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845 sats \ 13 replies \ @skreep_ 8 Jun 2023 \ parent \ on: What sub should Stacker News add next? bitcoin
Ditch the idea of subs all together and go with a tag system. Obviously this would be a monumental change but it is food for thought.
Instead of having a Bitcoin sub, a privacy sub, a jobs sub, a development sub, an AI sub, an Art sub, etc, you could make it so one tag per post is required, the remaining tags come at an increasing cost
This way I can select tags in interested in and even merge tags to curate threads more specific to my interests.
I might be particularly interested in AI+technology or Bitcoin+development and Bitcoin+art but I may want to blacklist AI+art.
This could eliminate the need for cross posting and having a million subs for specific different reasons. If I'm just searching Bitcoin, I'd see all posts with that tag except for combos I've told the algo I don't like. Maybe if I search privacy, I'll see Nostr+privacy posts and Bitcoin+privacy posts and privacy+tech post.
Moderation would become increasing difficult with however more tags were introduced. A system where we can downvote with sats that would maybe be redistributed to positive contributors could lead to a pretty decently self regulated ecosystem.
Just an idea of had about improving Reddit in the past that could be applied here (potentially) but I'm no backend guy so I imagine this is a big ask
Agree with this idea. There are too many posts that involve more than one category. Take the PSBT coordination project on nostr for instance. What is the main category, bitcoin or nostr?
Some tags could have special prices (like jobs for example).
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So instead of a formal tagging method of posts, with UI to accommodate it, wouldn't this comment reply be something to show under the ~bitcoin and ~meta tags, but then also I could add others somewhere in the message, at at the bottom of it, like this one has (and thus you basically search for posts and comments with ~bitcoin) to see this?
Or are you referring to how a moderator can tag my post (or "community style" where there is voting on what tag(s) are set my posts)?
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I'm talking about tags acting as their own respective subreddits so to speak.
So instead of Bitcoin being a sub, it's just a tag. Instead of searching through all posts on the Bitcoin sub, we would just be searching or have selected posts with 'bitcoin' as a tag.
This should be viewed differently from a tag like 'nsfw'... Maybe I'll refer to that as a particular post as being 'labeled' as NSFW.
Instead of seeing a post on the privacy sub and the nostr sub and a nostrprivacy sub splintering conversation into three separate threads in three separate subs, you would have the one single thread show up if you were searching the tag of Nostr, or privacy, or Nostr+privacy 'tagchain' if you will, or these were whitelisted tags you've given the algo the go ahead that you prefer to see.
It gives the user the ability to zoom in and out of specific content really easily. Am I searching for Bitcoin or Bitcoin+development or Bitcoin+development+jobs, or etc.
I might think nostr+AI+art is insufferable, I can't stand to see one more AI generated purple ostrich so that's an easy blacklist. AI+art, see ya.
Nostr+beginner or Bitcoin+beginner or coldstorage+advanced etc these don't need to be separate areas when there is so much crossover relevancy. This would eliminate noise and focus discussion.
This helps shake up the whole sub system all together honestly. Scrolling Reddit feels stupid these days, when the same fuckin video shows up on crazyfuckinvideos and damnthatsinteresting and beamazed and videos and natureismetal and contagiouslaughter and funny and wowthatscrazy and Blackmagicfuckery etc etc etc.
If you ask me, the sub system is actually fuckin trash lmfao then you get moderators who decide how everyone else will play in their own little ecosystem they've decided to roleplay as 'God the moderator.'
People are always going to want to splinter off to dig deeper into any given topic and just adding an extra tag is a better solution than creating a whole new domain for that ultra-specific type of post.
Anyway, these are my 2 sats. Feel free to ask further questions
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Furthermore, you could still have overarching 'subs' I suppose, but instead of splintering in a million directions, you'd have just the major umbrellas of SPORTS and POLITICS and then the tags and tagchain system could be how they splinter off. I'm just trying to think of how you keep sports news and politics news and gaming news separate when you search news, but maybe you don't, maybe you just blacklist what you don't want to see at you go, and the curation happened naturally over time
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re: splintering
Subs could have subs which could have subs. I've always wanted subs on SN to be recursive to solve this problem. e.g. ~bitcoindev should be a sub of ~bitcoin as ~bitcoin/dev
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If you ask me, the sub system is actually fuckin trash lmfao then you get moderators who decide how everyone else will play in their own little ecosystem they've decided to roleplay as 'God the moderator.'
This need not be the case. Reddit enables this. This is something that could be decided at sub creation time and not allowed to change (an unchangeable constitution), or something that needs to change by the entire sub voting (democracy), or like on reddit (a system of monarchies/oligarchies) etc.
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This idea is appealing. I've been considering it for a long time.
It's not obvious what the exact difference between a tag and a sub is depending on our definition of each. They both ultimately segregate by topic. But ...
IME What people usually mean by tag is that they are arbitrary and can be created on a whim.
Are there other differences that I'm missing?
Every feature of tags that you've described could also be achieved with subs -- because, again, it seems like the only difference between tags and subs is the friction to create the "topic space," ie subs have high friction and tags have low friction.
One of the things I can't figure out with tags is how to get tag "ownership" ... I want stacker created subs to be their own "nations" with their own economics and rules.
Maybe we can figure out a middle ground? Idk. Open to proposals. It's interesting to think about.
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The difference is posts would just be tagged appropriately and publicly posted.
not posted IN Bitcoin, or IN AdvancedColdCardTutorial or IN PoliticalDiscussion or IN CanadianConservativePoliticalNews ... why do these need to be specific places with rulers? Just let posts be posts and help facilitate it to those who would be interested in it. The cream will rise to the top. I would require a root tag though, that's where it would be posted "in", if anywhere.... I wouldn't allow posts to be untagged.
side note: I don't know, is tag the wrong word? should it be label? whatever works really. I'm gonna start saying label instead of tag. I don't like to keep saying tag over and over again. tag tag tag, nah..
There would have to be some hierarchical system for the labels to be organized. SportsIceHockeyNHLNewYorkRangers shouldn't be a single labelchain (?_?) at least visibly like so... IDK there's got to be a point where the root of the labels becomes implied in the later ones... seeing {{[Sports]+[Baseball]+[MLB]+[BostonRedSocks]+[Daily Discussion]}} is pretty ugly and we also wouldn't want links like stacker.news/sports/IceHockey/NHL/NewYorkRangers/thread03374989 either I don't think? You'd hope that it'd just be stacker.news/NewYorkRangers/thread03374989 because if were talking about the rangers, we know we're talking about the NHL Sport of Ice Hockey.
I'm all over the place when I'm trying to explain ideas, bare with me. I'm going to present the Idea like I'm a new user creating an account and being introduced to this new ecosystem. I think it would be really easy and intuitive to onboard new users. let us roleplay:
==
I, the brand new user of Stacker News, am looking to participate in discussions of my favorite hockey team team, amongst other things that interest me.. As I make an account, I quickly create a lightning login account, click next, and some labels pop up.. I'm being asked to select labels that may be of interest to me. I choose some basic ones... they offered me some options to dig deeper into some of the different labels but I just want to browse so I've made some choices and left the preselected labels selected.
After clicking next, I'm browsing the home page... I would see posts that are trending with labels like [Sports] and [Gaming] and [Art] and [Politics] and [Science] and [Technology] and [Economics].
I click on the label [Sports] under one of the posts and I'm brought to a new page of posts all labelled with [Sports] including [NFL] and [MLS] and [Cricket] and [Ice Hockey] and [Boxing] and so on.
I click on a [Ice Hockey] label on a post and same thing, Now all posts I see are trending posts labelled with [Ice Hockey]... I can search these posts by top of the / most trending / most discussed / most... of the [choice of time frame] Like every other time I am reading through similarly labeled posts. While browsing [Ice Hockey], I see trending posts labeled with [NHL] and [SHL] and [KHL] and [OHL]. I click on [NHL].
I see posts with labels including [NewYorkRangers] and [BostonBruins] and [VegasGoldenKnights]... I click on [NewYorkRangers] and see trending posts with this label. I have arrived at the content I was seeking and have found the discussions I am looking for. I follow the [NewYorkRangers] label. When I follow it, I'm suggested a few other labels that users who follow [NewYorkRangers] also follow, including [NHL], [IceHockey]+[Prospect]+[Analysis], and [NewYorkJets]. I like to geek out about the draft so I'll also follow the [IceHockey]+[Prospect]+[Analysis] labelchain.
I go back to home page and begin browsing whatever content I am interested in. I start following labels that interest me. I follow [Advanced]+[Bitcoin]+[ColdCard]+[Tutorial]. I also follow [Advanced]+[Tutorial], so I'll see any post that has both labels on it. I follow [Historical]+[Japanese]+[Art] and [Modern]+[InteriorDesign]. I click on the 'trending labels' tab and It shows me info on how popular certain tags are, historical data on when certain combinations became popular. Other labelchains that may be of interest to me.
As I continue to use the website, I organize my lists of labels so I can easily sort through what I want to see with ease. Users share their own personal Labelchains. Some have them directly available on their user profile page and I can just click on it and see his exact feed on SN with all of his interests. I can save his labelchain and anyone elses and swap between them when I feel like my own feed is getting stale. When I see a label I like while I'm browsing someone else's feed, I can click a button that says Save to --> skreepchain #2 --> List --> Politics, or whatever you know?
Also, last thing, the creation of labels should be in some way crowdfunded so they are determined and not all over the place. You don't want users to create [Funny] and [Funnnny] and [Fuuunnny] and [funnnnnny] and [fffunny] and [ffuuunnnyy] and [fuunyyy] to be labels... you'd just want [Funny].... Then maybe one day a streamer who goes by [fffunny] comes along and his community wants to fund the tag to distinguish that particular content. Ultimately, you want determined tags the community has approved and actually wants to use.
I'd imagine users could place a deposit on a label proposal which would need X amount of users to donate a small amount in order to make that a label. Users could even go to a tab of the website where they see a label proposal board, where they pledge maybe 100 sats and pre-follow labels that have been proposed by users. This way the Label system could grow naturally. You could reward users for being founders with a special emblem. Funding for the label could even then be a pool that is used to reward users who post with the newly approved label to kickstart activity using that label.
In this process, you could determine ties to other labels, as in [IceHockey] and [NHL] are bound, just as [NHL] and [BostonBruins] are tied, but has nothing to do with [InteriorDesign]. This gives opportunity to determine community consensus on spelling/formatting and what should be and shouldn't be chained together and what is or isn't acceptable for this website (a profane label would never make it past proposal, and it would be like putting money in a fire lol...)
I've gone on long much too long for one post.... I've probably brought up too many things for y'all to even approach a cohesive response to lol... I actually do really like the overall idea of making the domains in which these posts exist much more modular and interconnected than tons of little nation states with their little rulers ruling over their little ecosystems.
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Easiest to consider using a system like defining labels as parents, children and siblings. Sports would be a parent label to Ice Hockey.
Hockey would be considered the child of Sports, sibling to Football and Baseball and so on, and parent to NHL, grandparent to NewYorkRangers. These Family trees are how the network should naturally grow out and be defined.
This also helps because all hockey is sports but not all sports is hockey. All NHL is hockey but not all hockey is NHL.
As the community grows, it could crowd fund binding tags together so when you're whether you're searching Cooking or Tutorials, you would come across a post tagged as [Cooking]+[Tutorial]
Then eventually the Tutorial community crowdfunds their Beginner / Advanced prefix tags when they feel it's worth it. I follow [Beginner]+[Tutorial] and I'm telling the algo I like chains that contain those two labels.
Now my feed shows me more Beginner + [cooking, math, guitar, drums, exercise] + Tutorial.
I can click the Guitar+Tutorial label and tell the algo I don't like these two labels together.
Communities should define their own prefixes and suffixes.
For gaming, there could be prefixes like Retro, PC, Playstation, Xbox, Mobile, Board. It could have suffixes like Review, Discussion, Trailer, Gameplay, Stream etc.
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Thanks for thinking about this more!
why do these need to be specific places with rulers?
Why do companies need leaders?
tbh A lot of what you described sounds like the way we are imagining subs. The only difference afaict between subs and tags is ... their creation and not their consumption.
You get into creation here:
I'd imagine users could place a deposit on a label proposal which would need X amount of users to donate a small amount in order to make that a label. Users could even go to a tab of the website where they see a label proposal board, where they pledge maybe 100 sats and pre-follow labels that have been proposed by users. This way the Label system could grow naturally. You could reward users for being founders with a special emblem. Funding for the label could even then be a pool that is used to reward users who post with the newly approved label to kickstart activity using that label.
This sounds a lot like a sub by another name IMO. What do you think, specifically, is bad about subs that's solved with topics?
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Why do companies need leaders?
The "company leaders" in this case would be the leadership team of stacker news, and by contributors to labels who are favorably regarded by their respective communities, so I'm not taking an anarchistic stance that no one should lead or "be in charge" of anything.
This sounds a lot like a sub by another name IMO
Well, it's replacing them so it is similar, but how I'm seeing this is still completely different from how subs work today.
Let's put it this way.. Right now, there are three subs here. Bitcoin, Nostr, and Jobs.
Most people are here because they are bitcoiners, so bitcoin is basically the home page.. then you have jobs, which are for bitcoin+jobs, mostly, and then nostr.
When we're talking about zap transactions on nostr.. which sub is this relevant to? Nostr+Bitcoin, but I have to make a choice and post it in one or both.
You've got people clamoring for a privacy sub, but guess what they'll talk about there? bitcoin privacy. nostr privacy. privacy technology. etc.
The difference lies in that subs are places where these particular posts reside, whereas labels are designations to facilitate them to their audience.
It's like how a tweet is a submission to a place (twitter) but a nostr event is a happening that happens, and if someone is looking for it, they can find it.
On the website with my vision, I click [Videos] and see posts like "Brad makes a Pepperoni Pizza {[Cooking]+[Video]+[Tutorials]}, and God of War: Ragnarok Review {[PC]+[Gaming]+[Video]+[Reviews]} and "Footage from WW2 Colorized {[Historical]+[Military]+[Videos]}
In this system, there isn't actually a place called Videos, or Cooking Video Tutorials, or PC Gaming Video Reviews or Historical Military Videos. and yet, there I am having these posts being facilitated to me, and I can participate in any of these communities.
Particular labels could be more expensive than others, and being more specific should come at at reduced cost. Reason: posting my local election results no one cares about to just [Politics] should be costly, but posting it to [Florida]+[Politics] would be less expensive.
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I'm just spitballing ideas out loud but I will spend some time thinking over this
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interesting idea, i like it
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