By seeing some of recent post, I’ve thinked about a concept that could be - I think - usefull for Diaspora user, especially beginner (or lazy people like me). This concept would be to be able to make the community create and edit some kind of “tags list” (or even some kind of “filter list” if we accept the proposition of letting people be able to chose word/tag filter in order to have a better control on their stream), that could be selected at the inscription or whenever they want to add/remove a list.
The tag list could be usefull at being some kind of “interest list”, and would help people to get started in Diaspora. The newcomer, after having created his account, would see the choice of “interest lists” (with an option to see what tag are in said lists, of course), and will for instance select a “sport list”, an “linux list”, a “rock list”, etc… All the tags contained is those lists would be added to his tag following list, and it would help to be directly “in the flow”. I think with such a concept, newcomer will feel more “welcomed” in the community.
( What could be done with the filter concept ?
Spam list ? A list of commonly used word by spammers.
A list of filter for those who don’t want to see NSFW/mature contents. )
I would be up to the community to create such lists, and would help the Diaspora* Experiences to be more user friendly, and make the community able to create the tool to better themself their diaspora experiences. It would be a totally facultative way to make the experience more friendly, without taking out any fonctionallity.
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I think that some sort of tags cloud or list would be cool. It could be sorted for popularity, so that users could see which tags are getting the most attention.
I see this as being the kind of thing which is perfect for community members to create and maintain. There is no need for some ‘official’, central resource for this. Anyone can create useful tag lists, either via their Diaspora account or by putting it on their own website. Therefore there’s no need to agree this in Loomio - just do it!
To me worst idea ever ! Why ? Just because it maintains clichés and preconceived way of thinking ! It is not up to us, or the community, or some people in the community to deceide what people must, would like to or should see !
We cannot take the responsability to guide people’s domains of interest ! This is what Twitter and Facebook do while enforce in the news flows popular tags or popular articles. It standarize our way of thinking !
A machine or a programm must not decide what people would like to see !
I don’t think the “popular tag list” is a good idea, because the way of that idea is more to give some kind of “list of tags used by that subject” : It’s more like maintaining a list of synonymes or similar subjects, and the difference is that the people are able to choose perfectly transparantly the list.
The aim was more to have several list that help to have a pack of tags used to talk about a topic, it’s more like a way to start easily on a subject. The aim wasn’t to “standarize” the way of thinking, but to allow people to say “that’s the tags used to talk about a subject”.
Maybe that’s a not at all a great idea, but that’s not deciding what people would like to see, it’s more like creating several “index” of tags used to talk about a topic, or a kind of topic…
As I’m not a newcomer, so maybe I don’t see what they need well, I though than in the alternative social network, the problem when we begin is more the feel that’s this social network isn’t very active, even when he is. That’s was the idea. Not to be some kind of big brother saying what people should or should not see
Maybe the moment when a people come to the network that make people register tag is enough (maybe a bit discrete…), but I was thinking of a way to make it more friendly.
I can assure you : when I came to D* few month ago, I wasn’t lost at all. I had many things to read very quickly and met people very easily. I only have one contact on D* that I knew before.
But to me, the problem is far deeper than you might see. when you say : "that’s the tags used to talk about a subject”, it is the node of the problem : scociologist have shown that we don’t invent words to think, we think with the word we know. Meaning that if a machine or a group of people decides what words to use to discuss about a subject, there is very few chances that other words will be used in the future for this subject. That way, we standardize the way of thinking.
It might not be a problem to talk about mecanics but is far more a problem to talk about politics. And on a social network,the group effect is too important to implement theses types of system. Mayby I’m too serious on this subject, but I keep being strongly opposed to any kind of word list not being established by the user itself.
I think there is a difference between tag and word, because tag is only an word that we put as a token in order to talk about a subject ( #freesoftware#linux#ubuntu#fedora#archlinux…).
When we say what we think with the word we know (I think explaining it in english will be a pain, I apologize if I’m not understandable), we say that we “cut” the reality in a number of part and that those part are made with our vocabulary, for instance, we differenciate some specy only because we have the vocabulary for. That why we have “concept”, that are mental parts of reality.
Tag is using one important word to help people to find a message (for instance #linux for a message talking about #linux), the way I see the list. It’s not deciding what word would be used to talk about a subject, that is thinking what are tags that can go in the same “global catagory” that are made. When I think about a post, I only use the tag at the end, as a way to share my post, It’s not that make the conceptual road and the logical enchainement of the propositions.
I think that putting a tag at the same conceptual level than a word is a mistake, but maybe I’m too “classical” in my way of considering a post.
But I can agree with you in the fact that using such list contain a problem that I’ve not though of : the possibility of intentional or not intentional manipulation of said list by forgetting some tags. It would not affect our way of thinking, but it would maybe make invisible the post about the subject that don’t use used tags, because maybe people will not add tag by themselves.
So that was not as a good idea as I though, my bad. But thinking that it’ll affect user’s way of thinking is a bit fast, I think But we are going into a philosophy of language debate, ahah.
I think that having an idea of the topics that are “trending” on D* would be useful, fun, and help bring our community together even more. People don’t come to social networks just for the socializing (although, of course, that’s a big part of it). They also come for entertainment and news. So, if something is being talked about a lot, it would be useful to able to see some indication of that. Of course, it should be optional, so if you don’t like that sort of thing you can turn it off.
Yeh, you see the whole idea of ‘trending’ topics gives me the cold shivers - to me it smacks of marketing/monetizing (ghastly word, but appropriate here) people’s social interactions, and of making people feel that they should be interested in, or pay attention to, whatever lots of people are talking about. It can also lead to attention-seeking behaviour, because for some people it would be a challenge to get things they’ve started talking about listed in the ‘top topics’. Personally I can’t see what use this could be to D* - it would just make it more like the marketing-driven networks. We should, I think, always be looking to do things better than them, and that sometimes means not implementing at all a bad feature that exists on other networks.
But we’re all different! I don’t like those things, but I acknowledge that some other people do.
@kazhnuz : It seems like you got my point, but, to be very clear on it, I’m going to take a simple example, though extreme.
You will never see this image and react to, the same way if I tag it #terrorrists or if I tag it #victims…
Make “tranding tag lists” is letting these king of images be more easily tagged #terrorists than #victims, or vice versa, and erase any kind of debate.
About trending tags, @goob raised this idea to add (optional) most popular tags to the statistics.json output from pods - and that could then be aggregated somewhere to show a trending tags list. That is perfectly possible to do, but listing posts from those tags is more difficult since we don’t have public post federation yet - but that is just another hurdle - it’s also possible to do.
