What if we eliminated "ownership" of link topics?
It's been a while since we had a topic to generally discuss potential site mechanics, and this is one that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so I thought it could make a good discussion.
This recent "Suggestions regarding Clickbait and misinformation" topic originally started me thinking about this, because a lot of the potential ways of dealing with those kind of topics involve modifying link topics in some way—changing their link to point somewhere else, editing the title, adding additional links, etc. However, one thing I've noticed on the (rare) occasions where I've performed those kind of actions is that some people are extremely protective of the posts they submitted, and can get upset about even minor title edits because it's changing their post. Some users have deleted their posts after they were changed, because they didn't like the change.
So... what if we made it so that link topics don't really "belong" to any user in particular? We'd absolutely still want a record of who originally submitted the post to be able to notice behaviors like spamming certain domains, but other than that, if it's a good link/story, does it matter much which user submitted it?
Here are more unorganized, general thoughts about some of the things this might affect and would need to be considered:
- Text posts would remain as-is, since in that case the submitter is also the author/source of the post.
- On that note, it could be a bit weird to lose the connection in cases like a user submitting their own content (such as a blog post that they wrote). Maybe we'd need some way to indicate that, through a standardized tag or something (or even a checkbox when submitting)?
- Are there other cases where the submitter is important and associated with the content?
- We could use the space in topic listings where the submitter's username is currently displayed to show different, more relevant data instead. For example, maybe the domain could move into that space instead of being after the title in parentheses, or it could display other info like the name of the actual author of the linked content, the channel name for YouTube videos, etc.
- If the submitter no longer owns the post, they'd probably no longer have control of deleting it. When could that be an issue?
- How would this affect user pages? Should links that the user originally submitted still be visible there, even if they're no longer considered posts that the user "owns"?
Please let me know any thoughts on the overall idea, any of the above questions, and also feel free to point out other aspects of it that I've surely missed.
(And unrelated, but I've bumped everyone back up to having 5 invite codes available, which you can get from the invite page. I'm still working towards making the site publicly-visible fairly soon, and will hopefully post more info about that before long.)
What if we moved the name of the submitter to appear only in the Topic Log in the sidebar?
This keeps it as publicly available information, but it's not broadcast on the main page, nor even on the submission itself unless you're seeking it. Any changes to the post can be shown in the same location, so it is clear what the submitter provided versus what people have changed. This allows the submitter to not have to "speak for" a new title or tags should they disagree with them. It makes the content the focus, not the submitter, but still allows us to hold people accountable for their submissions should they spam or break the rules.
This sounds reasonable. If you own the content, you can always put that in the title. The downside to submitting anything that has your name next to it is; it seems you are advocating for it, instead of letting it speak for itself.
I'm generally a fan of having users be socially responsible for the things they post as well as being responsible from a moderation perspective. That social pressure to not post bad or low-quality things that aren't rule-breaking can be a powerful and positive force that I'm not sure is worth discarding for the sake of making topic editing less messy.
So imo the general principle of keeping social accountability intact outweighs the benefits of simplifying things like correcting titles.
Social accountability works when the community is small and most of the users are quality ones.
When the site gets bigger that social pressure becomes dimmer. Less people (relatively) are going to point out or even care that a certain post is up to the standards or not.
In larger communities, it's not the users that dictate the quality of the community, it's the rules that enforce a certain standard to be held by the users.
A lot of the proposed ways for the group hierarchy's functionality is geared toward keeping personal interactions intact, it would just happen in groups deeper in the hierarchy rather than having the whole site know who you are. "Bubbling up" from small to big means that at the smaller level, your actions and reputation can still matter.
Not that this isn't a danger, but I don't think anything should be planned with the assumption that Tildes becomes a big faceless mass.
You know, this is a really important point -- it's hard to shake the reddit mindset. It will likely be impossible to keep all of the detrimental social patterns that happen over there from occurring on Tildes, but if this site is designed to merely mitigate their effects, rather than go after the root sources it will make a good outcome that much more difficult to achieve
Edit: I should not imply that Whom does not mean "Not think about the future". I incorrectly assumed that is what he meant.
I think ideas should always be tested against future circumstances. mb3077 is correct in stating that we know what effect larger communities have on posting quality.
It's disingenuous to suggest that Tildes shouldn't be compared to Reddit. They are identical in a lot of ways, one is simply smaller and still focused on quality over quantity. That lasts for now, we don't know what the future holds. And if the site gets larger and larger these things change.
The same scenario can be applied to real world communities. A farming community is policed and held together differently than a city of size, say, New York. People don't care in New York if you scream "Fuck off!!!" but they sure do in small rural communities.
Same thing applys to the internet, we should operate under the assumption Tildes will grow and as such, pre-empt that growth by hypothetically considering our ideas when the user base is larger. In this case, social accountability. Fire and forget features with posts, in my opinion, is a bad idea. And it, as you stated, relieves users of their social responsibility. This is separate from them being held to the rules by admins, but we know as a community gets larger it can be difficult to filter the bad.
I didn't say not to think about the future, but when part of a site's design is to avoid a certain future, you shouldn't make other decisions under the assumption that the site will fail. If you think those plans won't get us there, talk about how to change those rather than changing other things as if it's already failed at doing so.
My apologies, I didn't meant to put words in your mouth. For some reason I surmised from this statement...
That you didn't want to consider the future. I see where I misinterpreted that. Thank you for pointing it out.
Considering it's literally in the docs, and at the bottom of the site that priority is given to quality content and contributions, this seems like extreme scope creep & premature optimisation.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you are saying that because the docs already state the priority of the sight, it is unlikely or "extremely" unlikely in your suggested case of this being "extreme scope creep".
I think that is disingenuous to the argument when we already know that irregardless of a stated objective or priority these things can change. It would be ignorant to assume it will always remain the same. Companies spend millions of dollars on threat analysis preparing for the unknown, and here it costs us nothing but time and oxygen to think about what could happen if the site got bigger and changed.
Things change, it doesn't hurt to prepare for change.
I guess that is where I disagree. The way I think about it is, what if we took the entire user base of Reddit, and placed it inside Tildes? How will the community be different? Will the unique mechanics of Tildes be enough to show improvement over Reddit?
The answer may be yes, I honestly don't know. But I think that we should always look far ahead to the extreme cases when making rules for the site.
But you're planning for failure. If you don't think the planned mechanics are enough to manage that outcome, then that should be the point of improvement, not assuming they won't be and changing other things in response.
Also I very much disagree with making rules based on extreme edge cases, especially on a site that's intended to have a very high number of users who can apply some level of moderation. Like in the docs, "Trust people, but punish abusers."
I don't think that allowing mods to edit posts is changing the mechanics, I see it as adding a new feature. You can argue that this feature undermines or goes against the current mechanics in place, but I personally don't think so.
And it's not like Tildes is a finished product, there are many features that could be added as we go along.
The "extreme cases" was poor wording from me, what I meant is the assumption that Tildes will have a huge population someday, and to build the site accordingly, and I understand why you might disagree with this.
I think this conversation got lost at some point if you're talking about moderators editing posts. I thought this was about removing the original poster from link posts.
Tildes should be built for more people than it has now, yes. But you're making a very strong and pessimistic assumption by saying that a large population means the site will become faceless. I think it is far better to try and attack that problem as some of the planned mechanics do instead of giving up and just trying to mitigate its effects.
It's not pessimism nor a strong assumption IMO. It's based on long, hard experience with countless social sites/systems that have come before this one and significantly degraded in quality due to the ceaseless Eternal September and problems that brings like users becoming a faceless mass due to their sheer numbers. It happened to Usenet, it happened to Slashdot, it happened to reddit, it's happening to Hacker News and IMO it's better to be realistic about the future and plan for it accordingly, rather than stick our heads in the sand, hope for the best and watch the site inevitably die a slow death as a result.
And attempting to learn from the mistakes of the past social sites/systems that came before it and trying to figure out ways to prevent and mitigate those issues is entirely the purpose of Tildes. That's why it's a non-profit, has taken on no VC debt, has no ads, is privacy by design, etc. And allowing mods to edit links and maybe even totally dissociating users from the submissions in the first place is potentially one of the ways we can keep the quality high even after the faceless hordes eventually do breach the gates, so at the very least they are ideas worth exploring, IMO.
I don't understand, how is trying to cater the core design of the site toward preventing this problem sticking our heads in the sand and "hoping for the best," while giving up and just trying to mitigate the effects of it is somehow the proactive approach?
Also I don't buy that it's some inevitable end for social sites, unless maybe you limit the scope such that Tildes couldn't do anything to define itself. There are plenty of sites which are very much not "Reddit-likes" which don't run into this problem: no one complains about Tumblr or most social media being "faceless." That isn't to say Tildes should be more like a social media site, but might there be things to learn there?
The idea for Reddit seemed like it might've solved the problem, with subreddits being a great way to have tightly knit communities which manage themselves. But as most everyone here knows, that didn't quite work out. The site really pushes users to use the front page or /r/all and acts more as a content feed that shoves the core groups out the second their posts get traction on the site at large. Mods don't have tools to make their subs stand out or to manage them as is needed for those subs. There's a lot of things pushing people away from using Reddit in a way that would make it so users have faces and interactions are more personal.
Aside from being open to giving specific groups and their future maintainers the individualized tools necessary to allow groups to define themselves, the hierarchy is probably the most important to keep in mind here. Previous conversations about how the "bubble up" mechanics might work are probably worth going back to, because they can be the key. When a post works its way up the hierarchy, what does that mean? Is it just a matter of who sees it? Are there separate comment sections at each level? If there are, it might be that the deeper in the hierarchy a user goes, the more tightly knit the communities become. If it really does end up being dynamic and ever-expanding (based on frequently used tags, apparent need, whatever), tight communities might be able to outrun the horde by being super super niche. There's very little that's been concretely said on this topic, so I think it's worth talking about what kind of communities different implementations of the hierarchy might create or allow.
Specific suggestions aren't really what I'm trying to do here, but I really hate the idea of making no attempt at being different and simply hoping we can mitigate the same problems that Reddit had because Tildes is purer on the financial end, instead of leveraging the freedom that gives to try and actually address problems. Mild measures to mitigate problems are for when systems are actually in place and changing them would cause problems of its own. We're not there yet, so it makes much more sense to try and find solutions.
EDIT: I don't want this to be baiting you into a debate about what radical departures from Reddit could bring this outcome. My point is simply that focusing on those departures is preferable to resigning ourselves to where Reddit is right now and solving it from that point. This site has the advantage of being able to think about these questions early on, why throw that out and only use the tools that a popular and mature site is left with?
Tildes at this very moment is still fundamentally no different than reddit mechanically speaking, other than some minor tweaks, and as such is still very much vulnerable to the same failings, IMO. And as of right now I would say the core design of the site is not really designed nor sufficient to prevent any of the problems we see on reddit. Trust is an idea that is core and could potentially do so as is the hierarchy and content bubbling up through it but both of those are a ways off implementation yet. But allowing mods to edit links and dissociate users from submissions is potentially another avenue for doing so and so is worth exploring. And that's all I am really trying to say. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
p.s. I absolutely think there is some valid criticism in here against the idea of dissociating OPs from their submissions entirely (yours included), and as I said elsewhere I am not entirely sold on the idea either. However even with that criticism and my own misgivings, I still think it might be worth quickly implementing the idea and trying it out for a while to see what effects it has. This site is a giant experiment, after all, and that's kind of the beauty of it.
I certainly don't think that Tildes is ready to solve these problems as-is! I added an edit that you might not have seen, by the way. I would much rather look big-picture with the planned features and how to use them to shape a better website than use counter-measures to problems we might yet find a way to solve.
Where I agree with you wholeheartedly is experimentation being a good thing. The site has slowed down on changes and things have been much the same without much progress in a while, at least from the perspective of a user. As much as I don't like this idea, I'm getting concerned about very little moving or being tested out. I'm not contributing work myself so I can't really complain, but trying anything out at all seems preferable to having the site stay mostly static. I don't mean to insult anyone contributing to the site, what we have now is already good enough that it's my only permanently pinned tab, but things haven't been "shaken up" in quite a while.
That's totally fair. But, ¿porque no los dos? Isn't it better to have some preventative measures in place as well, just in case we can't find a way to actually "solve" some of these issues or the plans (like Trust) don't work out as expected?
Isn't that exactly what this idea is? It's an easy change to make and could shake things up a bit. Heck, even this topic with the proposal of the very idea got a massive response. Not all against or in favor, but it's still great to see some ideas being lobbed around, debate happening and some passion stirred up in here again. :P
That shakeup is coming, I promise. The site is going publicly viewable soon and we will hopefully get hit with a renewed wave of interest as a result... though that probably won't happen until after Christmas, for obvious reasons.
Oh, that's what I was trying to say, my bad. I'd rather see ideas that I think are bad tried out and discussed than I would the site just treading water.
If the topic still shows who originally submitted it (just not as prominently), that aspect would still be there.
If there is still public record of who originally submitted the link, then I don't think users will be any less defensive over their submissions.
Just change the language of the acknowledgment to frame the user's behavior as callous: "humbly submitted by @exampleUsername with no pretense of ownership"
I don't want to participate in a platform where mods modify what I write and my name is still attached to it.
Something I think your idea misses is at what point the submission is no longer your own. For instance, if a moderator comes and changes the title of the post, is that still yours? If another mod further comes along and edits the post to link to a more reputable news source, is it still your submission?
I am all for using social pressure for good, as far as is possible, but I think we could reach a better compromise. Namely, I would support giving the user an option to dissociate themselves from a post only after it has been edited by a moderator. Any moderator of that group would presumably still be able to see the original submitter, link, title, etc. (for rule enforcement purposes). As it stands now it most of this information would still be in the topic log, so there would still be a stigma against submitting dreck -- I could even see this process being built into trust-system calculations (e.g., if a mod has to keep changing your titles because they're click-bait, well...).
But this also allows us to escape otherwise tricky circumstances. For instance, if someone posts a potentially biased source that strongly supports their own position, would always want their name tied to that post once a moderator changes it to something that defends both sides of an issue?
That wouldn't be a bad middle ground, imo. It's still a little odd in that you have more of an option to separate yourself when you do something bad enough to have your topic edited (not that that's the only instance that topics are edited, of course), which is when that social pressure would be the most necessary. Awkward, but not the worst.
Put that way, I definitely see your point.
I guess I'm basing at least some of my assumptions on reddit here (surprise), in that we'll inevitably end up with at least some crud working it's way up to the higher-level groups. This gives a mechanism to preserve the discussion on a post without having to keep the initial post as-is (i.e., if the OP would delete it after edits).
A better use case would be when several smaller related discussions get merged into a megathread -- who would be the author in that case? It seems most logical to me to dissociate the OPs from the various threads at that point.
I agree with the fault you have found there. Essentially this enables a user to "Fire and forget" when it comes to posts.
Posted something a lot of people call you out for? "Disassociate" and now that post will drift off into oblivion and you no longer need to worry. Unless someone recorded your name down of course.
Want to post propaganda a few times until the admins catch you and ban you? You're gonna get away with it for longer when users are unable to call you out for it via post history. "Fire and forget" baby, it's all you need.
Edit: To clarify though, this would make a great middleground, except for the fact that this enables users to relinquish social responsibility. That is an issue.
Maybe the solution isn't to allow the user to dissociate, but to have that happen solely in response to moderator editing. Then you're liable for all poor content you've submitted, except in the cases where a moderator has taken action on it (and presumably made a note on your behavior, a la the moderator toolbox on reddit)
But like it has been discussed below by others, if a moderator needs to take action on your post as far as changing what YOU the user wrote, at that point it should be removed.
And to further the point on post editing, I'll re-cite my previous issue with moderators having the ability to take action on editing posts.
The issue we are looking at here is identical to the u/Spez fiasco with r/the_donald. The CEO edited peoples posts/comments to what he wanted and didn't tell anyone or give them a chance to say no. And like Deimos just stated....
Immediately followed by....
Whereas the post started with....
This is my primary issue with this whole argument, it's a manufactured issue. The lede has been buried hard here. This is not a post quality issue, it's a user rights issue.
We currently have a win/win scenario with users. Post good content, get upvotes. Post bad content, no upvotes or you get called out. The community self moderates via upvotes.
Post good content / get nothing. Win/Loss? Post bad content/ get nothing. Loss/Loss?
I just don't see how any of this benefits anyone but the admins having the ability to tweak posts however they want and as a result users don't have any right to complain.
The benefit is that the users of the site get higher-quality submissions, due to allowing mods or trusted users to improve them, without the (legitimate) concerns associated with editing posts that belong to other users.
Using my example again of the BELOW trailer submission that I edited, which of these is the important part?
I think that overall, #2 is clearly more important. Tildes is content-centric, not user-centric. For example, you subscribe to groups that are about subjects that you're interested in, you don't follow individual users. Other sites like Twitter, Instagram, etc. take the opposite approach, but the overall structure of Tildes is definitely based more around the content. Because of that, if it's a high-quality, appropriate submission, it shouldn't matter who the specific user that posted it was.
I understand your summary here, and I understand why you think that removing ownership provides a net benefit to everyone.
But I think we fundamentally disagree on what is good for User experience. I also think that comes from my preconceived notion of what will come of Tildes vs. what you the creator want it to end up as.
I think I've laid out my arguments in terms of why I believe this issue is not relevant as well as why I would disagree if it was. There isn't much more for me to speak to on the issue but I do need to spend more time reading the docs on the site.
Thanks for the discussion.
It's interesting to think about.
We don't really spend much time re-evaluating the mechanics of forums we take for granted. The prominent display of the name of the person sharing content is one of those things - that's just the way it's always been all the way back to the earliest days of forums and BBS systems. These standard mechanics have a massive impact on people's behavior even though we're not thinking about them. A person's 'handle' is their core identity mechanic on any social site.
Like you say, when people submit a link they naturally display a protective ownership reflex. Is this reflex a good thing, or a bad thing, or more dependent on circumstance? If we don't display the name of the original poster, does that do anything to lessen the incentive to post in the first place? What about reputation - not the numerical kind Tildes is tracking - the name recognition kind we all get from seeing many posts by the same person, for good or for ill? I think it's very likely that altering aspects of ownership will have effects on all of these things and more we haven't thought of yet.
That doesn't make it a bad idea. Managing people's behavior is an impossible task, and so is predicting it. We can't just say 'do this for everyone's benefit' because people don't listen, especially on a site they visit primarily for entertainment and distractions. Not one person reading this knows reddit's real rules, most of their favorite sub's rules, or follows them well. Walls of rules everyone ignores aren't a solution. This may come off as a bit pessimistic, however I really believe the only way to make effective, widespread changes in people's behavior is to build the system in such a way that it both makes the good behavior the laziest/default action and reinforces that good behavior with some sort of reward, even if that reward is as silly as a number counting upwards.
Perhaps we ask this question and think about it a bit differently. What changes in human behavior will this cause, and what are we gaining, or losing?
The first thing that comes to mind here is the impact on identity. This change makes the groups less about individual users and more about the group (and the content) itself. I think it's likely to cause a shift towards a stronger group identity. It may help cut down on harassment of prominent submitters as well. That never really struck me as a huge issue that would justify grand changes but it is a potential side benefit.
I like the idea of placing the domain name in place of the user if only because it'll make people more aware over time what content shows up from which sites - the reputation shifts from the submitters to the content creators and domain owners. Obviously we'd want to go further than just the domain name in some cases, such as using channel names for youtube or artist names for bandcamp, maybe even as far as reporter names for journalist sites. With the metadata capabilities we've talked about exploring that isn't much in the way of 'extra' work.
The second thing that comes to mind is that if usernames aren't prominent on link posts, that will have an impact on the use of text posts. This seems like it'll push people towards making text posts long-term. Having their name attached to a good thread they start grants more recognition/reward than seeing a simple link do well. This change would increase the divide between original content and simply sharing someone else's creations.
What bothers me here though is that this doesn't actually 'solve' any of the issues that brought this discussion up in the first place. We still need to remove posts, edit posts, change links, change titles, and track the who/what/how/when/why of all of these changes and who submitted something regardless. None of that goes away just because usernames aren't so firmly attached to the submission any longer, and we'll still need to do these things to text posts where the user's name is prominently attached.
We're adding a lot of complexity here without gaining any real benefit, all for what looks like the sake of not pissing off a small, overly sensitive group of people who react badly to being moderated. Frankly, let them be offended - it's good for the soul. People don't deserve special treatment just because their egos are fragile. The kind of person who gets offended at a title change is still going to be offended even if their name isn't so prominent.
I think what more people are worried about is that editors/mods don't put words in their mouths abusing their powers. That's why any such change should automatically trigger post disassociation. We can also record the original link/title/etc in the topic log for anyone who is curious, so the record is still preserved and open/honest.
I like the idea of strengthening group identity. I like finding a way to reward text posts with more recognition. I like seeing the domain name or content creator/channel identity on the submission. We can do all of those things through other means, though, and probably better... so I'm having a hard time seeing the point of this change.
I think it's important to reiterate that this sort of editing is not supposed to happen often. It's a rare event, and if mod teams are editing 80% of a group's posts, we need to do something about that - either build them a better mechanic to accomplish whatever it is they think they need to be doing, or in the case of a rogue team, shut that behavior down.
I'd leave things as is for ownership right now. I think I like taking the username off of link submissions from the main view, though. I think the domain/OC name has far more value, and I don't think we need to repeat reddit's cluttered mess. The submitter's name could go in the sidebar, or be only visible viewing the topic directly, or de-emphasized in other ways. I don't mind that at all.
As soon as any moderator/editor/whatever alter's the user's submission, they should be disassociated from it (and notified) except for a note in the topic log. If you want to go the extra mile, you could let them re-affirm/re-associate as a way of saying they agree with the changes.
Definitely for forums, but not necessarily if you look at some of the earliest sites that I would consider "link aggregators", like Slashdot and Boing Boing. You could submit stories to both of them, but they had to go through an approval process, and then the "ownership" would transfer to whichever editor approved the post, usually with just a "hat tip" ("h/t") sort of acknowledgement of the user that submitted it in the first place.
For example, if you look at this old archived version of Slashdot's front page, you can see that the top posts say "Posted by timothy" and just include something like "LMCBoy writes..." to acknowledge the user that submitted it. It's clear that LMCBoy doesn't "own" the submission any more, but you still know that they submitted it.
Similarly, on Boing Boing, you have things like "posted by Mark Frauenfelder", but with "Becky sez:" or "via RealityCarnival" or "Thanks, Simon!", etc.
Of course, we don't have a similar sort of pre-approval process so it's not that similar overall, but having submissions "distanced" a bit from the person submitting them to the site isn't particularly unusual.
Hah, when I was on slashdot I always assumed that was the user, not the editor.
And now you've got me thinking about vetted approval mechanisms for Tildes. An edge case but it'd be welcome in places like /r/askhistorians.
Yeah, and it's even the way Slashdot still works, even though it's moved a little closer to reddit/HN/Tildes-style now.
There's the "Firehose" page, where you see everything along with which user submitted it, and users can vote on them, which makes them more likely to be chosen by an editor. But then if anything gets chosen to be put on the actual front page, it still always just says the editor's name ("Posted by BeauHD"), and I actually don't even see any indication of the original submitter any more.
I wouldn't want to cater to unreasonable people who want complete control over their submissions. That's not what tildes is about.
I've suggested this previously: if a user deletes their post, only their username is removed from it.
I think having your name on a submission (and consequently seeing "your" votes, is a strong incentive for contributing. I wouldn't take that away.
I don't think it's unreasonable—after editing, they end up with their name attached to something that's different than what they actually submitted. I think it's understandable for people to be unhappy about that sometimes.
And yes, getting votes is definitely an incentive for posting, but is it a positive one overall? We're already deliberately staying away from other similar mechanics that can lead to undesirable behaviors (accumulated total score for all your posts, trophies/achievements, etc.), so I think it's worth considering whether ownership of link topics encourages positive contributions (through responsibility), or negative ones (through posting low-quality/sensationalized links because they are likely to do well).
Especially in less active groups, sometimes all the positive feedback you get are upvotes. I'm not sure if that's totally relevant in this case, though.
I think nacho's idea is great, regardless of what'll be concluded here. But there are privacy aspects about that: how do we make sure the user can truly dissociate themselves given someone in the comments can mention them as the poster.
Maybe a nice compromise would be to make posts edited by mods into a "community wiki" a la StackExchange? The user would only be mentioned in the topic log as the initial poster and would not be able to edit / delete.
You are talking about something completely different than what most people thought they were getting from the onset - are the mods mods or editors- curators of content?
Are you trying to build a community and let the group as a whole judge individual members or pre-arbitrate content based on your own subjective aesthetic. Users are creators of the content on your site - give them a little respect for the work they do. Mods should only be involved in special circumstances. Let the members' work stand on its own merit.
We must give people the ability to delete at any time, anything they post, and for any reason or no reason at all... and not a 'fake' delete, a real, 'holy-shit it's not even in the backups anymore' delete. That's a legal requirement thanks to GDPR - and it's not the only one. We'll need to let people download their histories as well.
This is not correct - the relevant definition in the GDPR is "his/her personal data" - their layman's FAQ states:
The link in and of itself does not constitute personal data and Tildes is under no legal obligation to remove the link. There may be a case for removing the linked submitter name, but the link itself can be left up with no possible threat.
That's good to know, simplifies things a bit.
I was more worried about comments with GDPR. People leak personal info all the time. Seems like the easiest solution is just to put the user in control of all of their content and let them handle it. That also seems like the 'right' choice - it is their content, they created it, they should have that power.
Comments, sure - links are a community resource though (especially if a discussion has started around one already).
I'm a bit ignorant here, but are big sites like reddit and facebook doing this already? I know reddit never did that in the past (allowing you to download your history). Is it because the site's Canada-based? I realize it could be used in the EU and therefore should comply, but I didn't realize that was going to apply to all these huge sites.
GDPR is an odd duck that lands squarely in legal what-the-fuck territory.
The moment anyone in the EU accesses your website, you are required by EU law to conform to the GDPR - and where your site is hosted is irrelevant, it could be hosted on the moon and make no difference. Considering Tildes can be accessed from inside the EU, that means Tildes is required to conform.
GDPR levies fines in the hundreds of millions, or 4% of your yearly net revenue (not profit) whichever is larger - so the EU is not fucking around here. Right now they are being rather nice and giving places like facebook/reddit time to add 'privacy' to their platforms. Eventually they'll start making examples out of the large players who don't comply.
The odds of Tildes ever being on the EU's radar are slim to none, but since the GDPR makes quite reasonable demands for user privacy, there's no good reason not to conform to it. It's a good law. What other less good laws start to follow it worldwide we'll just have to see.
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm really glad it's going to apply to all these sites that have been getting away with lax privacy for years.
A link topic is someone's choice to submit a particular item of content to Tildes, be it a news article, an opinion piece, an educational video, a song, a press release, a new game promotion, whatever. Someone has seen this content on the internet (or tracked it down) and decided to share it on Tildes. That's the first decision: "This is the content I'm submitting."
Then they decide how and where to submit it: which group to post it in, what title to write, which tags to add. These are decisions about how to present the content, after deciding to submit it: "This is how I'm presenting the content."
If someone comes along later and changes that submission, they're changing one of two things: how the content is presented, or the content itself. In terms of presentation, they might move the post to a different group, or edit the title, or change the tags. The submitter's choice of content is still present, but it has been repackaged for the benefit of other users on Tildes: including it in a more appropriate group where people will appreciate it more; presenting it with a title that reflects the content better so that people won't have misleading expectations; categorising it with tags that enable people to find it (or hide it) as necessary. These are presentation-level choices. They're cosmetic alterations that don't change the content that was submitted.
However, changing the link itself is different. This is overriding the submitter's decision about what to share. That's a major change. If someone changes the link, they are basically removing the original post and replacing it with something of their own choice. If the original submitted content was so bad that it needed to be replaced, then simply remove it. There's no benefit in gutting the post and replacing the content with something else. Any comments that were posted on that submission are suddenly orphaned because the content they were referring to is no longer present. Suddenly, those comments about Submission A are attached to Submission B. There's no continuity.
I believe that links should not be replaced. If they're bad enough, they should be removed and a new link should be submitted separately.
Therefore, the problem of ownership of a changed submission is greatly reduced: noone is being asked to be held responsible for content that they themselves did not decide to submit. The remaining changes (group, title, tags) are mainly cosmetic. The Topic Log shows who made what changes, so it can be seen that the original submitter made different choices when submitting the content. However, if someone doesn't want to be associated with those changes on their submission, then it should be absolutely their prerogative to delete the resulting post if they want to.
And, yes, I'm coming at this from the assumption that people should be associated with the content they submit. This contributes to a person's reputation on this website just as much as any comments they write. It's not all about hidden algorithms calculating a "trust" value. People respond to social cues; we are social creatures. /u/evilnight on Reddit (I think that's Amarok here on Tildes?) shared a "Game of Trust" which shows how people respond to other people based on their historical behaviour. Well, the content that a person chooses to submit is part of that historical behaviour. People on Tildes build an image of other people based on the content they submit. Our submissions form just as much of our history here on Tildes as our comments.
This proposal would also have the side-effect of hiding large parts of some people's history on Tildes. All we would see is their comments. What if someone submits links, but rarely comments? They would look like a low-activity user, and be an unknown cipher to other people. Whereas, if other people could see their posting history, they would be able to build a better picture of the things that person is interested in.
If you need to display more information about a submission on the front page, it's not like there's a lack of room! There's a lot of white space to fill on the front page; just shift the username across a bit. Or, if absolutely necessary, do as @kfwyre suggested and move the submitter's name to the Topic Log.
I strongly believe people should be associated with the content they submit - good and bad.
This makes a lot of sense, nobody owns a news story and any ownership feelings should really be set aside, and the website design should definitely reflect that. I think this would also go hand in hand with the ability to submit alternate links to a topic, further reducing the ownership sense a single user has over a topic.
Tildes is crowdsourcing information and discussion about a topic. On the spectrum of online contribution, between factbook comments and Wikipedia I think tildes is closer to Wikipedia then say reddit. This idea is a simple way make that clear with just the website design.
Having the original poster come up in the sidebar, would be a clear way give credit but beyond that the thread belongs to the tildes community because it's them that will make it worthwhile reading with their comments, ideas and discussion.
This is how I feel about thread ownership as well. Threads belong to the 'group' that spawns them. Sure, OP gets credit for finding the content and sharing it to start off the discussion. We also have to give credit to people commenting on it, since that's what we're here for in the first place - community discussion. The groups create the threads together. We should give them some tools to assist in community-based curation of those threads, not lock them in ice the instant they are shared.
I think we can move beyond this 'one link per thread' mentality as well. Why should there be only one link? Why not let the group add related links and information in an ongoing fashion, with the first link shared just being the starting point? Groups normally do this in the comments, but there's no reason we couldn't make it more organic and part of the submission up top. There's an opportunity here for OP to manage their own threads as well with some extra control over this process - we don't want this to be just an editor-only thing. Megathreads on reddit have been hinting at mechanics like this for years. I'll have to spend some time thinking about it and see what the possibilities are.
I am really starting to like the idea of making links and text posts into different animals.
Not in this new system, they wouldn't. Noone (apart from admins & mod-types) would know who submitted the content.
You must have missed the part about it being in the topic log. Everything will always be there.
I feel that this is a manufactured issue but at the same time I don't see how removing ownership of a post would solve that manufactured issue.
I do feel that Whom makes a great point in that removing ownership of posts voids that user of their social responsibility. What is to stop users from either essentially anonymously spreading propaganda or fake news and then disingenuously representing themselves in the comments?
And while "moderation" should solve that, we know these things can slip through the cracks.
But I digress, back to why this feels manufactured.
It is of my humble opinion that there is a clearly obvious reason why these users are upset or react badly to having their posts changed. You took their post. This is assuming these changes were made without authorization.
If I said a sentence out loud into the air, and you changed that sentence so that other people heard it differently and never heard what I meant to say, I would be very upset.
That's an invasion of my personal speech. I no longer have control of what I stated, suddenly my post history no longer reflects my own thoughts and speech. It doesn't matter if its punctuation, spelling or wording. You have effectively changed someones statement in mid-air.
Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, famously was crucified in many threads for the past two years after he was found guilty of editing critical comments of him.
So it is my understanding then, with my prior disclosed assumptions, this is a case of unauthorized editing of a users posts. So then by effect, a users post history can no longer be trusted as a real reflection of that users.
Now, having addressed the manufactured part of it, let me get back to why I think the proposed solution still doesn't work.
Who gets to see that record? Just you/admins? That doesn't work either. Suddenly users don't have a post history to reflect on. If it's everyone can see it, what's the point in removing ownership? If it's a good story, a user gets the satisfaction of knowing they were the ones to share and provide that good story to their fellow users. "Upvotes" and the "Exemplary" tags and other such things are important to "rewarding" users for submitting quality content. And while the supposed changes only are supposed for link posts, it's still the same. If I submit a life changing article from a tiny blog with only a few views, I feel like I should reap a few "upvote" benefits for my time spent searching and sharing that piece.
In summary, this issue feels like, for lack of a better term, a you issue. I see 0 discernible reason to remove ownership of posts besides granting anyone but the user a benefit of having control without dissent.
Perhaps I am too focused on the Admin v. User perspective on this and I invite others to tell me if so, and from there whether they agree or disagree!
Edit: Formatting.
I kept thinking on this and incase my prior thoughts were scrambled I wanted to make sure to address this point by point for things I didn't prior address.
Self auditing a checkbox doesn't work especially for reasons I've listed below. A standardized tag would only be user enforceable or moderators after evidence has been submitted? This just adds extra steps to everyone's life. I think this would be a bad feature/solution for the proposed change.
Propaganda is a very real and present issue in todays internet. Knowing where your info is coming from and who is disseminating it is important. Roger Stone (The one currently under investigation for foreign conspiracy.) was found to be disseminating articles painting him and his crimes in positive lights on Reddit, infowars and other sites. Removing a users identity from the post only encourages this behavior.
I don't think what we need is more domain information, or whatever else. If it's an article, we should go read it and the authors name will be there. If its a video, we will see where its from. Adding in what equivocates to the duplication of data we will already see just seems overly redundant. I see this as a waste of space.
Basically every time. While this actually takes the idea of "You cant take back what you say" to its logical conclusion, it doesn't work from a user rights perspective of editing/deleting THEIR submitted content. It generally will create more work for moderators I believe as well. You will inevitably receive messages titled "plz remove this post."
I touched on this above when I stated..
And expanding on that, either you remove it from post histories to keep a "User does not have ownership of this post" motif which still harshly effects a user by removing their footprint / history on the site. Perhaps this is a Me. issue, but if I could not see my post history for submitted links then I would lose the ability to see the sum of my contributions. I could not reflect on past thoughts, opinions or relevant events to me that I shared. I feel this is harmful to my experience as a user.
I'm very confused by this comment. You're both saying it's not an issue and then explaining why it is an issue. Then you reject an idea to address the issue by saying again that it's not actually an issue.
Right! To explain, I disagree with your post. I feel that it's not an issue, but I am lining out arguments explaining that "If this even was an issue, here's what I think." but I remind again at the end, I think this is a non-issue and the discussion is invalid.
Edit: Essentially, I disagree but I'm trying my best to explain why and consider your point of view.
Based on your other comments, I think the fundamental disagreement is that you think posts should never be edited at all by anyone except the poster. I disagree with that (at least in the case of link topics), and think that it's strictly superior to be able to fix a post than be forced to completely remove it (assuming it's fixable in some way).
As a specific example, when the trailer for the game BELOW was submitted the other day, the link originally pointed to a different copy of it on YouTube. Someone had re-uploaded the trailer on their own channel, and added a little intro to it that advertised their channel but had nothing to do with the game. I replaced the link to point to the official location of the trailer, and the result is a better version of the submission.
How would being forced to completely remove that submission and have someone re-submit the correct link have been better? There were already comments on the submission as well, should all of those just be lost? If you can't edit submissions, you surely can't move comments to a different topic than they were originally posted on either.
So overall, the point is that even though we disagree with whether posts should ever be edited, there's also an aspect that we agree upon, which is that it's problematic to edit other users' posts and leave their name associated with something different from what they posted. That's why my suggestion is to eliminate the ownership, because then that aspect is no longer there.
You hit the nail on the head! I think we agree on a lot of things but we see the issue differently.
After giving it more thought let me explain. I am concerned about maintaining Integrity of a users post. My concern for Integrity overall has to do with bad/good faith actors, their effect on user opinions and upvotes.
If a user posts the following "The Sky is bleu". You would suggest to edit the "bleu" to say "blue" potentially. And as you have helpfully pointed out, you have made edits to posts to what you believe is a better submission.
Except, you just violated multiple protocols of social norms/public knowledge. You have...
These are irregardless of your intent. You changed everything, just by modifying the link result.
Intent is important here, as the above examples assume you are acting in good faith. Whereas we know humans are not perfect, we can only assume that at some point even as someone as level and approachable as yourself will inevitably make a mistake. It could be gathered then that a mistake such as editing comments could happen.
This issue now extends to anyone with that power. If admins or moderators have the ability to change posts we cannot maintain integrity. From a moral standpoint, we can not assume that all moderators/admins/ even you will always act in good faith when it comes to violating the integrity of a users post.
The question of "Why be forced to remove a submission when I could just fix it!" is great, but only when you are assuredly acting in good faith.
Eliminating ownership solves everything above, but at what cost? The balance of user submitted content feels woefully inadequate now. Not to mention fire and forget attitudes towards content quality.
Submit Good content + Receive upvotes/endorsement/good feedback for users = Win/Win
Submit bad content + Receive no upvotes/ negative feedback = Lose/Lose
No Content Submitted because there is no incentive = Lose/Lose.
I post content and I post my opinions because I am eager to receive feedback, conversation and acknowledgement towards myself. Perhaps others feel differently and that is why it is important we facilitate this conversation, but I personally would not enjoy a site where my name is not associated with my actions.
I still in no way endorse the proposed idea, but I have an idea.
It sounds like we NEED a provable audit trail/change control showing posters and general users when admins make changes. This would help ensure the integrity of comments/posts submitted by users. It surely would make me more comfortable.
Perhaps this will help relax users when there is a disclaimer showing that "Yes this WAS your post, but we made changes and here is what."
We already do have the audit trail in the Topic Log in the sidebar (though it doesn't currently show link changes, which does need to be fixed). For example, look at the Topic Log on this post from yesterday, it shows the title change that I made as well as tag changes made by both me and the submitter.
Thank you for pointing that out, I am new here but I should have confirmed the existence of that feature already.
Let's get philosophical...
What is a post? At its core, what constitutes the thing we call a "post"? Comments aren't part of a post: a post exists even if people don't comment on it. The group (e.g. ~news) is merely the repository for the post, not the post itself. Tags are ways of categorising a post, but are not the post. We're left with only three things that could define "post": the link, the content at the link, and the title. However, even the title is only a description of the post. It's crucial, but it's not the post itself. The post itself is therefore the link and the linked content. This what defines a post. This is its identity.
Therefore, changing the link (and thereby directing people to different linked content) isn't fixing the post, it's altering its core identity. Even if that change is as innocuous and minimal as linking to an ad-free version of the same trailer, it is still different content. The post has been replaced with something else.
How come that change isn't listed in the Topic Log for that submission?
Not one bit. In fact, altering the link in these cases is recovering the post's core identity which has been stolen by some asshat looking for revenue.
@cfabbro explained this in the other thread quite well.
Don't think this is a rare occurrence, either. I've seen it take over subreddits to the tune of 80% of submissions. It's a vile cancer that robs content creators of their revenue - outright theft, which ought to come with fines and/or jail time, but the law is eons behind morality when it comes to internet issues.
I also think you're selling comments short. Any good discussion ends up being worth far more than the link which sparked it. That's why I have a problem just nuking a thread with lots of comments every time this linkjacking crap comes up. The comments are far more valuable than the link - otherwise, why share it here and not somewhere else?
The solution is dirt simple - edit the link to stop the linkjacking. That's it, there's nothing more to it than that. The creators get their attention, the readers keep their discussion, the link still points to the same thing just now on the proper channel/site/location. The linkjacking asshat gets a red flag, and if that behavior keeps repeating, the banhammer.
The only drawback to this solution is a different kind of asshat with editing power who's altering things without cause. There's an answer for that too - revert their changes, then remove the editing capability they've shown an inability to use wisely. That's why all this goes in the topic logs, so when it happens we can identify it.
You seem to be expecting someone to edit a link in a post to point to something else entirely different. That's not the intended use of the editing features.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that the comments were about a specific linked item, and if you remove that linked item and replace it with something else, some or many of those comments will lose their context.
I have seen people advocate for this. "No biased news articles! These should all be replaced by links to reputable news sites." (Where "reputable" means "sites I agree with".) They even want opinion pieces about news replaced by neutral articles.
Exactly. What if that brief preview advertising that person's channel happened to spark a large comment thread about that intro. It may be irrelevant to the original link's intended subject, but comments occur organically and can go places no one originally expected. Changing the original link destroys that context. I suppose that could be vetted, but there are quite a few ways that could go wrong.
I think you're making it out to be black-and-white when it's really not. When I replaced the re-uploaded trailer with the official one, it was completely identical other than no longer having an irrelevant channel intro. The content of the topic did not change at all, and the identity of the post didn't change. Any comments about the trailer itself would still be completely relevant.
Similarly, yesterday I replaced Gizmodo blogspam with the actual source. Again, the underlying story is exactly the same, and the true content is the same. Any comments that had been talking about the actual study would be just as relevant. Sure, any comments that were discussing specific wording in the Gizmodo post would no longer be relevant, but I'd argue that those probably aren't very valuable comments anyway, and they could be marked as no longer relevant, off-topic, etc. using something like the label system that we already have.
Of course if we were to do something like replace an opinion article with a completely different article, that would be changing the core of the submission. But that's only one possibility out of a lot of potential reasons for changing a link.
The Topic Log doesn't currently show link changes. It's been so rare for me to change a link that I usually just leave a comment when I do it, but I intend to make it a proper, publicly-logged function soon.
So, you got rid of someone's post and replaced it with one of your own. Your content is now posted under that other person's username (I won't @-mention them, to avoid creating drama).
It is that black and white. You decided there was a better article about this topic and, rather than submit it yourself (which I know you're more than capable of doing), you placed it under someone else's username, making them accountable for the link you chose. What if someone reading that post has a grudge against Amnesty USA as one of those "SJW leftie" organisations? They're going to express their discontent to the person who posted that article - who is currently listed as someone else, not @Deimos.
I am not accusing you of being underhanded. I know you did this for good motives. I am making the point that the content you choose to submit to Tildes should be linked to your username, not someone else's.
If someone else submits content which is not suitable for Tildes, then they should have their post removed, and they should be informed of that removal. How else is that person going to know their chosen content wasn't good enough for Tildes? How can they make better choices in the future?
If the link change action is visible in the topic log (which is the plan) that is entirely not true about accountability. And that is also what this idea of disentangling the submitters identity from topics is also geared towards addressing, since then they would not have their name front and center on the topic so changes would not be mistakenly attributed to them. And I say mistakenly because that's what most of your arguments rely on... people misunderstanding who is responsible despite there being topic log clearly indicating otherwise.
It would be.... in the topic log. And if this idea gets implemented then the topic wouldn't even be strictly attached to the submitter in the first place.
Removing a topic because of a bad link (which the submitter may not even be aware is bad, e.g. linking to stolen content they encountered elsewhere) is just shortsighted. It's throwing the baby (comments) out with the bathwater (link). And there are also cases where, when a topic has already built up some momentum and is removed, that doing so also kills any chance a new, better submission (e.g. a non-stolen content) has of getting as popular. That scenario plays on time and time again on video heavy subreddits.
And how user will be informed is no different than if their topic was removed. If a moderator/high trust users steps in and says, "this is a much better link, we are changing it" that is negative feedback that is just as clear as if the topic had flat out been removed.
Would it not be possible to resolve this by having a locked version of the old thread with comments preserved accessible from the new thread and listed as conversation on a related (but not quite the same!) topic?
This could be linked with however it's shown to users why there's a new thread in their face.
That only solves some of the problems with removing topics but not the major core issues with removing them instead of simply allowing them to be fixed. E.g. This is an actually a scenario I have seen play out countless times on reddit over the years:
A user encounters a "cool" link somewhere (facebook, chatting with friends online, etc) and so they want to share that with others. They submit it to reddit with a catchy title and it quickly becomes super popular. After a few hours it's pointed out that the content in the link is actually "stolen" (freebooted/linkjacked/reuploaded) from another source.
Mods on reddit now have two options:
Option 1 is problematic because the vast majority of traffic will still be being sent to the stolen content and the original creator will only receive a tiny fraction of the traffic. This also continues to reward the content thief for their underhanded behavior and actively undermines the original content creator because it's unlikely their original content will get the same attention any time soon.
Option 2 is problematic because by nuking the submission it destroys access to the comments section and treats the comments as having less value than the link. And the unfortunate fact about resubmitting content that has already gained in popularity before it is removed is that the new submission, even if it is from the original source, is very unlikely to receive nearly the same level of attention again, nor even receive as much as it would have had the original submission continued to stay up. This is due to the visibility essentially starting from zero again and a large portion of users having already seen the content (albeit from the stolen source) so not bothering to view/vote on it again. And in fact the large majority will probably be entirely unaware that the original content they looked at was even stolen to begin with.
Your suggestion only solves the first problem with Option 2 but not the second or third. But on Tildes it's possible to allow a third Option, which solves all of them. Allow moderators to selectively replace links when the original is problematic (stolen content/clickbait/blogspam/etc). This preserves the comments on the subject, preserves the submission's visibility in the group so traffic continues to flow and makes sure the traffic goes where it should have in the first place from now on. And so long as the link change is recorded in the Topic log, so whichever moderator changed the link can be held accountable for doing so, the only problem with it is the OP still being visibly associated with the new link despite it not being the one they, strictly speaking, originally submitted. However this is a minor problem compared to the others IMO and is also easily solvable, either by removing the OPs name when a link is changed by a mod and simply moving it to the Topic Log as "originally submitted by", or not having that strong an association to a particular user who submits content in the first place by only ever showing the original submitter's name in the Topic Log to begin with.
Hm, I don't feel as strongly on this as Algernon here, but I think I value a user only being associated with things they posted themselves a decent amount more than I do the popularity of something that gets changed. Keeping the sort in mind is probably important here, too. All it takes is one comment to put the new topic back on top, and if anything it's getting a free bump from being posted again. It's hard to see things getting buried in the same way they do on Reddit when losing votes means next to nothing.
Scrubbing a post of the OP whenever it's edited by a moderator seems reasonable to me too, though, even if it is awkward like arghdos and I were talking about elsewhere in this thread.
That's a good point, however it's not guaranteed to be as successful as the first time or even continue to be as successful as it would have been had the link simply been replaced, whereas simply replacing the link is a guarantee of that.
Yeah, TBH I am not entirely sold on totally disentangling OPs from their submissions since some sense of ownership often encourages their participation in the comments (for good or ill, but mostly good IMO) and that sense of ownership also provides incentive to submit in the first place, to some degree. I know it's petty/shallow but I often feel a sense of pride when a topic I submitted gains popularity even if I didn't create that content in the first place. That's not necessarily why I submit things, but it is definitely a factor in the reward structure of doing so. So I think simply scrubbing the OPs name when a link is changed and moving it to the topic log (so they can still be held accountable if they show a pattern of submitting "bad" links that need to be replaced) is the best option here.
p.s. "but I think I value a user only being associated with things they posted themselves a decent amount more than I do the popularity of something that gets changed"
If it was your content and hard work that was stolen and someone else was taking the credit (and monetary rewards) for, would you still feel the same?
Same. I don't give a shit about karma. Voting on a post is only feedback to me that people have seen that post and appreciate it. That's valuable to me. Finding good content to post here isn't always easy. Some of it comes from my ordinary news reading, but some of it comes from my deliberate efforts to track down suitable content for Tildes. I want to get something back for that. And, seeing my post get votes or be discussed gives me that positive feedback: "I done good!"
I don't see the connection. Whether the link is changed or the entire thread is deleted, that's getting rid of the "stolen" or otherwise offending first link.
Here is the connection. Getting rid of the offending link is not the most important part of the equation, IMO. To me, the most important part is giving the original creators of work their proper due. Think of it like this:
You put a ton of blood, sweat and tears into making a great video one day and you upload it to your YouTube channel. At some point someone downloads it, reuploads it to their own monetized channel and eventually that link gets submitted to reddit, where it gets super popular but without any credit, traffic or money going to you. Which would you rather have; The video left up with a mere comment somewhere pointing to your channel, the content removed (but the odds of your original getting the same traction upon resubmission being unlikely as a result) or the link edited to point to your video so that all future traffic goes to you?
I suspect most people would prefer the last option.
That's fair, I guess, though if the sacrifice to achieve the ideal result for that creator is negative for Tildes I'm not sure it's a trade that should be made. Correcting it at all already seems extremely generous to me, though still within reason. That's just personal values and I'm not really willing to make a definitive statement there even for myself...I just know that I'm more personally invested in having the best Tildes possible than I am the site doing everything in its power to allocate attention to the news source that deserves it the most, you know?
I guess at that point I'd just fall back on what I said about the free bump. If we ever aren't sorting by activity by default, maybe whatever other metric is used could be carried over. Moving votes to a slightly different link seems much less problematic to me than moving comments over.
See, for me, I want the best site possible but not at the expense of ethics. And I am especially passionate about creators of content getting their due since I know how hard, precarious and financially uncertain that creative lifestyle/career path can be and without them, what would we have to entertain ourselves with?
That's not a bad idea either... but honestly, how is all that fundamentally any different than simply just removing the OP from the "submitted by" tag and editing the link?
To me it seems like an ethical decision to have the right link posted rather than the "stolen" one. I'm not sure that responsibility extends to making sure that right link is also popular.
Well, I echo what algernon has been saying about comments relying on the particular context of the original link.
Why should the rights of the one who committed a wrong (intentionally or otherwise) by submitting stolen content supersede that of the creator whose content was stolen? IMO it is the responsibility of the site to make amends to the creator as best they can and even to try to do everything in its power (like banning known freebooting channels, blogspam sites, etc) to try and prevent that situation from occurring in the first place as well.
I'm not sure how deleting the post of the wrong link and moving it to a post with the new one is putting the one who committed a wrong above the original creator. It's punishing the one who did something wrong (maybe with mod action if it repeats / looks intentional) and putting the right one up. Ensuring the correct link is popular seems above and beyond to me, though I'm not really sure how to argue with what you think the responsibility of the site is except to say that I don't think I agree.
I've got no objection to that, really. Not my personal crusade, but it seems like a sensible thing to do.
Because your (and Algernon's) primary concern here with editing links seems to be the submitter's right not have their link tampered with by anyone. Removing or even moving the link is giving that right priority over the content creators because there is available an option that provides the best possible outcome for the content creator and simply deleting the original topic or moving the link is not it. So that's why I asked, why should the rights of the one who committed a wrong (intentionally or otherwise, to not have their submission tampered with) supersede that of the creator of the content who was stolen from?
And my rationale basically goes like this: The content submitter has the right to not have their link tampered with given their username is attached to it. I am not denying that. But IMO they can lose that right under certain conditions.
Now, even in those cases I agree that it is unfair to have the submitter's username still attached to the submission despite it no longer being what they originally chose to submit. However that is what this very idea of never strongly associating users to their submissions can potentially address, as can simply removing the association upon edits by others but still storing it in the topic log, simply for accountabilities sake.
And as for why I think it is the responsibility of the site to redress the issue? That is largely ideological on my part but is due to the fact that the vast majority of social sites these day try everything in their power to absolve themselves of as much responsibility for their users actions as they can... and that is honestly why I think we as a species are in this fucking mess right now.
Facebook claims no responsibility for their Whatsapp users in India using that platform to incite lynchings. Facebook claims no responsibility for their users in Myanmar inciting and participating in a fucking genocide through their platform. Twitter claims no responsibility for the rise of the alt-right movement on their platform nor for allowing the shill accounts of a foreign power to manipulate the American population come time to vote. Reddit claims no responsibility for the alt-right and bigots taken root there, their message being spread through their platform or the actions taken by them directly as a result of this garbage being allowed (e.g. Charlottesville). Etc. Etc. Etc.
IMO it's about goddamn time a social site actually did take ethics seriously and made a serious effort to take responsibility for their users' actions while also trying to make amends for them when they are inappropriate, however they can (within reason)... Like when someone links to stolen content instead of the original authors, replacing the link with the proper one, regardless of any protestations from that original submitter over their "rights" to not have their fuck up fixed by someone who actually cares.
I agree that Tildes probably shouldn't leave "stolen" content or whatever else up. It should take action and responsibility in the same way Reddit should take action and responsibility for the alt-right's presence on the platform. They should erase the bad things. But on the other hand, I don't think a content creator has a right to their content being popular here, and I also believe a site like this has more responsibility toward its users than it does toward lining the pockets of others.
Idk if I like framing this in terms of rights, but if I go along with that for a moment, they shouldn't be something that can be revoked in any circumstance. If users are to have rights, the answer to abuse should be removal and bans, not removal of those rights. If someone does something wrong, I want them gone, I don't want to compromise this just like Tildes probably shouldn't compromise their privacy to start witch hunts. Maybe just leave that here, because the very concept of "rights" is a real deep rabbit hole I have no intention of going down.
But yes, I think it comes down to values in a way I don't know how to reconcile without completely leaving the scope of this thread. Agree to disagree?
But... their content was popular. Editing the link is not some artificial inflation of their popularity. It's simply redressing the fact that the popularity, which rightly should have been attributed to them, was instead stolen by someone else. And the user who submitted that stolen content, whether they knew about the theft or not, played a significant role in that too.
This also isn't about "lining the pockets" of people. If we were in a post-scarcity society I could see your side of that argument, but we don't. People still need to be monetarily rewarded for their work in order to survive and most artists don't exactly live in lavish luxury either.
I also fundamentally disagree about rights being entirely immutable. Basic human rights, yes, but above and beyond those are another matter entirely. E.g. If you break the law, you can justifiable lose your right to freedom of self-determination and movement. But yeah, agree to disagree overall. Thanks again for the conversation though, it was fun. :)
I swear I'll close off the main conversation here but one thing:
In practice, I'm sure this mostly means which news organizations we redirect people to, not all sob stories about small youtube channels having their content stolen, but that's beside the point. People needing to get paid doesn't mean that Tildes should violate its own integrity and treatment of its users in order to hold up certain content creators.
Obviously we disagree on what counts as violating its own integrity, and I'm fine with leaving that where it is.
That's a false dilemma. There are more than just those two options. There's (at least) one more option: the link to the plagiarised video is removed, and a new post linking to the original video is posted.
It's not a false dilemma. I listed all three options, included that one: "the content removed (but the odds of your original getting the same traction upon resubmission being unlikely as a result)"
Oops. Sorry.
No worries.
I have already argued elsewhere against this proposal. Every comment and suggestion I'm making in this thread is on the assumption that we do not de-couple people's usernames from their own submissions. I think that's a bad thing to do.
Some people don't even know Topic Logs exist!
Even knowing about a Topic Log, the submitter's username would remain much more prominent than the name of the person who replaced the original link with a new link.
But removing the original content that the comments were discussing leaves them adrift and orphaned, without context.
Maybe we just remove the link itself, but leave the comments in place (that seems to be a common objection to removing posts - tagging @Amarok). The post would appear on people's front page, and they can click to see the comments, but they can't click through to the original link because it was removed.
It's better, but still far from perfect imo. People would just repost the links/titles/etc in the comments of that thread anyway. That's how a lot of linkjacking gets found in the first place - by the users, not the mods.
Part of the problem here is the time difference between edit and feedback from the user who is being edited. Ideally we'd want a mod to just make the change, then have that pop up to the user somehow so they can approve/disapprove it. It could be hours before that interaction can play out, though, since we're not all online all the time, and when edits are necessary there's usually a time-sensitive component to it, faster is better.
We could disassociate the user on edit, then as part of their notification of the edit, give them a look at what was changed and the reasons why (entered by the editors, not boilerplate). If the user decides to approve of those changes, they are re-associated with the content. If not, the disassociation stands. There might also be an appeals process in there they could start if they think the edit was malicious.
This mechanism would at least keep everyone involved in the loop, and expose bad editing activities very quickly.
We can take steps to make editing less necessary as well, with a smarter submission page. Most users who do this aren't malicious, just unaware - they post the first link google throws at them or whatever link they saw elsewhere, without looking for better ones to the same content. The submission page can help make them aware so they get it right the first time.
So I wouldn't even get the option to delete a post of mine that someone else has butchered?
Great! Fix the problem before it happens! Wonderful!
Don't gut my post after I've made it, and expect me to be happy.
We could just say: Don't make shitty posts! and call it done, for all the good that'll do us. :P
Frankly if you think the edit butchered your submission that's malice territory. Most of it'll be 'corrected link to artist's channel instead of shitty music blog' which you'll just shrug at and move on... unless you're the guy who owns the shitty music blog, and then we get to have a chat. :)
Someone else took the guts out of my post and replaced it with something I didn't choose. They decided that the article I submitted wasn't good enough, and then used my post to submit a link of their own instead. If that's not butchery, I don't know what is. If my content isn't good enough, then remove it. Don't overwrite it with something else that I didn't choose. What if there was a reason I chose my article instead of theirs?
You keep talking about music. I have never submitted a music link to Tildes (and am extremely unlikely to in the future). Here is my only submission to ~music.
Not every submission is a link to a music video.
This problem is present in every science article, every possible link to streaming media sites, and most of the news especially politics. It's probably omnipresent across all content. I only use music because that's the stuff I know best. I promise you a mod from /r/videos, /r/books, /r/games could give you plenty of other examples, as cfabbro already has.
See, this is where our disconnect is. In your head, links are changing the content at the other end of them. A news article is now pointing to pornhub, that sort of thing. In my head, changing links is finding the best version of that content to present, and if there's one out there that's aces (or more legal / ethical) compared to the original, then it should be replaced. If you think that changing a pointless string of link text no one even reads without changing the content it's linking or the context of the discussion is gutting your post, that's on you and I don't think I can help with that. I also don't agree with that position and I can't imagine I ever will. If someone changed my submission links like that I'd be grateful for the help and thank them for making it better / finding a better source.
Maybe we can get there another way.
Let's talk about megathreads, where users and mods can all submit multiple links to the same submission in an ongoing fashion, with all the links are presented in some way, and presumably voted on in some fashion by the users. Now you've got multiple people updating a library of links in real time. Some of those are likely to get deleted by people other than the one sharing them as well. Do you have the same issues with this sort of activity?
There are very few links that lead to exactly the same content. Unlike music videos, where the same video can be hosted on multiple domains, most news articles are slightly different to other articles. Each takes a slightly different angle, or has different information. They're not direct copies of each other.
For example, I just posted a story to ~sports about a recent mental health incident a sports star was involved in. I read a number of articles about this event, and chose this particular article specifically because it has more details about the lead-up to the event and is therefore - I believe - more informative.
However, it's possible that a (hypothetical) moderator of ~sports might see that article and think that the details are a bit too detailed ("trigger warning"), and prefers to see an article which focusses more on reactions to the event than causes of it. So, they replace my link with a different link.
But that's not the article I chose to submit, and there was a reason I chose to submit a different article. Why should my choice be overridden by a moderator who wants to soften the blow to the readers of ~sports? I want people to see the causes of the event, not the reactions to it. But a moderator decides that's not suitable.
If they want to see an article with a different focus, they shouldn't hijack my post to do that. And I shouldn't be associated with their choice of article, given that I already read it and knowingly decided not to submit it.
I agree with your example - I'd be pissed in that case as well, and I'd appeal it however that process takes shape. That's not what this feature is for, however - that's abuse, plain and simple.
Perhaps what we're lacking here is a clear set of guidelines for when editing something is warranted.
Unlike normal visitors who rarely learn the rules, people who have been granted expanded powers here can be expected to know and abide by the community guidelines - that's part of the responsibility they inherit with that power. That means we can make a formal policy and expect it to be followed.
Is it really abuse, though? It's the same news story, just from a different source. It's not like, as you say, someone replaced my link with a link to pornhub. Is it abuse to replace one news article with an article from a different source?
I have seen people here on Tildes (and on Reddit) get absolutely rabid about how much they hate certain news sources (this is why some people include domains in tags on posts here: so other people can filter out certain sites). If I link to a news article from one of these much-hated news sources, is a moderator justified in getting an article about the same event from a less-hated source? You'd get a lot of people arguing in favour of replacing a biassed article from the evil Fox News with an article from the nice CNN, for instance.
You keep talking about music videos. I keep thinking about news articles. The use cases and requirements are different.
Well, the link-jacking case with news articles is when some shit news blog posts a two paragraph editorialized blurb about something, and themselves links back to a far better article. If someone posted the news blog link and it's clearly shit-tier compared to the content they are ripping off, that edit seems justifiable.
Yes, I know. I have seen your previous comments on this subject, we have argued over them and yet I still disagree; I don't think it's a bad thing to do and I have tried to explain why I think that is the case as well. It's clear that we have a fundamental difference of opinion. But you continuing to operate as if your conclusion is the one that all assumptions going forward should be based on is not exactly productive, especially when the discussion has moved forwards already and we're discussing a new approach to the idea.
And? Some people don't know how to submit top level comments because the comment box is not where they are used to seeing it on reddit. That doesn't mean we should change the system to accommodate them. They can learn or they can continue to remain ignorant and suffer the consequences of that. Catering to the lowest common denominator is partially what got reddit in the mess they are in, and IMO Tildes should strive to not make the same mistake.
Not if their name was scrubbed from the topic when the link was edited and move to the topic log. And currently the topic log is ordered first action first giving the original submitter more prominence there, but it is was most recent action first it wouldn't be. However even if it the order isn't changed, if people don't know how to read the Topic log properly they can be informed how and learn. And if they harass an OP for their mistaken impression of who submitted the link, you punish them for that. Simple.
That's not a bad compromise, but TBH I don't think a compromise is necessary when we can simply dissociate the OP and replace the link instead.
Anonymised link submissions are not yet a done deal. This post of Deimos' is intended to collect feedback and opinions, to contribute towards a final decision. We have not yet moved forward. We are considering whether to move forward.
I get your point, but if the submitter's name was changed to his, there'd be people complaining that you hijacked their post and stole their imaginary "karma" votes. That would never be a popular thing.
I am not suggesting, have not suggested, and will not suggest that the username on a post be changed. I'm suggesting that the bad post, with the original submitter's username, be removed, and a good post, with the new submitter's username, be created.
I think that as long as it is not only mentioned in the Topic Log that the original link has been modified by XXX, but that it also shows what the original link was, then people will be able to make up their own mind about whether the admin modifying the content was acting with integrity.
Further to this, having something slightly more immediately apparent such as an asterisk right next to the modified title/link or some other sort of symbol could also go a long way to helping people to stay informed about whether something that they have commented on/plan to comment on has changed and what the changes are. It would also help reduce new users to the site from glossing over the fact the Topic Log exists in the first place (I didn’t realise this until just this thread!).
My opinion is that, mods should have the ability to change titles and links. But the moment they edit a post, the original submitter's name should be removed and be replaced with something like "This post was disowned by the original poster". The OP's name should be removed even if they agree/ satisfied with the changes, @Algernon_Asimov made a good argument about this.
All the changes made by the mods should also be recorded and be made visible to the public.
With a large user base you can't really trust that everyone will follow the rules. There will be many cases where a low effort or misleading post will reach the frontpage. I think that the mods should have tools to deal with these cases without causing too much disruption.
Just to clarify: my argument was not that a submitter's name should be removed if the link in a post is changed. My argument was that the link in the post should not be changed in the first place, given that this is the core of the submission. If the submission is so bad that it needs to replaced with something else, then it should be removed rather than gutted.
Which doesn't work at all in practice.
Original thread: couple hundred votes, 300 comments by the time the mods notice and delete.
Reposted thread: 5 votes, no comments.
You're basically saying the mods have to delete the 300 comments along with the submission, censoring several hundred other users, in the hope that discussion rebuilds itself organically again when the link is submitted with corrections. Having seen this play out on reddit I'm sure you know that doesn't happen. This position looks plain crazy to me. Editing must be possible since it's the only way to avoid the issue and still be socially responsible.
We need to be in the mindset of upgrading/clarifying/improving submissions, not just using reddit's primitive caveman deletion tools. Most of reddit's suck factor comes directly from having only the 'delete' option to deal with problems. Deletion should only happen when it's actually necessary (doxxing, illegal material, OP requests it, etc) - editing should replace it in most circumstances. The trick is building that editing system so that it safeguards everyone's integrity in a responsible manner. Auto-disassociation on edit does that just fine.
But those comments were about a different post. They were discussing the content at Link A. If we suddenly replace Link A with Link B, and make the post about different content, those comments are orphaned and misplaced. They're not about the content at Link B, but they're now connected to this new post about Link B.
Let's play a game.
Link A
Link B
Link C
Link D
Link E
Link F
Pretend you moderate ~music here. Which links do you edit, and why?
(Everyone should play this game, btw - welcome to being a moderator).
How would I know? They all sound the same to me. I know nothing about music, or music videos. I would leave this sort of culling to an experienced moderator with knowledge about music videos.
So all six of those links look the same to you? No differences in how you'd expect users to react? No consequences for where the traffic goes? Considering they all link to the exact same song, musical knowledge isn't really important here. I'll be happy to expand on them in a little while but I want to give people a moment to ponder on their own. ;)
Some of the links appear to go to channels called "Starcadian", which appears to be the name of the composer of the song. If we assume that a channel called "Starcadian" actually is "Starcadian", then you should probably remove the other ones if they're posted.
Links B, C, and E are all official artist sources - on vimeo, youtube, and bandcamp respectively. Those are what we've taken to calling 'preferred' sources. The benefit here is that every time someone clicks on those links, the artist earns money. Oh, and not that people care much about legality when sharing, but these are legal non-infringing links.
Link D is what happens when someone decides to promote their crappy music blog under the guise of promoting an artist. You wouldn't believe how livid the users get when this sort of content takes over - because it's adding an extra click to get to the content. Having a ton of ads pop up and five bitcoin miners attempt to download doesn't help matters either. These links are never, ever acceptable.
Link F is what happens when someone is trying to promote their youtube channel in much the same manner. They rehost other people's content in violation of youtube's own copyright policies so they can draw subscribers into their channel - stealing the view revenue that should have gone to the artist. These links are also never acceptable.
Link A is an odd case. MrSuicideSheep actually does get artist and label permission before posting other people's music on his account - and so do dozens of other tastemaker youtube channels like this. It's the same behavior as F with the only difference being obtaining permission. Any artist making electro would probably be thrilled to have their stuff shared on that channel because it'll drive hundreds of thousands of people there. These links are ok.
When bad links like D and F are submitted, they need to be changed to good ones like B, C, and E. That's the reason for link editing. At least for music I expect most of this can be automated away. It'd be nice to have the submit page doing some of this checking someday.
Note that changing these links would have no impact whatsoever on the comments, either. The content is the same, only the delivery source has changed.
I agree bad links need to be done away with. We don't disagree on that. We disagree on the mechanism for doing this. You think you should replace someone else's link with one of your own, and I think you should remove the other person's link (complete with a notification about this and an explanation why) and make a completely new submission.
Your examples haven't changed my opinion (if that was your intention). I still think bad links should be removed, rather than replaced.
You think existing discussion should be erased and forced to start again from scratch, rather than preserved, even when it is still every bit as relevant.
I have a problem censoring hundreds of other commenters just because OP made a simple mistake using a bad link, or is a jackass trying to steal revenue. Either way, that's got nothing to do with the commenters and I see no reason to punish them for OP's mistake by deleting all of their content and stifling an ongoing topic.
I say disable the original link with a note about why it was disabled - offer the OP a space to enter a new acceptable link. Other users can still copy/paste the link into the URL if they want to check out the original content. If OP abandons, some other user can offer a replacement in comments, and if their suggestion is proven to match the original content the votes will put it at the top of the comments. This way transparency is preserved and users start to give greater consideration to the origination of the content they link.
Honestly I don't really know if you will follow through on this to an extent that is actually meaningful. I don't think this would actually have any effect unless you fully disown any link posts from their posters, meaning you also lose that submission history on their profiles and no longer indicate it on the site, and even then people would probably still intuitively remember which posts are theirs. If the proposal is only to feature the OPs name less prominently then I don't think the actual issue, a sense of ownership of the post, is resolved at all.
In summary: I think you're hoping to fix an issue in the system when the issue is in the human.
As one of the more prolific submitters here (though not recently, between the holidays and my company having a newborn
babysatellite), I'm all for this. I don't submit links for personal glory, I submit them because I think they're interesting to read or discuss, and because I want Tildes to have critical mass to succeed.If I submit a crappy link, I'm fine with it being traced back to me. If I have a history of submitting good links, I'm fine with it factoring in to my overall trust score. But do I care about having reddit-style karma showing I've submitted a ton of links that got really popular (separate from whether they were good or not)? Nope.
I think there is value in both submitters and mods editing posts e.g. fixing typos/poor titles, or replacing poor/malicious secondary sources. But we do need to be careful of issues with propaganda and spam, as others have pointed out.
Maybe we could simply replace "submitted by" with "contributors". In the log, record the original submission and all edits. And on the post have "happy_shredder *, foo, bar, baz" (say, use an asterisk to indicate the first contributor, and list the others chronologically). This could also be handy for merging reposts.
I could maybe understand that for something like ~talk, but why ~games? The two most recent link topics in ~games are (both submitted by me):
Why is it important which user submitted those?
I don't think this would be an effective solution to the problem at hand, and adds unnecessary complication to the site (both from a technical and a user perspective). Already there are 6 questions in the OP regarding the implications of removing link ownership, and I would imagine there are plenty more issues that would be revealed if this were to be implemented. Not that any of those couldn't be overcome, but it seems like an unnecessary amount of work to fix what is and will hopefully remain to be an uncommon problem.
It's only natural that users will be protective of their own posts, but it needs to be made clear that submitted content, in a way, belongs to the community as a whole, and so it has the possibility of being corrected/updated if need be. I think the trust system will eventually help with this, since modifying another user's post is obviously something we should only allow for trusted users to do.
I also fear that users would be less inclined to post links if they do not retain ownership of the submission.
I am in favor of removing usernames from link posts with some accountability on the back-end for spammers or poor posters. Would maybe caveat this that one day if the site does grow large enough, to limit link submissions only to users who have the trust built from their own dialogue on existing topics. I know some forums have the 'junior' phase that prevents users from making parent posts unless they have an arbitrary comment count but with the trust system, this could be a better transition and keep the focus on meaningful dialog rather than solely link aggregating.
Having names attached to submissions only seems important to me if you are looking for some validation or public recognition for the content you submit. It creates a mad dash for when big news comes out to be 'FIRST!' posting which creates a flood of duplicate posts.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Positive social reinforcement of a desirable behaviour is an appropriate way to achieve things. If someone gets validation from posting good content, why is that a problem? The site gets good content, and the submitter gets validation: it's a win-win situation.
Of course, if someone is repeatedly submitting bad content, they won't and shouldn't get that validation. Their posts should be edited or removed, and they should be discouraged from posting more bad content.
But rewarding someone for doing a good thing? I don't see that as a problem.
Because I would theorize a few things based on my experience on the internet and my knowledge of psychology:
While positive reinforcement is great, when some gets a negative response, the negative response has a disproportionate impact on someone's psychological state and processes than a neutral or even positive feedback. This is called negativity bias. I think we can all agree (for the most part) on the belief that the people on the internet and the interactions they have, are not always positive and are not always rational, devoid of their own biases and stereotypes. In my experience, interactions can veer into the cruel and critical real fast if something gets misinterpreted. All it can take is one harsh comment, calling out a user specifically or negatively tagging a post, to prevent that user from attempting to post again.
Positive social validation in internet groups is, more often than not, only given when posts are made that align with a users world views or beliefs. Going back to the 1st point, internet users are not rational people and most are not systematically evaluating content in a standardized format to decide whether or not to vote positively or positively tag. I would posit that content will only be received positively from a group if the content matches values or beliefs that the group holds. For example, a liberal article will be more positively received than a conservative article by a liberal group, even if the conservative article has better content. E.g. Confirmation bias
By having a user attach their name to the post, they needlessly attach their own social reputation to the content, altering a group's ability to objectively evaluate and respond to content. Going back to the liberal vs. conservative argument, if a user gets a (negative!) reputation for posting conservative articles that are not well-received in a liberal group, their name, and therefore their reputation, gets attached to the content. Again, I will say that people in general just aren't rational enough to work through these feelings, nor do they have the ability to withstand the cognitive load, to prevent them from thinking this way on a site like this where every link is evaluated, even at passing. I have too often seen users evaluate a poster's motive for posting content rather than discussing the actual content.
All of these factors eventually cause group polarization and unnecessary group dynamics. If the goal of tildes is to promote good discussion, the positive validation should not come from a little number next to the article title, but rather than from the quality of the discussion it brings. By removing the user who posted, it provides a user the ability to post things that aren't mainstream in the group and not have to worry about being publicly stigmatized if it doesn't go well. If comments or discussion doesn't come, they can move on and submit again when they found something interesting again.
If a person's self-worth or ego is tied to having some sort of social recognition for posting links on a site, I would say that that is unhealthy and a sign that there is something missing in that person's personal life and that Tildes is a poor substitute for whatever it is they are missing.
I'm not seeing the problem here. If someone is so sensitive that criticising their post causes them to stop posting... there's no downside to Tildes. In fact, it's an upside: we lose a source of potential problems.
That's not going to be solved by removing a person's username from their submissions. If they submit a post that isn't well received they will still know.
That's a good point.
I never said or implied that the validation came from the little number. It comes from other people seeing that someone keeps posting good content (regardless of what votes it gets), and therefore responding more positively to that submitter.
It's not about someone's self-worth or ego. It's just about giving people a bit of positive reinforcement for doing something good for the site.
EDIT: Typos.
I disagree, there should be a diversity of ideas and viewpoints within reason and I believe we should foster an environment that promotes that diversity.
They will know but they won't be publicly criticized/ostracized for it. The only feedback most should receive is a lack of discussion surrounding the topic for submitting a poor topic. Content should be evaluated not by who posted it but what is within the content itself.
People should be judged on the content of their own ideas and how they support those ideas rather than the content that someone else created/produced, that the user happened to find.
I think I understand where your coming from and the intention is good in my mind. You contribute a positive behavior, you get positively rewarded. However, my feelings regarding negativity bias and the way I have watched communities get utterly caught up in social systems they have decided to gamify has led me to feel that most internet communities are a waste of time due to the lack of genuine and meaningful content. The idea of social pressure (positive or negative) as a means for filtering participation just doesn't sound like a good thing to me and I think Tildes has an opportunity to try something new here.
I think you should build reward systems that are directly tied to the behaviors you are trying to promote. In the case of Tildes, a reward system that ties points, tags, and public recognition works great with promoting the creation of meaningful dialog. But I just don't feel like that same system should be applied to link submission as there isn't nearly as much work involved with it as there is for making your own meaningful comments. So with that, the tagging system and points system are key to categorizing and moving content so they should stay, but the recognition for submitting a link is the easiest to toss, especially when you consider the reasons I listed in my first reply to you.
Just got around to rereading some new comments in this thread and I think you just changed my mind on this, moving me from being neutral to in favor of removing highly visible usernames from link posts. The loss of a personal aspect on link posts does seem like it would soften the effect of any negative reactions, and embolden people to make posts that go against any group-think present. That must have a dampening effect on negativity and group think, even if it's a small one.
I have had a feeling for a while that negativity is a long, slow entropic process that kills forums with the death of a million tiny papercuts. Each negative reaction provokes other smaller negative reactions over time into the future, building up until some sort of critical mass is reached, and then the entire forum goes negative. Once negative, it stays that way, and there's no going back - it has to be recreated from scratch elsewhere. Anything that can slow or stop this process is a must-do.
Add in the incentive this change creates for people to make self posts where their names are more prevalent, and the shift of reputation from the submitter to the sites, channels, authors, or creators whose work is being shared, and I think we've got a clear winner here. It'll trigger a collection of small but beneficial network effect changes.
This is a very interesting idea. I think Whom hit the nail on the head though - the social pressure would evaporate. What if instead of doing this site wide, do it in either a new or existing sub, but only for that sub? That'd provide a bit of a playground and we might see some interesting behavior in a "anonymous" sub. Got to run!
For links, I think this would be great -- especially as the site grows and duplicate links are posted (which i would assume would act as a bump instead of creating a new post). Using the 'tag history' or whatever in the sidebar, there could be a general 'post history' that shows the people who submitted the link, modified titles, labels, etc.
Down the road, it'd be great if mods could merge links to related stories, essentially creating a text post with multiple links with each link's respective title. Often big stories end up with fragmented discussion.
Hi @Deimos. I'm replying to this comment of yours over here because I don't feel right derailing that thread with an off-topic meta discussion about replacing links.
If you check the timestamps in that thread, you'll notice that my comment was only the second comment there: I commented only about half an hour after the post was made, and there's only one comment older than mine. If someone had been able to remove the post at that time, instead of merely commenting on it with better links, all those other comments wouldn't have been made. The point about those comments being lacking context would be moot.
Now, I know this supports both opinions:
If someone had been able to replace the original Reuters link with the Washington Post link, then everyone would have commented on the new WaPo link.
If someone had been able to remove the original post with the Reuters link and make a new post with the Washington Post link, then then everyone would have commented on the new post containing WaPo link.
It works either way.
The only reason I commented there was because I was unable to remove the post itself. And, until this very minute, it didn't occur to me to ask you to remove it - because it didn't trigger any red flags as a "bad" post for me. It was just an uninformative article, so I posted some more informative ones.
However, if someone had removed the post at the time I added those informative articles, the other comments wouldn't have been made.
In this particular case, if you did replace the Reuters link with the Washington Post link, none of the comments would lack context or be negatively impacted - because the article they're discussing is basically a nothing. However, if the original article had actually had some content, things might be different. Imagine someone replacing a Fox News article with a Washington Post article (because "Fox is biased!"), or replacing an opinion piece with a news article (which I have seen people here advocating). If the replaced article actually contains content which isn't in the replacement article, then there may be comments about that content which now lack context.
The example you've picked to discuss is fine because the link being replaced has almost no content. It won't always be like that.
Title editorialisation makes it difficult, at least until a proper trust system is in-place.
To me the worst thing is copying an editorialized/bad title because it was used on an original website to drive clicks/traffic that doesn't nearly summarize whatever topic/event the article is dealing with.
Neutral, descriptive, good titles are more important than where they originated.
Indeed. Frankly, the only reason reddit-at-large adopted the 'you must use the original title' rule was because people on reddit were easily out-assing the sites they were linking to with respect to making headlines that were instant clickbait. That's what karma-chasing incentives get you - a race to the bottom. Reddit doesn't allow for title editing either.
Fuck the original title if you can come up with a better one. Having a posse of trusted editors overseeing each group with clear guidelines - neutral, descriptive, accurate for starters - should solve that problem. Remember that here on Tildes if this place ever gets massive most posts will be bubbling up from the smaller quiet places, so their titles/links/etc are likely to get fixed by the smaller groups long before they ever get any attention in major ones. We're not just fixing the problem, we're fixing it before it has a chance to become an issue in the first place.
Voting based on title wouldn't be so bad if the titles were solid, would it? :P
Agreed. In fact here is an example of an article that I've recently read: https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/giraffes-now-endangered-species-and-threatened-animal-can-become-extinct-html-1407091-2018-12-11
The current title of the article should not be posted as is, because it is misleading.
But some people that are passionate about the subject may vote based on the title alone, and that is where the problem arises.
I'm not sure what you mean, how does that make this more difficult? Doesn't it make it easier to be able to fix editorialization?
Replying to both you and @nacho here:
My concern is that if someone editorialises a title poorly, everyone's just stuck with it until someone with the power to change it does so.
"if it's a good link/story, does it matter much which user submitted it?"
Yes, it does. I could continually make posts that feature a biased and polarizing presentation of a pet social issue I have.
I'd tow the line and be careful not to post anything too extreme but hey, we all know the criteria for "good" journalism is subjective.
Before if I was called out I would have had to shift the blame towards the source, discredit the dissenter, or ignore it entirely.
Now I can happily fly under the radar while spamming my social views without appearing like an overzealous extremist.