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authored by epilys 2 years, 9 months ago | source | 7 comments

epilys wrote :

Hello folks,

It's time I write down what I have in mind for the website and ask for your thoughts and feedback. The gist is:

• posts (stories or text posts) can have one or many tags
• tags can have a parent tag, so tags are hierarchical
• you (the user) can "follow" tags by grouping them in tag aggregations, which is basically a collection of tags with a common theme
• those aggregations can be public or private, and can be created by users
• public aggregations can be subscribed by other users
• aggregations can have story filters in order to control what shows up

self-organising content / communities

Without assigning discrete categories to the website (such as reddit's subreddits) subcommunities can arise from neighboring tags. If I follow for example only "mathematics" tags, I will see and talk to people who also have the same interest.

I'd like to somehow calculate what are the most active of those communities and translate them into "default" aggregations. These would be suggested to new users.

story filters

For each tag in an aggregation you can associate a depth and story filters. Depth is that of the tree made up by the tag as root and descendant tags below. Default depth is 0 which means that if a post is tagged only as database theory and that tag's parent is computer science, a computer science association with depth of zero won't show that post.

Filters can exclude specific tags, domains and users from an aggregation. To allow exceptions, there are "include" filters as well that override the exclusion ones.

This is not implemented in the public website but I have an initial attempt on a public branch.

community growth - how can someone join the website?

Invitation-only registration can be a deterrent since it requires extra effort compared to filling a registration form. I have added the ability to request an invite here. Requests will be public for users only here where you can invite the people who requested an account or "vote" in favor or not the request. You can also add non-voting comments. I maybe over-engineered this a bit, but the reasoning was that the requesting person is known to one of us and is abusive. Of course that won't help much if someone had already invited them, though.

I'd like to hear your thoughts, suggestions, disagreements.

You must be vouched for by a vouched user to participate.

• 1

  badtuple2 years, 9 months ago | link | reply | source

  I like it. I'm curious how we'd tackle tag discoverability. If tags are suggested to new users, will they still be able to see the unfiltered stream? If not, how do I find new tags?

  Some ideas:

  • "All" and "Subscribed" views. The "All" view lets users stumble upon tags that might interest them by seeing what's attached to stories
  • A master tag list. This would likely require curation/organization
  • Tags could be added/edited at any time. Refining tags on known posts could introduce them
  • 0

    badtuple2 years, 9 months ago | link | reply | source

    ^ forgive the weird formatting. Ran into the 500 character limit super fast and had to make it fit.
  • 0

    epilys2 years, 9 months ago | link | reply | source

    This is what I had in mind as well. For now, the "All stories" link in the header menu points you to the unfiltered stream.

    As for discoverability: I forgot to mention it, but I thought of introducing a "neighbor distance" for a tag, which would include tags that are "close" by defining an edge (u,v) for tags u, v when they are both present in a story/post. The idea being that relevant tags end up together in posts, and you can do a DFS/BFS and stop at the given distance.

    • 1

      badtuple2 years, 9 months ago | link | reply | source

      That's definitely an interesting thought. To reduce the amount of deliberate crawling of the search space (where a person has to check the surrounding tags of individual tags) what would you think of a Discovery page?

      What I'm imagining is that there's a page that you go to and it shows you the normal posts filtered by your subscribed tags. Unlike other pages though, there's a slider that goes from 0 to n. The slider position represents the number of hops from each tag, and as you ramp it up the specificity of your filters loosens and the results get fuzzier. That way you can find "novel" posts outside your comfort zone, without going all the way to the unfiltered stream.

      Of course, all these features assume an amount of activity that warrants them. The Discovery page doesn't make much sense if all tags are effectively 1 node away and therefore equivalent to the unfiltered stream, haha.

      • 0

        epilys2 years, 8 months ago | link | reply | source

        I'd like the user to think as little as possible about this. The neighbor tags would just show up along with the resident ones, and there's a convenient button to add it in the aggregation or exclude it.

        The discovery thing sounds great! It can be an addition 🤔.
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  amvc2 years, 9 months ago | link | reply | source

  I like the idea of tag depth. I guess you can select for specific "branches" in the tag tree with a combination of depth, exclude and include filters. Would be interesting to see the UI for this.

  • 0

    epilys2 years, 8 months ago | link | reply | source

    Yes! Ideally the UI should not get in the way, since it's only meant to be seen during setup.