different ways, and a directory is still good enough for the immediate future, so that's not really an issue and we've plenty of time to work on it.
For academic topics I expect we'll still want to lean towards the scientific approach, but I bet if we think about it even that dry tree might surprise us with something more human-centered. I guess the TLDR here is that we should pattern the groups by groups of humans that already exist, not by an academic taxonomy. Is this a tribal taxonomy? I don't even know what to call it. I bet it's never been tried before, though. That alone is a good enough reason to get excited about it for me. :)
Save the hardcore academic taxonomy for the tagging, where it can do the most good, and where machines can help us out with it one day.
That's a good point, especially when we are considering where to put subgroups. It's kind of what I was subconsciously thinking about when I suggested news sub groups. People/usability should be first, not taxonomic considerations.
No one wants to be the 'master of all news' so a ~news.politics, ~news.games and ~news.tech etc. are of questionable utility vs something that serves a groups interests directly like ~games.news and ~tech.news.
Right! The difference for me between tags and groups was always that the tags were just pseudo-groups waiting to be born, and more like the wild west with any user being able to use them on their submissions. Maximum freedom, minimum overhead.
It didn't occur to me until now that groups should follow a human-centered taxonomy and tags should follow all of the others as needed. If we do it that way, suddenly everyone has their own news group, or politics group, or whatever they need, and those posts bubble up into communities that are still on topic for them by virtue of the group identity. This gives the groups a more firm identity.
We can even get creative. What if we did have a ~news, but very limited direct submissions to it. Instead every ~group.news can bubble up into ~news when the group has something that they think needs to be shared with 'everyone interested in news'. What would the exemplary mechanics do to that news feed, I wonder? It's a bit weird having posts jump around outside of the hierarchy, but for certain topics, perhaps that would actually work out better.
These are great points. One of the themes I'm seeing in this discussion is that as tildes grows, the hierarchical taxonomy becomes problematic. To be upfront - I'm one of the reddit refugees, so I'm definitely approaching tildes with the "subreddit" mental filter that you pointed out.
Sure - a lot of us are immigrating from reddit because of the changes over there that we could no longer tolerate; we all want to avoid some of the problems we experienced over there; we all want to keep tildes a place for "more serious discussion"(whatever that means...). But I don't think the default answer to those concerns is "let's not design ourselves like reddit". I'll go out on a limb here with a hot-take and make the claim that the "subreddit" system of organizing discussions worked. It found an effective way around the challenge we're currently discussing at both small and large scale. Yes - a lot of the problems we found with that site were due to the way it was designed, but I don't think that the "subreddit" system contributed towards those problems.
I think a lot of the ways that tildes is designed already sufficiently mitigate those problems that appeared on reddit (i.e. self-modding, commenting at the bottom, etc.). If someone already figured out a solution to the challenge we're facing, we should emulate them; not doing so only for the sake of avoiding to "look" like them doesn't seem right..
I'm sure that a lot of the old guard on tildes will disagree with me on my above point. But keep in mind that with this current transition, tildes is encountering another deep challenge: the inevitable culture change that occurs whenever communities join together or a large group of immigrants move into a new community. Neither one of the communities will get a full say in what the new culture looks like. The survival of this newly created community and it's culture of the synthesis between all cultures depends upon the capacity of the old guard and the immigrants to learn from and appreciate aspects of each other's culture.
So, just giving this some additional thoughts alongside my suggestion.
I really like where you're going with this, and I think there are currently three Tildes groups that aren't actually representative of actual communities: ~talk, ~news, and ~misc.
~misc is kind of a weird one, I'm not sure what usefulness it would bring to other groups but for ~talk and ~news what about allocating subgroups for these for all top level groups? e.g. ~games.talk and ~games.news . You could keep ~news and ~talk around as both generic top level options and, as you mention, special hybrid catchalls that actually get bubbled up with content from all the subgroups.
News and talk do seem like a really good fit for this model.
I wouldn't worry about ~misc as that's just intended to be a generic catch-all, a special case like ~test (the only one not subscribed by default). If we're doing things right it should be a ghost town because content has other places to go.
I have always wanted a ~health.mental. It's a natural split and there's more than enough content for it already.
Seconding this, although I also strongly feel that we would need dedicated moderators for it. I moderated /r/SuicideWatch for quite a few years, and can attest to how tricky and fraught with perils such a group can be to moderate. So having enough dedicated people to effectively monitor it, and respond quickly to reports and other issues would be essential, IMO.
Wait, did you have the same username on reddit? I'm being hit with a truck of recognition here. Anyway, howdy, I remember liking you! Apologies for the off-topic reply.
<looks around for an exit> Nooooooooo... I am /u/totallynotcfabbro on reddit. ;)
Okay, dangit, you caught me!
Haha, I remember asking you a CSS question for /r/AskScience purposes like 10 years ago lol.
Heh. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Besides /r/reddithax I was also a mod of /r/ideasfortheadmins and /r/help, and active on /r/csshelp too, back in them thar good ole days. :)
Edit: Oh, shit. I just realized who you are (looked at your bio). Hi. Welcome to Tildes! I actually mentioned you to @Deimos when I sent you an invite. So if you need/want a bunch of other invites for the rest of the /r/science, /r/askscience, and other science subreddits mods, let @Deimos know since I am sure he would be more than happy to get more of y'all on board Tildes! :P
I didn't know I had a reputation to precede me! :D
Thanks!
I honestly haven't been an active moderator of these big subs in quite a while, I just never had the heart to remove myself in case I ever changed my mind to come back. I had mod burnout bad though I am still very fond of all the folks I worked with in both subs. If I happen to speak with some of them, I'll definitely recommend this place. I like it a lot so far.
Ah, so you're one of those "evil powermod" subreddit squatters like my old pal qgyh2, I see! :P
I was tempted to stay on as a moderator on all the subreddits I modded too, just out of pure vanity, even after I stopped using the cfabbro account. IIRC Deimos even said at one point I was the mod with the most subreddits. But I got seriously burned out too, and decided to focus purely on /r/coversongs (my passion project) before finally quitting using reddit entirely (other than to handle invite threads on /r/tildes), so I feel your pain. :(
I am much happier just being a prolific poster on a few niche subs I enjoy these days -- most of which are currently private or restricted because of the protests! I actively mod just a tiny sub which hardly requires any effort and gets like 2-3 posts a day anyway.
I don't think I'll ever feel the need to delete my reddit account, but I would like to make a backup of my data at some point. I am still really proud of some of my posts and comments which I'd like to leave up for as long as reddit is around.
I deleted cfabbro during the blackout after Victoria got fired. In some ways I regret it (because I can't reconnect with any of my old co-mods and friends as easily anymore), but I still think it was for the best. I am proud of what I did and helped build on reddit too, but reddit inc. clearly doesn't care about mods, or our efforts, so I didn't want to reward them by keeping all my old contributions on the site. I handed over the subreddits I created to others who still found value in them, but all my own posts and comments on reddit are now gone. C'est la vie.
You were? Hm. I never noticed your name when I was a mod there. Maybe we served at different times. Or I'm just an unobservant nuffer sometimes.
It's possible I am misremembering and I was never actually a mod there. But krispykrackers made me a mod of most of her subreddits along with qgyh2 and davidreiss666 so I just assumed /r/help was included in that. It's been so damn long, I honestly can't remember though. Was violentacrez ever a mod of /r/help? If so, I'm pretty sure I was too since I remember interacting with him behind the scenes in there, but it might have been somewhere else we both happened to co-mod (not /r/jailbait, BTW, I was never involved in that shithole!). :/
It's okay! You power-mods are allowed to lose track of all the hundreds of subreddits you moderated. :P
I don't even remember how I got on to the mod team for /r/Help and /r/ModHelp. I know I gained some prestige by being on /r/AskHistorians. And I was a prolific answerer in /r/Help. But I don't remember how I ended up on that mod team. I was never a power-mod. I think I never moderated more than about 10-15 subreddits at any one time. My personalised hands-on moderation style doesn't scale up very well, so that limited how many subreddits I could get involved with. So, I don't remember how I ended up a mod team with admins and power mods, and it seems very strange in retrospect. (Mind you, I worked hard while I was there, and didn't just coast.)
Apart from a few people like kallisti_gold and sodypop and redtaboo, I didn't interact with most of the other mods there. Some of them weren't even active (cough... qgyh2).
I'm guessing that you & I never overlapped there.
However, I do recall that davidreiss666 once told me I was one of the best mods on Reddit! (That sort of thing sticks in your brain.) He added me to /r/Asimov based on that, and my username.
I don't know about violentacruz. That name doesn't ring a bell in the context of /r/Help.
I was mostly a back room mod. Helping with CSS (which is why I got invited to so many mod teams), automod stuff, debating policies/rules, warning other more involved mods and admins of critical/time-sensitive issues, doing basic janitor duties, etc. so I was still able to be reasonably effective despite being part of so many subreddits... at least I think/hope I was effective, anyways. :P
I was more front-of-house, dealing with errant posts and fractious users. I got burned out after 6 months, in my first stint moderating on Reddit! (The repeated personal attacks and death threats got to me more than I thought.) When I started modding again, I knew to take it easier.
Oh well. We were ships passing in the night on Reddit. And now we're fellow Tildren!
I think I was only a mod of a ton of subreddits for a reasonably short time too. A few years starting after the custom subreddit CSS feature was added. I kept plugging away on /r/SuicideWatch and a few other subreddits I had a passion for though, until I finally got completely burned out and stopped using the cfabbro account entirely.
My ideas for some new groups:
~travel
~culture
~locale (maybe a catch all for for any local news/events without us having to break into actual local groups)
~cats
edit: One more idea is ~infosec (i think it's distinct enough to warrant its own section from ~tech)
IMO ~pets (edit: or ~animals as Skybrian suggested) is probably better to start with rather than making a top-level ~cats group. Then a ~pets.cats subgroup could be created afterwards.
I love the idea of a ~pets group but I really would like tildes to not turn into a low effort image board. If we make a pets group it should be clear that it’s not just a place to post cat pictures.
That's certainly a possibility, and a worry of mine too, but if people start using those groups to post standalone images (without providing enough context to warrant the post, or without making an effort to encourage further discussion), we can always block standalone image posts in those groups. And I also think the "trust users, but punish abusers" philosophy applies here, since there are plenty of legitimate and valuable discussions that can take place regarding pets, and particular animals/breeds/etc. So why should everyone be punished (by not having a place to discuss pets) merely because of the possibility of some bad actors abusing that group's purpose, or people misunderstanding Tildes text-forward philosophy?
Honestly I would really appreciate a place that's dedicated principally to text-based discussion of pet-related topics, since that stuff is easily overwhelmed by images. A megathread for links to cute pics could be a thing but I'd principally like it to discuss brand recommendations for food and advice on how to prevent certain behaviors, etc.
Tildes already does the scheduled posts for certain groups. A weekly "post your pet photos" thread in ~pets would keep the main board text-based but let us have our cake and eat it too.
Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking! I think as long as tildes doesn't automatically display images the way reddit does we have a lot less to worry about when it comes to image posts, especially given the general culture of the website.
Any group or sub-group we create could be turned into a low-effort image board.
For example:
~space could be a sea of photos of the night sky, taken by Tildren.
~hobbies could be a stream of videos about Tildren playing/building/performing their various hobbies.
~comp could be a collection of pictures of people's home-computer building projects.
The only thing stopping that is the culture we instill and uphold across Tildes. We would just instill and uphold the same culture in a potential ~pets group.
Any group can turn into a low-effort image board, but likelihood for each is certainly different.
Why not a ~pets.pics and a ~pets.discussion so everyone can find what they're looking for?
Even through I'm trying to promote pro-cat content, this is definitely the right choice.
I was so bummed when I didn't see a pets or animals group! Even if the focus is more on text or animal pictures I'm sure it would be of use for a lot of pet owners
Sharing toy, food recommendations etc. My cat is allergic to everything ever and I would have loved help figuring out what foods he could eat from someone who already went through it. Took me over 6 months of researching
I agree that pets would be a big win and popular
I do not want an ~infosec. I find infosec-oriented discussion to consistently be of astoundingly low quality.
If you're knowledgeable enough about the subject to draw that conclusion, is there anything you might suggest that would improve the quality of these discussions? Could you provide high quality contributions yourself? That alone would make it a worthwhile group, I think.
I'm not disagreeing, just saying that if that's the case, saying that to people is useful and having a space in which you're saying that to people is positive.
Perhaps a curated space would be best, a la /r/askhistorians, with certified users who can provide non-terrible advice.
Is there reason for it to be a separate main group instead of a sub group (~tech.infosec)? This could simply be my ignorance, but most of the infosec discussion I see around the next have to do with software, which feels like it falls under tech.
A cats groups would be a huge plus for someone that regularly visits /cats, /aww, /turkishcats
Fair. I would prefer that the main focus is on more serious topics (like cat nutrition or cat care tips) with the occasional "show us your cat" thread.
~travel would be a really good idea IMO it can be used to discuss travel tips,local cuisines,must see places,local events.
As someone who really enjoyed r/solotravel reading peoples travel stories was really cool.
It can be used as a tool for travelers to cross examine their gadgets,itineraries as well.
As population of tildes is growing and becoming a more geographically diverse community,it can be a really helpful tool for many.
so bump for ~travel by me
I'm not sure what ~culture would be for. Could you give some examples?
Edit2: I actually think Naravara's suggestion of ~style is actually better.
Edit: Loire convinced me. I totally support a ~fashion top level now.
~design.fashion maybe? Since most fashion topics are already posted in that group.
Ah yeah, that's fair. Putting it under ~design would narrow it down quite a bit and prevent it from really branching out like that.
I'll be honest as a cis man I also love fashion so I'd second a ~fashion group too!
I came in here specifically to see if there was any discussion of adding groups for haircare/makeup/clothing. I know I've looked to r/curlyhair a lot for advice on how to handle my mop, and I've gone to r/makeupaddiction for guidance when I've had a situation that required me to slap paint on my face and didn't want to waste $ or look like a clown. Like it or not, physical appearance plays a major role in how we move through life so I see it as being as important as getting some DIY groups so I can fix my squeaky timing belt/recaulk my tub/mount a wall shelf instead of having to shell out $$$ or beg friends/family to do it for me. I agree with NaraVara that ~style (and ~style.hair ~style.clothing etc) would be a good inclusive name.
Edit: groups not subs, gotta change my vocab
I would prefer to call it something like ~clothing or ~style rather than ~fashion personally. Fashion is specifically for the style that is current or contemporary right now but making clothes and even clothing yourself are broader than that.
Seconding ~style, since there's more to it than just clothes.
Hmmmm... good suggestion. I think I actually prefer ~style too, especially since fashion feels so formal.
I would like a ~humanities.history, ~humanities.linguistics, ~humanities.philosophy, and a top-level ~religion.
Previously I've wanted a ~humanities.theology: but after reading @lou's comment, I agree, a separate
religion~spirituality would probably be best. Nesting it under ~humanities would probably encourage more outside-looking-in discussion which often isn't helpful and particularly would not fill a niche.That's right.
The only distinction I would make is that I would prefer ~spirituality over ~religion because a lot of people cultivate spirituality without being affiliated with a religion.
I think that's a great call.
Discussion about atheism would fall under a ~humanities.theology or ~humanities.religion sub-group. If I can live with that, I'd hope you could live with spirituality being there as well. :)
I actually think spirituality should be outside ~humanities for reasons I detailed here.
Less formal alternatives: ~beliefs or ~faith.
Putting it under ~life might encourage informal insider discussion, if that's the goal. ~life.faith?
~life.spirituality?
Theology would encourage more academic discussion while I feel like religion would easily become people discussing their own faith etc. I’d like to keep those separate if possible.
I agree. I'd go further to suggest that ~humanities.theology is probably not desired.
I don't see why not, given that theology is one of the humanities, just as much as history, linguistics, and philosophy.
If we're finally splitting ~humanities into sub-groups for each of the major humanity disciplines (as was always my hope, starting when I first proposed this group), let's do it properly.
I think it would invite quite a lot of criticism of religion and lead to flamewars. But there are a consistent batch of folks who want a direct port of /r/AskBibleScholars or similar subreddits, I suppose.
(as opposed to ~spirituality: which would invite people saying "this is what i think personally")
It's funny how people have become fixated on that one subreddit, just because the moderator was so public about his desire to migrate his subreddit here.
There's a whole collection of religious subreddits which could find an equivalent home under something like ~humanities.theology or ~humanities.religion: /r/Religion, /r/Christianity, /r/Islam, /r/Buddhism, /r/Humanism, /r/Atheism, /r/DebateReligion, and so on.
See, I'd put the first six under ~spirituality (~spirituality encompassing spirituality or lack thereof) and consider the final not fit for Tildes.
(i'm quite opposed to the idea of migrating specific subreddits like /r/AskBibleScholars fwiw, though I don't think I ever brought it up while @suspended was around.)
wow but /r/DebateReligion is fucking hilarious right now huh
My point is that there is space on Tildes for a high-level group for various religious-related discussions. Because theology is one of the humanities, it seems reasonable to host these religious discussions in something like ~humanities.theology or ~humanities.religion.
In terms of naming, I actually think ~humanities.religion is more accessible than either .theology or .spirituality.
Even if we were to take up @lou's suggestion for a top-level group about people's beliefs (I don't agree with their proposed name, but that's a different issue), we could aim that group more at people's personal experiences, and then create ~humanities.theology as a deliberate counterpart, for more academic/theoretical/general discussions about religions and belief systems. Because theology is still one of the humanities.
Same! We should not aim to create a one-to-one correspondence between Tildes and Reddit.
However, some themes and categories are universal, such as religion/spirituality/whatever.
I believe it is important to stress that spiritual and religious practices are highly personal and subjective, and the importance of having a top-level group for that is not merely a matter of categorization logic. Like many technically minded spaces, Tildes is, as a whole, highly critical of religion and faith. Religious trauma is widespread among users, and, as a believer myself, I can tell that I do not feel entirely comfortable talking about such matters here. I would prefer having a top-level group that is not a default because in that situation those who are disinterested in those matters wouldn't randomly encounter spiritual content which they neither want nor approve.
I had a thought today. Just putting it out there...
We could have ~life.religion for people to discuss their experience of faith, religion, and/or spirituality in their everyday lives. We would be contextualising faith, religion, spirituality as part of people's lives.
And, to complement this, we could also have ~humanities.theology as the home for more academic discussions about religions, theism in general, ontology, and the meaning of life.
And some non-users of religion as well! You must let me tell you some time about the interaction between the Abrahamic religions and gay men, and the trauma that has caused... ;)
I'm not dismissing the need for a group on Tildes to discuss matters of faith / belief / spirituality / religion / whatever. I'm mostly concerned about getting the best categories in ~humanities (which I requested, back in the day, and therefore have a slight paternal interest in), and also finding the best way to categorise your personal belief discussion - and whether these two goals would result in the same groups, or different groups.
~tildes.third_party (or ~tildes.unofficial if you wanna make it confusing :P)
Since there's quite a bit of stuff posted that does belong in ~tildes though isn't directly about Tildes, but a third-party project. I don't know if the distinction matters, but if we're trying stuff out with groups I figure may as well suggest it.
Potential description adapted from ~tildes:
Perhaps ~tildes.apps? It would be a bit of a stretch to cover extensions, but close enough.
I think third-party makes the most sense as it covers anything. Apps also wouldn't cover userstyles or scripts, websites like Tildes Statistics, etc.
I'm with you there.
third_partyisn't ideal (especially with that clumsy underscore in there), but it definitely has a better scope, sinceappsalone might end up being a bit quiet anyways and it makes sense to include other stuff besides. Plus, it'd cover the unofficial Tildes side-communities (e.g. the Discord server) as well, which might be helpful.~tildes.3rdparty just to tighten it up a bit, maybe? It could be our first group with a number in it! :P
Or what if... We go even further beyond?!
~tildes.3rd🎉 / ~tildes.3rd🥳
The first group with a number... And an emoji!
~t11d35.3rdp4r7y, lets go! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I think a ~promotion group might cover this as well as people shilling their personal projects more generally.
It might be an idea to look at ~misc and see if there are any topics in there that crop up frequently which currently don’t have a home, as this would seem to suggest a void in top level groups
I like your scientific approach to the question. Maybe someone could compile a list of most popular tags there.
~misc is nay-entirely politics. And sometimes YouTube videos.
That's probably because a group of us make every possible effort to find another home for posts in ~misc. I know I try and move topics in ~misc to better groups whenever I can! However, topics about politics don't easily fit into any other existing group on Tildes.
Indeed, and I greatly appreciate it!
Agreed. IMO the 3 times when groups matter are:
I tag my topics. I'm a long-standing member of Tildes, with roots going back years. I literally wrote the instructions for Tildes! If anyone knows how to tag a topic, I certainly do. Right? Right.
So, I tag my topics. I do it with great thought and care. And I know my stuff! So... job done. <wipes hands>
And then I come back an hour later and find that @mycketforvirrad has changed them anyway. They've tweaked one or two of the tags I carefully applied, and added tags I didn't even consider thinking about.
On some topics, you'll see two or three different people making changes to the tags. It's not a one-person job. Don't try. Don't think you have to get it perfect all by yourself, on your first go. Because you never will.
Apply some tags, just to start the process, and then watch everyone else add to what you started.
Give it a go. And then watch what experienced taggers do, and learn from their example. I have. I am. I do.
I largely agree, and in the short term I think just making a bunch of requested groups is probably the way to go. However, long-term I am unconvinced.
I think this is great, and I also think this is explicitly the current philosophy on Tildes. However, it does seem like enough people have concerns about where to put stuff that it needs to be addressed.
Providing info when people register is a great first step, but I don’t think we can trust people to really absorb the info given how terms of service agreements are usually brushed past. Therefore, I think the structure of Tildes should also help signal to people that they need to start posting in order for a community to form.
I’m leaning towards the sentiment that groups as they exist here are not a great system [one example]. I think that a tags-only system would help promote the idea that anyone can use any tag they want. It also lets anyone create a new tag for whatever they want. This structural change helps signal that people should make new tags as they see fit. Then, if a tag becomes popular it can be displayed more prominently in much the same way as groups currently are.
The promotion mechanism to make a tag mature would take some thought. However, this approach seems like the only way to prevent user-created groups without making the group creation process feel tense or exclusionary.
I’m starting to think that there are good reasons other platforms have basically let group creation be a free-for-all. People like having agency, so we probably need to lean into that a bit more.
As is, making new groups is clearly a contentious topic. I don’t see this getting much easier as time goes on unless Tildes basically creates every group people ask for in a somewhat timely manner. However, that then contradicts the original philosophy that groups should grow organically.
It's okay. Someone else has been taking care of that for you. ;)
How I'm helping
I apply more 'Joke' labels to your comments than to everyone else's combined! Well... almost. But you do get the lion's share of my 'Joke' labels.
The problem is that each user's click on the Joke/Noise/Offtopic labels only gets a 0.5 weighting, so it takes two users' clicks to add up to 1 full 'Joke' label and take effect. But I do what I can!
I have a suspicion there are a lot of European users here now, ~europe may be cool.
Not to get too deep into the debates that came out of the previous thread, but what would you think of as a good example of something that should be posted to a top level geographic group instead of a topic subject group?
It's the debate between tags and groups I suppose, but I do think there's topics that interest specific geographic regions and not much outside of those. However I don't think that's what's at the foundation of the request. While I could potentially filter the US/USA tags from ~news and keep Europe/European tags visible as a solution, it rather looks like this request (and similarly ~local) is not one of usability but to build a community. An emotional argument over a rational one if you will.
I think the emotional connection is what I am looking for. r/Europe has that for me and I don’t see a reason why Tildes would be unable to be the platform for this sort of space. You can then get local event posts and megathreads that really would not fit under and general topic thread. ~Europe just seems like a good starting point for the experiment with a solid userbase. ~UK is another good example and perhaps later you can go into ~de or ~dach for the German speaking regions.
This raises the immediate question of whether the uk gets its own group, and if so, whether it goes under europe. :-)
Still part of the European continent ;)
Yeah. "Europe" and the EU are two different things. Just ask Ukraine.
I'd like that too, but what about something like
~world or
~global like json suggested.
That could be a place for anyone who wants to talk about what's going on in their part of the world. Or talk about stuff related to Africa, say, or India. Whatever matters to you. Got a cool tradition in your corner of the globe? I for one would love to hear about it. That kind of thing.
I was active in the relationships thread on Reddit, even though lots of advice was breakup/divorce there may more nuanced discussion and insights shared here. ~life.relationships
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet: ~fitness
I think fitness topics currently being under the umbrella of ~health is pretty limiting. Whereas having it as a top-level group would allow us to eventually support more subgroups like ~fitness.weightlifting, ~fitness.yoga, ~fitness.calisthenics, etc.
How would you draw a clean line between ~fitness.weightlifting and ~sports.weightlifting?
(Repeat for every other sport).
Why does there need to be a clean line? If the topic is specifically about the sport, and the person submitting it wants to discuss the sport with other fans of the sport then ~sports. If the person is a participant or looking to get fit doing it, and wants to discuss it with other participants and fitness enthusiasts, then ~fitness.
I think this reply could be relevant for most of the “whatabouts” in this whole thread. Does it matter if something can fit into a couple of places? Is it the end of the world if you miss one post because it’s posted somewhere else? Or if you have to subscribe to more than one place to capture all the instances of discussion you want? I think some people are getting a little too nitpicky, and maybe suffering from a bit of fomo. It might be a discussion that needs to come back when the sites bigger (and maybe at this point you allow some kind of cross posting or posting under two groups simultaneously), but for now there aren’t so many posts that it’s a big deal, I don’t think.
This might be getting a little off topic, but I feel like some updates to tags could cover a lot of these suggestions. Allowing filtering based on group + tag rather than just tag could more or less remove the need for subgroups, and allow a relatively small and broad set of groups to encompass everything.
eg. rather than having
~games.game_designas a group, you just keep the~gamesgroup and~games.game_designfilters to thegame_designtag within the~gamesgroup.I'd be hesitant to create a lot of really tightly focused groups as that could be hard to walk back later.
I don't think tags alone are good enough. With them being freeform, they don't actually do anything as currently implemented.
A person making a new post has no easily accessible way to know what tags have already been used.
Yes, there are a couple people manually tagging new entries, but that is not scalable, and it is also not what the community has been asking for every day.
The attitude towards adding new groups has been pretty conservative, and it's safe to assume this initiative is not going to result in 50 new groups.
The feedback collected here should be used to add a few more, the most wanted and likely to be used candidates.
Actually, there's an auto-complete feature for tags.
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/posting-on-tildes#tagging-topics
All you need to do is imagine a tag that's even slightly relevant, start typing, and you'll see what similar tags are commonly used in the group you're posting in.
Not on its own, absolutely.
However...
There are more than just a couple of people tagging topics.
Deimos can add new taggers any time he wants. He previously asked for volunteers. If he sees the need for more taggers, he can ask again.
In the long-term, there'll be an algorithmic method for automatically giving tag powers to users as they demonstrate experience and consistency on Tildes, so new taggers will always be arising.
Thanks, don't know how I missed that. I stand corrected.
I don't remember exactly what's gone down in the past, but my understanding is that this isn't really the case. I believe it's been mentioned before that groups (or at least subgroups) that are too inactive can be rolled back, with any submissions to them being moved to a parent/other group and having the subgroup itself become a tag instead.
Yeah, folding groups back into their parent groups is pretty simple (AFAIK). It's been done at various points in the past. E.g. ~health.coronavirus was recently folded back into ~health. And several other temporary subgroups get created here every year and folded back into their parent group after the event is over. E.g. ~creative?tag=TiMaSoMo and ~comp?tag=Advent of Code.
cc: @cannedoats
Tags are totally fluid. They're not predefined or restricted. If you want a new tag, you can create one instantly. Tags are free text. If you want a tag that says "cannedoats faves", you can apply it to your next topic. And the topic after that.
Of course, some other people might question the need for such a tag, and might remove it.
However, we can and have discussed what tags we want to use, and we create new tags all the time.
This makes a lot of sense to me and how I was under the impression subgroups worked at first. I don’t really like the idea of a bunch of individual subgroups (as they are now) for every sport, for instance… but I could see a sports group that you could easily filter down to a specific sport tag by navigating to ~sports.soccer or whatever.
It would also be kind of interesting to be able to subscribe to specific subgroups in that same vein, but I imagine that would be a lot of work to implement and gets a little far away from what’s being asked.
Lots and lots of groups and subgroups are going to be suggested here. It's very hard to organize these in a Tildes thread, let alone determine which are most popular, especially if this topic blows up (which it's very likely to). I'd like to request some sort of poll on a third-party platform, where we can see all of the suggestions in one place, sort them, suggest new ones, and vote for all of the ones we think are good ideas.
I don't know what platform would be a good choice for this. Bonus points if there's a way to keep the list grouped by group (with subgroups hierarchically displayed below top-level items).
Hopefully this is a given, but I'm not meaning to suggest the winners should be determined by pure democratic vote. Deimos gets the final say... but I'd like him to be empowered with well-formatted data as he considers it.
Is this post the foundation needed to collect groups so that something as you described can happen?
At the very least it's a place to suggest a good tool for us to use. We're already pushing 150 comments in here and it hasn't even been two hours. There are a ton of duplicate suggestions, parallel conversation threads about the same ideas, and single comments that contain multiple group suggestions so that the vote mechanism doesn't provide any useful feedback about which suggestion(s) the vote was for. I'm not sure this is really an optimal way to make big site decisions.
It's not for making the decisions. This is the brainstorming part. Deimos will probably follow up in a couple of days with another post summarizing the suggestions.
Based on previous history, that follow-up post is more likely to be announcing the new groups & sub-groups he chose from the suggestions made here.
cc: @balooga
You can globally filter out tags already: for instance,
ask.helporask.advice. There is not yet a mechanism to filter by group, however.https://tildes.net/?tag=cycling
;-)
(i definitely see how you missed it - i frequently find myself in a group, wanting to see all posts with the tag, and have to manually remove the group from the url because there's no way to from Tildes itself.)
I actually have the opposite problem. I don't see anything on the filter because I assume all results are in groups I'm not a part of. I do wish there was a way to search all groups (even ones I'm not subbed to) on a tag.
This is doable now, though as you say, clicking the tag in that way doesn't take you there.
For example: https://tildes.net/?tag=ask
A suggestion that I haven’t seen yet:
~politics I think it could be beneficial to spin up a group for political discussion and news, that way that discourse could live there instead of in ~news , allowing people who want a break from politics to be able to unfollow.
Also, selfishly I’m missing r/daddit which as a new parent was immensely helpful and reassuring. I would love a ~parenting for us tildes daddes and mommes.
I would personally strongly oppose an ~politics group. Banning politics is impossible, but encouraging more political topics by creating a group for it is just asking for trouble, IMO. One of the main mods of /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics summarized all the problems associated with a politics group best:
Thoughts on handling political content on Tildes
~life.parenting I would 100% support though.
Agreed, and also, there is a politics of everything. Putting such topics in whichever other group they belong seems somewhat less likely to create low-quality fireworks. Internet politics goes in ~tech, and so on.
(I was sort of thinking ~law would make sense, but until lawyers start asking for it, I think a similar argument applies; there are laws about everything and you can put legal discussions in whatever other group is relevant. It will be most of interest to the people there.)
Agreed. Politics as discussion of policies and their impacts on people is good, and I think discussion of those impacts in the relevant places as they affect people can foster good discussions on them. For example, a tax plan or interest rate hikes might be discussed in ~humanities.economics. A “don’t say gay bill” can be talked about in ~lgbt.
But politics qua politics is vapid theater criticism that pretends to be serious only because it’s proximate to serious matters. But it is deeply unserious.
I've had a few ideas looking at the complaints/asks, since there are some shortcomings with the current organization that have come up with the recent expansion.
I hope this isn't controversial, but make ~people, move ~lgbt under it, as an example, and anything that is culture/ethnicity/demographics about people(s) would sub-organize under there? Unless there's some grand scheme for having top-levels for granular groups. Bringing this up, it would also be good to sort of find a way to emphasize the groups that would want/benefit from separate groups while somehow de-emphasizing the racial/social/general demographic hegemony that facilitates the need for these spaces, but I'm completely unsure how to do that especially in the context of a very international community since a given group in US has slightly different wants/needs form an online community from Britain or Brazil.
Groups we could probably use as catch-alls:
~nature (ex: ~nature.ecology, ~nature.hiking as tags/subgroups)
~people (already mentioned, allowing sub-organization for demographics related subgroups by nation, ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc)
I'm unsure what all we would need under ~people as far as who wants to be represented but for promoting diversity and following what seems to be the intended organization goal I'd re-emphasize this as a good way to go.
This paragraph is sort of out of scope:
I feel I'm locked on using tags, which adds a bit of friction, but perhaps presenting the tags as subgroups could smooth the experience as well. ~games.valve could point to anything in ~games, with the .valve tag for example. I couldn't help with the code, unfortunately, but it would go a long way towards longer-term organization, allow subscribing to tags (another possible feature?) and meet people's need for hyperspecific groups. You don't need to make a group, as it's sort of defined. We would just need an intuitive interface for navigating them.
EDIT: Rethinking it, groups based on diversity (say, ~black, ~asian, the current ~lgbt) would probably better serve their targets as top-levels for visibility, but I basically stand by the groups that would be sufficiently broad, but don't exist in any groups we currently have, and ~people for things that aren't exactly ~talk or ~life things.
Love the idea of nature, hiking, camping, backpacking, climbing, ect.
Maybe there's a place for this already, but I'm super new haven't found it, yet. I am learning I'm more neurodivergent than I had previously realized and have found great support from some of the neurodivergent groups on other sites. So, let me throw that out there as a potential thing, though maybe it's just ~health with some tags?
Others have suggested something like local groups to focus on conversations that matter mainly to a geographical region. I would also really like something like this, mainly because I'm not interested in US news/politics (Still interested in world news) and in my experience these dominate.
Even splitting the news group into US news and world news would be good, I think. It’s hard to block tags in this area because blocking USA might lead to missing news which is for example primarily from Australia but concerns trade with the US, or something of that nature
Yes, there often events that affect multiple regions. A current example: wildfires in Canada. Also, anything related to international trade.
Yes exactly. Those of outside the US might not want to miss those types of posts, but may not be interested in the minutiae of Supreme Court goings on, for example
Based on discussion in other parts of this topic, I don't think a local or geographical group would be used for news articles. The main appeal would be more the sense of community and talking about those regions, whether it's locals, asking for advice and things to do when visiting, seeking help searching for someone or something, etc.
That said, I do support the idea of dividing ~news to have more specific regions, such as ~news.europe, ~news.usa, etc. The top-level ~news could then potentially be used for articles that don't necessarily relate to a specific region (e.g. Trade/negotiations between 2 countries, the Titan submersible, the wildfires in Canada, all the issues people had visiting Qatar during the World Cup that didn't relate to the game itself, etc.).
One of the primary concerns I have with this is that I don't think we should have it be just "USA" and "World", since that would imply the USA is the "default" like on reddit. But you obviously also can't break down "world" into every individual country, so choosing how to divide it fairly is still tricky. This might actually be more feasible with the tag system than subgroups, but I think the tag system would need some improvements to make that really work since tags are currently a bit... "buried" in the UI, for lack of a better term.
Luckily we have a great world division system already in the form of continents, though some might need to be expanded to include countries which don’t fit into a continent. Europe, Asia, Americas, Africa, MiddleEast, Oceania, would work.
Continents don’t really work well as a classification system. Asia and Africa are simply too diverse.
If I had to do some sort of geoscheme I’d probably start with the World Bank’s classification system and introduce a few additional subdivisions. I’d create a separate Central America region, break Europe into Northern, Southern, and Eastern zones, split East and West Africa, and create separate SE Asia and Central Asia regions.
Sure, I was just trying to be conscious of having too many subgroups. You could as well say each country needs its own but you have to draw a line somewhere!
life.location
This will enable the construction of support systems. In my experience as a 10+ year member of a location-focused subreddit, such forums can and do improve lives, perhaps even saving them on occasion. Over the years, the accumulated bank of knowledge within previous discussions provides near instant answers to countless questions.
I came to Tildes primarily to start and contribute to ~life.Japan. If you are in the same boat then let’s link up. I believe Tildes is the place to create a new lasting community that supports the welfare of short-and long-term residents.
It seems a little quirky, but I like this since it separates living in Japan from other stuff like international diplomacy and history. Not everything about Japan is about living in Japan.
There are grey areas. You can learn Japanese without living there. But there are always grey areas.
(In the meantime, please feel free to start a "life in Japan" topic in ~life. If it gets attention, that will be evidence that it's worth having a group.)
the last time we did a Tildes census, I was the only Japan resident on the site. I'd love to see a community here centered on life in the land of the rising sun, but even with this current influx of new faces, I'm not sure there's enough of us
Y'all need to start pushing those Tildes invites through the real world instead of just to internet friends. Invites draw in the social networks that already exist in the real world that way.
This is just a minor tweak but I think ~finance sounds a bit specialized and I'd prefer ~money as a bit more down-to-earth.
Looks like one definition of finance is "the management of large amounts of money."
One group I'd like to propose that I haven't seen mentioned yet would be ~writing, either as a top-level group or a subgroup. It's one of the more confusing ones to post about because it can fit in both ~creative and ~hobbies depending on the type of post (e.g. sharing your writing VS talking about writing), to the point I'm not 100% sure which one would be ideal to use for a subgroup (maybe one for each?).
While it could be a subgroup of one of them, I think there's also potentially enough material for it to have its own separate group. Creative writing, technical writing, sharing your works, writing tips, questions about writing, requests to help edit, discussions about publishing, helpful tools, writing prompts... The list goes on.
Either way, I for one would definitely appreciate a dedicated writing group or subgroup.
Seconded. I would love to have a single place for all this stuff. I think it could be a subgroup of ~creative (rather than hobbies) with relevant tags, but hopefully one day it could be popular enough to garner additional subgroups like ~creative.writing.publishing or whatever
~work would be a place for topics about anything work-related, including professional and labor issues.
~life.work maybe? Since most work/career related stuff already gets posted under ~life currently.
I guess, but wouldn't it be a weird place to put stuff about unions or hiring or people management?
Though, taking a really broad view, isn't everything life? Except ~machines.
Now I'm imagining a forum with ~life, ~machines, and ~rocks as the three top-level groups.
Or an astrophysics forum where they have ~hydrogen, ~helium, and ~metals. :-)
Clearly we need one uber-level ~reality group from which all other groups derive.
Well, maybe you want two groups, ~truth and ~fiction.
I expect that forum would have a lot of taxonomy disputes.
Are we sure yet that our universe is not a ~simulation?
For the purpose of classification, you'd want to know if it's a real simulation or a fictional simulation.
(Maybe it's time someone marked this subthread as Noise.)
The simulation of reality is simulated in reality.
~recursion
Dear Deimos on my wish list I still have a group about ~mobility. Bikes, human scale urban design, etc. And I think a generic group like this can cover quite a lot of ground, pun intended.
Possible alternatives: ~transport, ~movement, or ~move.
I second calling it ~transportation and I think that would end up taking ~hobbies.automotive as well.
I like it but I think it'll fit better under ~design.mobility than on its own group
There's been a bit of back & forth on this. A lot of, eg. NJB videos currently end up in ~design but absolutely don't belong there because they're more about the economics of mobility, but it's not like they belong in ~finance either, etc.
~mobility gathers these cross-group type videos quite nicely, it's the best I got.
I definitely want a group for discussing this sort of stuff but I think "mobility" is a bit too vague... it makes me think first of mobility aids like canes and wheelchairs! But not sure what a better group name would be that encompasses the right stuff. ~design.urban or ~design.city maybe?
The few I'd love to see would be ~comics (like r/comics), ~plants (houseplants, succulents, gardening, etc), ~pets, and ~cleaningtips. If there are subgroups that would fit for these, please let me know!
~books.comics, ~hobbies.plants (or ~hobbies.gardening), and ~life.cleaning could probably work. I think there should totally be a top level ~pets though. ;)
What do you think about ~life.pets?
Yeah, I would be fine with that, TBH.
How is ~books generally meant to intersect with "stories"? A lot of stories and documents aren't really books, and a lot of comics aren't books either...
Yeah, I think there is an valid argument for changing ~books to ~fiction, perhaps. But I have always personally interpreted ~books to basically mean ~written_words or ~stories anyways, so web comics, ebooks, and such would be perfectly appropriate for the group. The paper format, or getting formally published, isn't really the important part, IMO.
A reason why I'd prefer ~stories is that it more clearly encapsulates all of those things, plus non-fiction and even fully visual graphic novels or sequences with no words! So I'll leave this as a formal suggestion for a renaming and potential reorganization (subgroups).
And I concur ~stories works well, because I think we could use a fanfiction group , and ~stories.fanfiction seems like a logical place in a hierarchy for it.
The reason I think we need a fanfiction community is because the level of discussion and analysis of media that fanfiction does is a great match for Tildes. Just as an example, I found /r/HPfanfiction had much more in depth discussion than /r/HarryPotter
~stories could include biographies and even a lot of history. It wouldn’t include more analytical or philosophical books that don’t have narrative.
It’s a bit quirky. There are stories about everything so that’s another taxonomy problem. I like it anyway. It seems like it would attract good links?
Ultimately it's impossible to ensure the groups are perfectly non-overlapping. Biographies could either go in history (humanities) or stories. And that's fine! The poster can inclusively choose an appropriate group based on the type of discussion they want to have.
On the other hand I think it's correct for there to be humanities that aren't compatible with the stories group, since there is already a group for them anywyay.
~hobbies.gardening
I'm throwing out this as a selfish request, not certain it's an actual gap that could be filled by a subgroup, just one I'd like to see filled. Currently there's a post every few days in ~hobbies tagged with 'gardening'.
To reference reddit, r/gardening has 5.5 mil+ subscribers, among the larger subreddits. It's also IMO one of the most friendly and helpful subreddits I've seen.
I have no standing and probably everyone will hate this, but I'll suggest it anyway just in case someone wants to riff on the idea: what if we acknowledged that minority experiences are often country-specific? So:
Logically you want to do the same thing in the US:
What minority means can be left vague and country-specific, but it's a bit more concrete than pretending it's the same worldwide. There are many minorities and it's intersectional. (Perhaps in some countries, everyone is a minority in some ways?)
There can be subgroups as needed. "Minority" could be omitted too. Perhaps ~life.usa.black sounds better?
(I don't suggest any change to ~lgbt. There are similar issues in every country, though some are far more severe than others.)
Any group scheme is going to divide discussion in some ways, and this is no exception, since it divides minority discussion by country. It's the same website though, so if you have experiences in more than one country, you can read both. It seems in keeping with Tildes being an international website, and perhaps encourages discussions to be rooted in lived experiences rather than abstractions?
Edit: one thing I particularly like about this scheme that it handles immigrants smoothly. Whether they were born in China or in Canada, someone who is from an Asian family and living in Canada could talk about it in ~life.canada.minority.
(Come to think of it, possibly "minorities" would be better?)
I would love a ~cars!
A topic about going places might be good. The obvious name is ~travel I think it should cover permanent moves as well, including immigration. Maybe ~move?
I think the biggest must-haves are ~people and ~local, as per the other thread.
It's probably time for a ~music.streams or something of that nature to separate text discussions about music from actual submissions of music itself - the latter should pop down one level. Then we'll figure out how to make autoplaylists and kick albums up into ~music as they are discovered with exemplary mechanics. We're going to want some way to track exemplary submissions as an ongoing bestof all year long eventually. That really takes the work out of the year end lists. I kinda like the idea that 'streams' doesn't kick single individual tracks up into ~music, just good music videos, good playlists, killer mixtapes, exemplary albums, and ace live sets - curated musical content. I'm not really wedded to the 'streams' name and I'd like to find a better one. 'listentothis' seems a bit on the nose, it's been done. Maybe ~music.appreciation?
I think it's also time we get moving towards having a testbed for much more active group/subgroup mechanics and interaction. By that I mean let's get some more subgroups going and lean into our 'usenet' capability just enough to see it starting to branch out a bit in all of the groups. We can always change them later if we think of better ways to organize them, and we probably will once they are up and running for a while.
Edit: ~music.listeners that's it. Remember the human.
~music.listen could work? Some will be videos of course but still the primary function of the subtilde would be to suggest music you think others should/would like to listen to.
Is ~music.jukebox too cutesy?
I'd like some granularity in ~comp: but I'm not quite sure how exactly. A ~comp.unix might be nice. Tags work pretty well for help and advice posts. A distinction like the proposed ~humanities split would be neat: ~comp.algorithms, ~comp.systems, ~comp.networking, ~comp.plt... but I know there isn't enough deep content posted to foster discussion.
Can we, first of all, rename ~comp to ~computers? It's confusingly vague as-is.
Also, yes, definitely some subgroups here ... at least ~comp.programming, and perhaps something like ~comp.hosting or ~comp.networking, and maybe a ~comp.hardware.
Huh, I always though it was from comp(uting).
See what I mean?
I also didn't get it at first. Though I would vote for ~cs, as in computer science. The more general computers would fit ~tech better perhaps
May I suggest ~computing? This is the term I've seen used in the UK to encompass IT, networking, cybersecurity, programming/software dev, etc.
I would be fine with that as well.
Yeah, I think tags and megatopics are best for now. The important thing is that non-programmers can unsubscribe.
It should be ~comp.lang, not ~comp.plt, right? :-)
I would really like to see a chronic illness group. Probably as ~health.chronic_illness. In my experience these kinds of support groups can be very helpful.
Gonna summarize my thoughts from a few comments I have made, mainly because I am getting frustrated at seeing either "oh that's just ~tech", or "oh that's just ~science".
~tech is not where engineering and STEM related topics should go. "Tech" is basically entirely correlated with consumer goods and services at this point in time; things related to the FAANG companies, random consumer devices (phones, laptops, tablets), or consumer services (VPNs, servers, streaming). Any average user is not going to associate building a self piloting drone from scratch with ~tech, they would probably associate that with ~engineering though.
Engineering is not ~science. Engineering is the application of science to solve real world problems. Science is the expansion of human scientific knowledge. As such I think there is definitely a need for a top level group ~engineering.
I would like to see:
~engineering (for more rigorous topics)
~machines (for more hobby level topics)
And sub groups for:
~science.physics
~science.chemistry
~science.biology
etc.
I also think there is a need for a new group ~education, with possible subgroups:
~education.teaching
~education.resources
~education.tech
~education.primary
~education.secondary
~education.higher
etc.
A first pass at a more human centered taxonomy.
I think that's enough to get the idea across by example.
These do not look like newsgroups, or like subreddits, or like a scientific taxonomy. It's something else.
Then we have this strange network effect...
It seems like there's a special class of groups to be had here that might help bring the various top level communities into contact with each other outside of their own silos.
A DIY group I think would be representative of our modern internet culture and relevant to the Tildes readership. From cooking to cleaning and repair to home improvement, a DIY group would be about the stage and transition of becoming a self-reliant adult from college age and onward, and that might be the most relevant group to a majority of us.
Such a group would naturally tap into aspects of others such as creative, hobbies, finance, food, health, and life, but that is the point. All of those things are aspects of life that we are expected to master as adults, whether we are taught or are left to discover on our own.
Having a DIY group would help to encapsulate all of those crucial things for those of us who need a helping hand.
Edit: also, thank you for the invites! I'll do my best to invite personalities that will benefit the readership, and moreover, will benefit from the energy here on Tildes.
While being a great fan of DIY personally, I am not sure if it's a good idea to extract it from e.g. ~comp or ~tech. It feels as if building something yourself is now something niche and most people should consume "professional" products if not becoming brand fans outright. I believe that having them mixed will lower the barrier for crossing over from consuming to making. Especially with discussions around beginner trouble.
But ~comp or ~tech wouldn't be appropriate places for posts about putting in a DIY outdoor deck, or a DIY bathroom remodel, DIY motorcycle maintenance, or the countless other DIY type of things that aren't electronics related.
As a jack-of-all-trades, I'd love to see a dedicated DIY group for all of those other types of projects.
Yeah if diy would be subgrouped anywhere I'd say it would be ~hobbies (and I'd be all for ~hobbies.diy) not ~tech and CERTAINLY not ~comp (that group is for comouter science-y stuff?). Certainly that's where you'd find the most relevant content currently on tildes.
As someone that rarely posts or comments, I don't see a need for more groups. Activity has slowed in the past week or so since the big wave of new people.
I actually really like the broad categories because it exposes me to more things. If more groups are added, I probably won't subscribe to them because I may not be interested in that niche. However, if those posts show up in an existing group, I'll at least see it and maybe learn something new.
It is possible the reason why activity slowed so much in the past is because people felt they didn't have a home here. And there is really no harm in adding a few more groups, IMO. They can always be folded back into other groups if they don't stay active.
I’d be interested to know whether the decline in activity represents people leaving Tildes, or just switching to lurker / infrequent poster after initially experimenting to see how things work here. In other words, how does our volume of traffic correlate with the fall in new posts?
To throw my two cents in as someone who came, made some posts and has otherwise spent my time rather quiet (and beating my head against the JavaScript overlord to add more features). I've bitten my tongue instead of commenting a few times as I'm still getting a gauge of the community. I've said my hellos and now am spending my time absorbing the community and the style.
I'd imagine that there's quite a few other people around that are still just dipping their toes in, then waiting and working on acclimating slowly as to avoid trying to force our standards onto Tildes instead of taking the time to let Tildes apply its standards to us, if that makes sense. I spent 13 years on and off Reddit and I personally am being very careful to not be part of a wave that morphs Tildes in the wrong direction.
I've seen a little talk about embracing the slow internet. Maybe I prefer it even slower than most. I won't be leaving if new groups are created, I'll be here checking in a few times a day :)
Maybe it helps that I have a slack team with about 6-8 friends (not-anonymous) that chat about all sorts of topics daily. There's actually a parallel between the groups we have and the channels in slack. I've tried to invite them here a few times but none seem interested. They want the super specific groups they love from reddit.
I would love ~scifi ~comics or ~books.comics ~hardware. I think we should club tv, movie, music in ~entertainment for e.g ~entertainment.tv.firefly, ~entertainment.music.news.
Love the idea of ~scifi and fully support it.
Ironically, I posted - and then deleted - a topic about the content of the ~space and ~science groups, just a few hours before this post.
So... with that subject fresh on my mind...
How about splitting ~space into:
~space.science
~space.exploration
The .science sub-group could host topics about the scientific study of the cosmos: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, and such things. The .exploration sub-group could host topics about the exploration of space: rocketry, satellites, interplanetary probes, missions to other planets, and similar things.
Thank you for soliciting feedback. Like others, I definitely want a top level women's space.
I think we could add social sciences to science and humanities.
I would prefer an animals category and a pets subcategory. Livestock is a thing.
Fashion would be a nice additional space.
Thank you again.
Too many comments to look at them all at this point 😅 Didn't see this talked about, but I think something like ~ProductRecommendation or ~ProductReviews could be useful, as that often involved good discussions and quality content on Reddit. It would also be a potential interesting archive for some to look through as the content in it grows over time.
But wouldn't product recommendations be better suited to the specific groups that people want recommendations for? If someone wants recommendations for an e-reader, they post in ~books, where they'll find other readers like themselves. If someone wants recommendations for an electric guitar, they post in ~music, where they'll find other musicians like themselves. And so on.
A generic group for product recommendations would basically be a miscellaneous hodge-podge of unrelated stuff.
And, if someone wants to see all recommendations on Tildes, they can search by the "ask.recommendations" tag: https://tildes.net/?tag=ask.recommendations
Just realized I never responded to this! I did not realize that tag was already available, so yeah I agree that that is a much better way of finding recommendations than what I suggested.
?tag=reviews also has a bunch of topics too.
I'd be all for more subgroups like ~games.steamdeck but maybe subgroups should be hidden or collapsed on the main page until manually expanded?
steamdeck might be kinda specific, but at the very least something like games.pc/games.console/games.vr?
I know this can get out of control fast but at the very least those 3 categories are big hardware divides that do often have exclusivity, so being able to filter to what's relevant to you is nice.
Definitely still niche, I just picked what came to mind to point out that lots of subs on the main page might be rather messy and being able to collapse and expand them would be a nice feature.
I don't think anyone has said it yet, but ~comp.Linux and/or ~comp.FOSS
I don't know if a general ~videos would fit tildes, but I would definitely appreciate it. I really miss the old /r/videos when you would see new creators rise up or find really cool videos that wouldn't have been served on YT homepage.
The problem with that is video is a format, not a subject. So I think the existing videos tag is better since it can be used across all the groups. If people only want to see videos, they can visit that tag link.
I haven't caught the hang of tags yet, so I don't know. I forget that they are a thing until they're brought up.
I actually mentioned this to @cfabbro just last week. I've got some ideas about re-organising some of the information.
I figured I would wait until features started getting changed & added again, and use that as a prompt to gradually update the docs.
Also... someone around here said they were a technical writer. Maybe we could get them to volunteer!
~finance.economics
~finance.investing
~finance.personal
~finance.news - I know this is a weird one, because there could also be news.finance, but a lot of the finance posts seem to be news related....
It seems to me like there would be too much overlap between .personal and .investing which could cause confusion
~finance.news has the taxonomy problem with ~news, like you mentioned.
How about ~finance.personal and ~finance.analysis? With the former being for content for individuals, and the latter being information about the market, economics, and even some news content?
Good point.
The vast majority of current finance posts seem to be transitory news articles, but they also relate to economics, business etc.
I think Deimos will need to think through the taxonomy problem.
If I wanted to spam a ton of economic updates, would that go in analysis?
Based on the usage of current tags, perhaps the following would make more sense
~finance.economics
~finance.business
Edit: I do wonder about the risks of not having a
~finance.other or ~finance.news.
I think people may be reluctant to spam the finance group, and just having two sub groups leaves no place to post all the other stuff.
I think there needs to be serious consideration about where an economics group / subgroup should be placed into the taxonomy of groups. Personally speaking, I've always considered finance to be a subset of economics and would argue that ~economics.finance makes more sense. My argument here on the distinction is similar to the one that @cfabbro pointed out between science and engineering. There's also a great deal of economic thought with regards to environmental discussions, and yet there's the ~enviro group. Other's have mentioned in this thread that economics should be considered under a broader ~humanities group.
Of course, all these considerations bring up the challenges and potential setbacks of using a taxonomy to group, categorize, and focus discussions; it starts to get confusing as it grows. One way around this would be to regularly publish and update a more robust site taxonomy. @Deimos, is this under consideration? Tags are certainly another way around this, but I've personally always found that system to be a bit messy...
Regardless, I think the broader subject of ~economics requires and merits more consideration of how we arrange it on the site. Economics is not just a study of financial activities. There are assumptions built into that paradigm which require sound reasoning; many fields of economics have been challenging those assumptions that lead to different models and results. If tildes is aimed toward more serious conversations, economics is important because it drives a lot of policy discussions.
That's my two cents anyways...
~writing would be nice, with sub groups for things like ~writing.prompts, ~writing.poetry, ~writing.wordavalanches (my favorite subreddit)
How about ~creative.writing
Because ~creative is already host to quite a few "writing" discussions, and these discussions sit there quite well.
I love this! And yes I have seen lots of references to writing. I would be a bit more eager to post writing prompts if it's in a group dedicated to writing, rather than just the hobby group
(Personal Wishlist)
It would be nice to have a group that can host weekly threads for trading links to users' personal cute animal images/videos, talk about pet training/animal husbandry stuff, be a place for threads about cool/rare animals, etc. Not trying to reinvent r/aww here, so there would need to be a culture of keeping things in (monthly?) recurring threads and not letting individual user's cat photos clog the default homepage, but IMO that's something Tildes has done well historically. ~Life.pets/~Life.wild?
Also, ~hobbies.plants (indoor + outdoor gardening) and ~hobbies.woodworking?
I'm going to make this a comment rather than a post as I want to be seen but don't want to create a big debate. I'm new and plan to adapt to what is here.
Question 1. I was attempting to share an invitation and the skeptical response was, it may be a cool community while the founder is in charge, but that could change at any time if there is a single point of failure.
Question, what if any plans are there for continuity of mission and customs here in the event that Deimos moves on?
Question 2. I check daily an economics and financed focused blog called Naked Capitalism. It is small and independent but reputable. They have a custom, after linking all the serious articles, of posting what they call the antidote de jour. It is one or sometimes two cute animal photo. Could something like that fit here or is that too reddit like? I'm open to all answers but wanted to ask. Example https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/links-7-2-2023.html Scroll to the bottom for the antidote
Regarding your first question, if Deimos decided today to stop Tildes, then tomorrow it simply wouldn't be here anymore. The existing community would fracture and find refuge elsewhere like many did the past month. I don't think this is gonna happen any time soon and if it were I imagine there would be at least a heads up about it.
Only time will tell whether the bus factor will increase but if the recent success of Tildes continues and people keep donating, then it's looking great.
I can't remember if Deimos ever said it explicitly but I imagine Tildes is here to stay. We're trying to do something different and being purposefully slow, so if it takes another 5 years to get the Spectria employee count to 2 (or 3? Can't remember if it takes 1 or 2 people to form a not-for-profit org), then 5 years it will be. Edit: In the announcing Tildes blog post, the last paragraph is what I was thinking about.
I think this is going to get buried in this thread and not seen unfortunately, I think more people would be able to answer if you made a full post!
#1 I don't know the amswer to, but as for #2, Tildes is generally fine with links to images within the context of a larger discussion. If you wrote a post that sparks discussion, especially something long, and then added some image links as the bottom as "antidote" I don't think anyone would mind. People here mostly dislike posts that are only links to images.
I think ~guitar and ~bass (and other instrument based groups) would be great groups to have, as discussing musical instruments is very different from discussing music itself.
Also a group about weight lifting would be good, as it is not exactly the same as discussing health in general.
How about something like ~music.players.guitar for these? (Bass guitar is still a type of guitar... unless you mean the double-bass?)
This would complement @Amarok's suggestions for ~music.listeners and ~music.gear.
~music.makers.guitar. :)
I like the bifurcation of music makers vs music listeners. All my time on reddit, those two groups of people were always bumping shoulders passing in the various music communities and there was something... grumpy... about it. I got the impression that the makers community was having a hard time getting their music geek on with each other because the listeners had a million radios all turned up to eleven, drowning everything else out.
Yeah... I saw your suggestion of ~music.makers - and deliberately chose to suggest ~music.players for this person's idea.
To me, "makers" seems to lean more towards professionals who make music: musicians, producers, singers, etc. The people who go into a studio and record music to be sold to the consuming public. They make the product that we all listen to - on radio, on streamers, on CD, and so on.
On the other hand, "players" seems less formal, less professional... more like my friend, who's teaching himself to play banjo just for the fun of it.
But, happily, the final call on naming conventions in the ~music group isn't mine to make. I can leave that to you and Deimos to sort out. :)
I'm not really wedded to any particular solution myself, just exploring the problem space.
~music.players sounds like a great place to discuss the finer points of WinAmp vs. iTunes.
I'd like some deep dives on the best mp3 players on the market, please.
I feel like you've got it backwards. At least in the crowds I run with, "players" implies the cats who can REALLY play. Whereas "I make music" feels like something a more casual musician would say.
Anyway, as I said somewhere else in this thread, I also like ~music.makers because it's a throwback to usenet. rec.music.makers.percussion was my very first online music community.
I don't think we're at the threshold for this yet, but it might be worth thinking about different food related subgroups in the future, and to realize that food and hobbies do have some intersection.
For sake of discussion, lets consider coffee brewing and Mead-making, as examples. There are tons of technical discussion that wouldn't really qualify for the general "food"-space, like the merits of different coffee grinders and their engineering, yeasts and their performances in different temperature ranges, or the general chemistry involved in the creation of both.
And yet, it's all distinctly centered around food.
Personally, I don't have any answers, but as I stated earlier, I think it's worth throwing it out into the air now, for greater minds to mull over.
I do like my coffee content, though I don’t know how many discussions I would contribute too about it. I mainly just watch James Hoffman videos & make my pour-over coffee (well, actually immersion with a Hario Switch). Though I guess when I start trying to make espresso again I’d appreciate a place to talk about what’s working and what isn’t working with it.
It could also be fun to do a “What coffee are we brewing this week” thread …I might just start up a discussion in ~food with the coffee tag next week when I get a new bag opened. Well I might put it in ~hobbies and see if someone moves it to ~food instead.
I don't know if this fits under an already existing group, but I'd like to see something for sustainable transportation, including bicycle commuting and transit (full disclosure, I've been a long-term moderator of /r/bikecommuting, and have lived car-free for more than a decade in a non-coastal western U.S. state).
I know that occasional bike-related topics come up in ~hobbies, but commuting is fundamentally different from fair-weather or hobby riding, and often involves problem solving and real-world issues. Maybe these topics would fit under ~life, but they're rather different from the usual topics posted there.
Finally, as a cocktail nerd I've made a few posts/comments in ~food, which I generally think fits; however, such drinking is a bit of a hobby, so I don't know if they'd fit better there. Maybe some subgroup for those might be welcome? I'm sure some people who want food recipes don't want to see a bunch about cocktails, beer, and wine.
(As a P.S. side note: This talk of community taxonomy strikes me as similar to the problems of library organization, e.g. Dewey Decimal vs. Library of Congress, with the added wrinkle of digital separation [although having the front page be all groups is similar to walking into a library as a whole]).
Not necessarily a recommendation, but more of a deeper quesiton to be asked. I'll harken to a quote from your last post:
(emphasis mine)
So while I could recommend some kind of game subgroup, I'm not sure if it would quite solve this hesistation. instead of ~games flooding the front page, it'd be ~games.E3 or something for a month.
I believe there is some consideration for this in the weighing, but I figure now is the best time to bring up some considerations: Should we have some separation of "the front page" Tildes.net and say, Tildes ~all which shows a truly unfiltered feed? I am 100% for subgroups, but I imagine another function of subgroups could be to weigh how many of a certain group's posts will be front and center. e.g. an ~all feed may have 10 ~games posts all at once, because they are the most popular posts. But a "front page feed" would limit that to 3 posts, include the other groups, and sprinkle the other 7 posts further down the feed.
We could have a similar functionality for signed in users, but be more granular. By default, everyone is "subscribed" to all groups, but as of now, the only 3 options if you get too much of a certain group is
What if "subscribed" was using a similar curation method, where you get only a few of the most popular posts, and we instead have an opt-in for a "super subscribed" mode where you get the full nozzle of content? That way, I know the only people who may get a torrent of E3 content would be those who chose to do so (and then can go back to "regular subscribe" mode if it's too much... or just filter out E3 in this specific example).
That's all a huge tangent to the real question here, but food for long term thought. On topic: I'd like to propose a structure for the games group. We group based on themes, so I'd propose this hierarchy:
names are all TBD (I'm not quite sure I like "mechanics" as it veers too close to "design" as is), but I think the general methodology of how to divide games, and potentially other media, is clear here. I think it solves a lot of problems compared to trying to split based on genre or game franchise or company, while still offering enough granularity to let people pick and choose what aspects of the games industry they are interested in.
Would like to see something along the lines of a .education subgroup for some topics.
From my experience on other sites, I try to find communities to learn and explore topics but it can be a little intimidating to jump in and ask the obvious questions or find reliable resources. Would be nice to have dedicated spaces to just connect with people at the same level or people who are willing to teach.
What about more ~hobbies?
But there's the problem of smaller hobbies is that maybe they will not get posts as much so that needs to be sorted out. I think it would work better with bigger hobbies.
Like a few other users already mentioned, I think ~travel would fill a gap. I don't really see any other group that it would overlap with. I would also like ~finance.personal. That said, I'm not sure if the site is big enough to support it yet.
A ~anime.groupwatch or something of that nature could be good. It would allow people to unsubscribe from group watch threads and such. That can solve one of the concerns about doing anime group watches.
This is not as much as a short term idea as much as it is a longer term idea, but I would eventually like to see a raisedByNarcissists type group on tildes one day.
This can be done with tags already! You can edit "filtered tags" here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
I'd love to see a ~tech.3Dprinting or something similar, but I completely understand if that is something too niche to include. Having a less broad tech or hobbies group that focuses on stuff like 3d printing and/or electronics would be really neat.
I'm still incredibly new to tildes, and I haven't quite gotten down how focused the groups are able to be, or if more niche groups are even something that is desired among the creators or users.
What about ~tech.me (mechanical engineering) or ~tech.cam (computer aided manufacturing)? I would be similarly interested in CNC and 3D printing.
I suspect a lot of people would assume ~tech.cam is about cameras
That would actually work a lot better! I think having the broader scope would allow more freedom with what people can post in regards to their engineering projects and cam projects!
The only ones I can think of right now are groups like ~cubing for anything Rubik's Cube, as well as ~autism or ~autistic as I've seen more topics and comments discussing the matter in some way recently (even if partly not straight up named).
~neurodivergent or ~neuro? Maybe be better under ~life, ~health, or the oft-proposed ~health.mental
I dunno if ~cubing is that big of a draw to break out of a hobbies tag.
For what it's worth, I vote against ~neurodivergent. Excuse my polite soapbox for a second, but I hate the way it smashes together (primarily) people with Autism and people with ADHD.
I think the issues and challenges faced by both communities are distinct from one another. The ADHD community has struggled for years to be recognized as a real disability that needs treatment and accommodation (and not just laziness / bad parenting, etc.), while the Autism community from my impression has had the opposite problem of needing to be seen as a natural difference that should be recognized as healthy.
Anyway it wasn't my intent to derail, my thought is that if we're going for a larger and more inclusive group than just autism , we're better off with a "ability" or "disability" group at whatever level hierarchy that the women group ends up as.
Not to mention that neurodiversity comes in many more variants than just ADHD or autism. Though I do believe people like that tend towards online communication, and I see how that can influence the narrative. So a neurodiversity tag could easily reinforce that it is about only those two things when it isn't.
I think such topics belong under a health tag.
not every discussion about adhd or autism is necessarily going to be "health-related", and a discussion about living with adhd or relating to others' autistic experiences would be more suited for ~life. While I think mental health is related enough to health in general to be subcategorized there, this doesn't hold as well for things that are unchangeably part of your psyche the way adhd and autism are. I'd maybe go to ~health if I were having side effects from my medication or something, but it doesn't seem like the right place even to do things like discussing coping strategies.
We've had two Rubik's Cube related news articles posted in the entire history of the site. I'm not sure we're yet seeing the grassroots growth of cube-enthusiasm sufficient to encourage the founding of a group just for it.
True, I didn't look much into subgroups yet, so I just suggested them in general.
I'm still wondering whether there might be a desire for a ~socialscience group, which seems to be a gap between ~science and ~humanities. This would cover the disciplines of economics, sociology, anthropology, and so on.
Surprisingly, we haven't had a proposal for a division of ~science yet. I don't think I actually want one but there was that ~science.formal / ~science.natural / ~science.social division floated (and implemented?) a while back.
For now though, I'm content with ~science being one main hub, while on occasion some topics float off to ~humanities or ~enviro or ~comp.
Yep!
Nothing came of it, though, as far as I can recall.
That's why I haven't bothered suggesting it again now. I'm picking my battles carefully.
I would love a more broad group related to game development. We do have ~games.game_design, but that to me is just one of many gamedev related disciplines and perhaps it could itself go under some sort of ~gamedev group.
Would renaming ~games.game_design to ~games.dev help with that do you think, since then it would be more all encompassing?
I think that's a great idea, personally. ~games.game_design has always felt a little "wrong", somehow. I think because the name doesn't build on its parent group. It's also the only group that uses snake_case, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't know how many game devs are actually on Tildes, since they tend to cluster together. But your suggestion appeals more to me aesthetically, at least.
Sure, that could definitely be an option, along with tweaking the subgroup description :)
The current ~games group is mostly focused on gaming news (which I like, btw). But I'd love if Tildes had a group more focused on retro games. As it's under the gaming umbrella, maybe it should be named ~games.retro ?
Gaming emulators are another niche I find interesting to read about, but as it is very closely related to retro games, It's best to postpone the creation of a group just for this.
I'd love a group for home improvement and careers/jobs/trades. The career group could eventually be expanded into sub groups, eg careers.electricians, careers.accounting, etc.
I would love some news subgroups. News posts arent great for discussion, but it’s also nice to stay informed while looking at Tildes in a way people can opt out of. News subgroups also help people filter out noisy topics without having to police megathreads and all that junk.
~news isn't really great, it ends up just being predominantly US news and politics. I don't think we should get rid of it, as it's nice to have a catch-all but we can better serve what kinds of news people are interested in by adding news subgroups such as:
~games.news
~tech.news
~sports.news
~health.news
~movies.news
~finance.news
etc.
And some new groups as well:
~local.us.news
~local.canada.news
~local.uk.news
I'm not sure every group needs a .news but many could probably benefit. This would also need to come in tandem with a way to collapse subgroups in the sidebar or things would get busy real fast.
Separate comment to gauge interest of this specifically:
Also, I'd love a ~world and ~world.news to discuss international events and politics but that might just be me.
Disclaimer: I feel like if I read through everything here I'll be too late with my ideas to contribute, so let me pre-apologize if other people have already posted the same or similar ideas. If I notice any later I'll try to edit this to mention them.
Not exactly suggestions for specific new groups, but more a feature suggestion: A system where people could vote on whether to move a post, and where to move it.
A post would start out with implicit vote(s) for where it was posted. People could then agree or not. If they don't agree, they could (must?) suggest a different group, which could even be a group that doesn't exist. If some threshold is reached, the post would be moved. The threshold might be different if the suggestion is a new group vs. an existing group. It could also be that you'd need a critical mass of other posts with the same new group suggested before the group could be created.
It might also be useful to have a page for each proposed group where discussion and voting could happen on whether the group makes sense, and maybe even a way to seek agreement on what the group should be called (and thus where it sits in the hierarchy).
Obviously the final decision could still be on the admin for now, but this could be an easier way to collect opinions from the community.
I feel it would be a nice addition to the Gaming group, to have a subgroup for older systems/emulation. A place for news and info in that realm can be really helpful too, in that topics/questions in which a problem was described and solved can go on to be useful to folks later in time. At least personally, I'd sometimes post to Reddit with this in mind, trying to describe the problem well and edit in what the solution was because I know other folks out there are gonna be looking for it.
Rules for something like that can be very straightforward, too. A ban on discussing piracy is simple enough for folks to understand and abide by. There are some communities out there putting out regular news and updates, and I wouldn't mind taking on putting together on a regular basis if that would help the group start/grow. Something like this could also serve to fulfill one of the other commenters' request, for a group regarding retro games/news. The two compliment each other pretty well, lots of regular news from the emulation community that can spur discussion of the retro games themselves.
I vote to have ~people and tag identity communities from there, I think Tildes should see communities with an International scope and not American diversity scope.
I think a data visualization group would be pretty cool. Thinking about /r/dataisbeautiful. I really enjoyed making OC for that subreddit, but I don't really see a group that similar content would fall under.
It would probably be best received in the group the data was about, in order to be on topic? Absent context, a pretty visualization is less likely to spur discussion.
IMO part of the fun was exploring a new subject through a compelling visualization. My favorite was a recurring project analyzing "the weirdest shaped baseball field in each state". Even though I have no interest in baseball, seeing the data visualization was great.
I agree that an image showing the weirdest shaped baseball field in each state is cool, but I'm not sure what there is to discuss on the topic? Though that could be a failure of imagination on my part.
One group I miss was pc part and game deals, they would list juicy sales, pricing errors, etc to take advantage of. Idk if that would be a tech.deals or tech.sales or something like that, or if you'd want a whole sales category.
Offtopic: is there any way to view what a group looks like without a tag, without temporarily adding it to your global filters? ex. something like
~hobbies?tag=!diyUnforunately not. Although adding and removing filters isn't exactly super difficult or slow.
p.s. ! is a reserved character in the URI spec, so it would end up needing to be hobbies?tag=%21diy.I believe it's allowed,
!is a part of the sub-delims group which is allowed in paths.Ah, so it is. Thanks for pointing that out. p.s. I added a Gitlab issue for your suggestion:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/795
Oh, I have another suggestion which is not really an answer to the question, so anyone please feel free to mark this as off-topic.
I would like to suggest renaming "groups" to "categories". Because that's what Tildes groups actually are, and the name "groups" creates expectations that they will function more like sub-communities instead.
I think that preventing too many echo chambers is certainly one of the goals here!
Personally, I don't think this is realistic. Tildes is growing and the desire to grow is outlined in the docs. As more people join this site, we will naturally need to have more niche spaces and better ways of filtering content.
I am a recent Reddit transplant, but I already think that the philosophies behind this site are more than enough of a reason! If future mechanics for how this site operates are a real concern for you, then take a look at my proposal here and see what you think. Personally, I'm quite excited.
I'm gonna try to be charitable here but honestly, this sounds super manipulative and demanding. You donate if you want to; don't donate if you don't want. Deimos knows quite well what Tildes' "raison d'etre" is.
Anyway I feel like you're reading way too much into the idea of wanting/needing more groups. It doesn't mean we'll be adding ten thousand new groups and allow people to create their own. Usually with these posts we end up figuring out everyone agrees there's 2-3 new ones definitely needed, and we usually get those plus maybe a couple more, depending on activity.
There is something to wanting a home that doesn't move all the time. See my post: Embrace the slower social web. Unfortunately, with the increase in activity it means the Tildes homepage moves too fast if you're subscribed to many groups (as most Tildren are). More groups means the ability to filter a bit more from the "main" set of topics. It's a way of slowing things down.
I disagree, there's a strong groups and tags distinction in my mind - a group is what a post is fundamentally about, tags are informational. The existing groups do an excellent job divying up all content, hence the lack of non-political content in ~misc, and there not actually being that many top-level proposals in this thread.
Deciding what group to post in causes some stress to some people (I'm one of them!) so I understand what you're saying here. To me the answer is "we have too many groups, we should have fewer groups and better tagging" (but I suck at tagging too).
But, at the moment, the answer is "make a good faith effort to put it in a suitable group but please don't stress too much, and you'll learn as you get more familiar with the site". I get the impression that we want people to feel welcome and comfortable here, and we want people to feel safe to post. I feel that some people are more likely to feel this stress about posting and that there may be some equality implications to this, so it's important to me to reduce that initial burden of "which group do I post this interesting article to?".
I say It goes in LGBT. If the hypothetical article was about any other of your suggested topics the LGBT part would be a side note in the main article and not in the headline. Most articles can be parsed like this fairly well (especially if it’s a real article that you can read and see what the body is about, and also get clues from where the original publication placed in the case of them having categories).
Personally I like having broad categories. There aren’t that many, so I’m subscribed to most. I’m unlikely to miss things I’m interested in this way, and if I do it’s not actually the end of the world to not know everything! Tags feel messier.
~health.mental. (edit: ~lgbt is also fine, IMO)
Sure, and people post them accordingly, and if they're in a category that doesn't fit, someone moves them.
I also think Tildes should lean more heavily into tags. Current groups/tildes could be potentially converted into super-tags, for lack of a better name. User would be required to select at least one at the time of posting. This could then allow a catalogue of presets for various types of experiences that users can create and follow. For example mods of an individual video game or news from a certain place but without politics.
I hadn’t considered a group less setup where the focus is instead on tagging posts and following tags.
You may have just convinced me that this would be a better system.
The core mechanics of the site are meant to select for quality above all, so there's really nothing to worry about. If you are subscribed to root groups only (as new users are), then the content you see should be exemplary-only for the most part, and any posts made directly to those root groups are held to Tildes' standards. Meanwhile, the noisier stuff drops down one level and disappears from the root groups. The reason you are worried right now is precisely because we haven't got enough subgroups to help with that. It will slow content down, but it will also convert that noisier content into something curated and kick it back up into the root groups once in a while. As an example, you don't need to see 500 submissions of music tracks, but you'd probably like a playlist of the best 50 of those once a week, and maybe a couple of really good albums pop up every week as well.
The smaller groups are in a sense content farms for their parents, where all the content can get worked out and polished up without spamming their parent groups into oblivion - which is why reddit's 'defaults' sucked so badly. They were just plain overloaded by the pace of submissions and so they became a mess.
That said, we haven't actually finished those exemplary submission mechanics yet. We haven't had enough subgroups to need them - but I sincerely hope after this round of group creation, we will have enough of them to begin developing the exemplary submission system and put it through its paces.
Honestly they will foster it a bit, and that's ok, because their content pace will probably be slow enough to accommodate it better. Tag filtering should do the rest, and that tag filtering will get a lot easier if there is an on/off switch for the top 30 tags across the top of the page of any group to tailor the subscriptions better. This is part of the reason the place is still invite only. We haven't got the raw mechanics to scale up faster yet, and we have to have the conversations about how to build them as we go. It's a process.