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I had an idea for a minimal change to improve a Reddit-like site, perhaps you will find it interesting: split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "commun
by comnetxr 7y ago
I had an idea for a minimal change to improve a Reddit-like site, perhaps you will find it interesting: split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".
Tags: much of the content of Reddit is people reposting the same thing at various times to various subreddits, and many of the comments are people noticing that it fits into "r/whatever" instead. The default behavior should be that posts of the same link to various tags (r/awww, r/catsstandingup) should not recreate a new post but just backlink to the same post. Repeat posts to the same tag should be a no-operation. This removes the community aspect of tags, and some of the worst emergent behaviors of reddit along with it. Treating a tag as both a topic and a community leads to a neverending cycle of people creating niche topic tags for the community aspect, but then finding themselves "invaded" as people will always want to find and comment on content about topics that they disagree with.
But of course the community aspect of Reddit leads to good things. So you make a separate concept of communities. These communities could follow the posts of one or more tags, applying filters to those of their own choosing, and make their discussion visible within community borders only or visible to all, based on their own choices (in addition to internal community posts.) They can control admission to the communities on their own rules (fully public, invite codes only, etc.) The ability to automatically follow the posts of certain tags (and either view or not view public comments) will keep small communities from getting stale for lack of posts.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoI think you just read the reinvented Delicious.
- woadwarrior01 7y agoI’d once built a Reddit with tags (or a Delicious with votes) 12 years ago. Never really took off and I shuttered it after 2 years.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoI think that could be useful in a corporate environment. Did folk pollute the tags with nonsense?
- woadwarrior01 7y agoYes indeed, cleaning up tag pollution (A half way solution I came up with was to use porter stemming to stem tags) and the deluge of spam were the two biggest problems. It was a bit much to deal with for a solo coder, working part time on the problem.
- AudioBookKing 7y agoI made something similar but very niche (only for audiobooks). I think the format works great for a lot of topics.
- tiredyam 7y agoSorry to break it to you but Reddit has this already
- scrollaway 7y agoYou're kinda describing Tildes (tildes.net).
- hi5eyes 7y agotildes is a shit hole, the admins are almost alt right/white supremacist/gab type people its nauseating
- dijit 7y agoEven if that's true, which I'm not seeing from a cursory glance; they've released their project as open source and it seems active. They've chosen technology I like too (python/postgres/redis/saltstack), and it seems to have a clean interface. On purely technical/product merits I like it.
- namanyayg 7y agoAny sources on that? Tildes is a young community still tho, voat failed and I don't think it'll be able to reach much success either (where success = massive volume of users). We'll see.
- onlydnaq 7y agoI believe you might be confusing it with Voat.
- krilly 7y agoThe alt-right, despite all its flaws, so make very good open source forum software
- est 7y ago> split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities". Tags are brilliant idea until you have tens of thousands of them. Plural forms, hyphens or without hyphens, synonyms, i18n tags of the same thing, mis-spellings, etc.
- tudorw 7y agoI'd like to see some 'AI' assisted tagging, where users are prompted to use a tag from a pool of common tags with the AI making suggestions on what might be appropriate, this would address most of the issues listed above.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aloisdg 7y agoSomething like Stack Exchange's tag system would be enough.
- tudorw 7y agoI'm not massively familiar with Stack Exchanges tag system, it does have some synonym handling, https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms , that seems limited to one alternative though, is there a more advanced aspect that I am missing, perhaps covering sememes?
- cpayne624 7y agoCan sort by Target to see the (sometimes) multiple synonyms for a particular tag.
- input_sh 7y agoPocket does that with the premium subscription. I find it to be quite useful.
- dpau 7y ago
- cheschire 7y agoReddit is wildly popular where many other competitors have failed. The reddit of today is the result of many years of change and trying to think of ways to manage the size in a better way is pointless without considering the entire journey. Part of what made reddit successful was exactly the subreddit individualism you're trying to remove. It's why so many people were upset when they removed custom stylesheets for subreddits. It felt like that individualism was being stripped away. Communities don't just spring up from nowhere. They need common interests to bring the people to them.
- enz 7y agoThat would remove the “community bubble”, which is an important aspect I think. However, a feature making easier to x-post can do the trick, maybe?
- petercooper 7y agolobste.rs does the tagging part of that in a HN-esque style: https://lobste.rs/t/databases https://lobste.rs/t/databases