There's currently a discussion going on on reddit on the concept of subreddits. A subreddit is basically a clone of the reddit concept but it is limited to a certain topic, a good example is the programming subreddit. To be completely fair, the discussion isn't really about the concept of subreddits per se, but for the purpose of this blog entry, I'm going to pretend it is.
Anyway, the discussion seems to be between largely two groups of people. One group argues that subreddits are fragmenting the community, while the other group loves subreddits for the way they (apparently) succinctly categorize submissions by their topic. Now, it's obvious that both groups have valid arguments, fragmenting a community is obviously not a good thing, while being able to group submissions by topic obviously is. To a certain extent people could argue that it is possible to group submissions by using the search, but the way it is dependant on the submission's title pretty much makes that an invalid argument in the long run.
So what could be a solution ?
One possible solution that would allow people to both organize submissions by topic while at the same time keeping the community together on a single reddit would be a tagging system of some form. If people want to view mainly programming related submissions, they could hit the programming tag.
Right now, subreddits are a way of categorizing submissions that is broken because it fragments the community for one, and secondly, it fragments discussion of a submission by allowing people to submit the same link to both a sub and the main reddit. I do personally read the programming reddit frequently, but it is not visible at all to new people and so it does a good job in preventing people who might have only a latent interest in programming from reading the better programming related submissions. On the other hand, since there are no restrictions on what link you can submit to what reddit (how could there be), it also happens that good programming related submissions are only submitted to the main reddit. This basically forces people to read both the main reddit and the subreddit of their interest if they want to have the maximum amount of coverage for their favorite topic.
But, but, tags are broken !
Ok, so there are some problems with tagging content, the largest issue being the fact that people do not use the same tag for the same thing, so there would still be a good amount of fragmentation. However, taking into account the great asset that the reddit community is, there should be no reason not to leverage that asset. It would be perfectly plausible to implement this in a way that people can only select tags from a predetermined pool. With this approach, the community could file requests for new tags, and if such a request is popular enough, it could be added to the existing pool.
Tag based filtering and modifying
Once there is a consistent way to apply tags, users could start filtering on those tags, if there's a topic people don't like (a lot of people complain about the amount of submissions on politics) they could set their preferences to block submissions with that tag outright. Or a more subtle approach could be to allow users to configure their preferences so that submissions with a certain tag are only visible after they get a certain rating by the rest of the community. Or what about attributing a default modifier to particular tags; you're into programming but not into politics ? Well then why not apply a standard +5 modifier to submissions with the programming tags, and a -5 to those with a politics tag. How exactly to implement the weight of these modifiers is up for debate, but looking at the great job that the reddit creators did with their recommendation engine, I'm sure they could figure out a kickass way to factor in personal weights with community approval.
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2 comments:
Interesting ideas, I'm all in for tags on reddit, can't tell how you would see the modifiers happen though.
I like the way digg splits up things, they don't force users to go to another subdomain.
I like reddit better than digg but the subdomain thing really could be better, like, your karma is the same in every profile but your comments and submitted links summary is different for every sub and that totally bugs me ;-)
A flat modifier like the slashdot commenting system probably wouldn't work very well in deed, but I still see modifiers for tags being potentially valuable when they are taken into account for recommending submissions. Also, maybe these modifiers could be weighed depending on age of submissions. Let's say you want political articles to start out at -5 for you. Obviously, this won't shield you from the article for very long if it's one that amasses hundreds of votes, however, what if that article got -5 for the first hour, -10 for the second, etc. maybe you should be able to select a cap as well. This would still show you the fast risers even in a category you don't really like, so you wouldn't miss out on any really good submissions.
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