Added some details about technical changes, but not at the detail where someone could start producing code (for anything besides linkposts). My hope is to put more atomic things as issues; if there are, say, three changes to make to the tagging system, my current thought is that each of those deserves an issue (unless they depend on each other in a deep way).
The overarching theme with tags is this: we don’t want to silo content for people, because that’s a recipe for people missing out on content (“Wait, there’s a main section?”). But we also want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don’t want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)
The main argument against tags and for subreddits is that different people will want different rules (what topics are appropriate, how people should talk to each other, etc.) and subreddits are a good way to make and enforce that distinction. If, say, the community neatly divided into “warm rationalists” and “cold rationalists” then we could have a warm subreddit and a cold subreddit which have parallel discussions on any shared topic. But there aren’t similar clean distinctions between topics; we don’t want, say, a SSC subreddit and a medicine subreddit because a post could easily fall in both categories.
I think that tags can solve the topic/norms problem too, but only if they’re clearly visible. (If the boxes are a different color, or have a conspicuous border, or so on, then it’ll be about as useful as having a different subdomain on the site.) But what exactly that’ll look like requires a bit more discussion and familiarity with the codebase (to see what parts are easy and hard to accomplish at various levels).
The overarching theme with tags is this: we don’t want to silo content for people, because that’s a recipe for people missing out on content (“Wait, there’s a main section?”). But we also want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don’t want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)
I think the appropriate historical allusion here is to the Blog Planet) aggregator and its lookalikes. Not that I’m proposing this as a technical solution, necessarily, but it’s a user experience I remember fondly.
Added some details about technical changes, but not at the detail where someone could start producing code (for anything besides linkposts). My hope is to put more atomic things as issues; if there are, say, three changes to make to the tagging system, my current thought is that each of those deserves an issue (unless they depend on each other in a deep way).
The overarching theme with tags is this: we don’t want to silo content for people, because that’s a recipe for people missing out on content (“Wait, there’s a main section?”). But we also want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don’t want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)
The main argument against tags and for subreddits is that different people will want different rules (what topics are appropriate, how people should talk to each other, etc.) and subreddits are a good way to make and enforce that distinction. If, say, the community neatly divided into “warm rationalists” and “cold rationalists” then we could have a warm subreddit and a cold subreddit which have parallel discussions on any shared topic. But there aren’t similar clean distinctions between topics; we don’t want, say, a SSC subreddit and a medicine subreddit because a post could easily fall in both categories.
I think that tags can solve the topic/norms problem too, but only if they’re clearly visible. (If the boxes are a different color, or have a conspicuous border, or so on, then it’ll be about as useful as having a different subdomain on the site.) But what exactly that’ll look like requires a bit more discussion and familiarity with the codebase (to see what parts are easy and hard to accomplish at various levels).
I think the appropriate historical allusion here is to the Blog Planet) aggregator and its lookalikes. Not that I’m proposing this as a technical solution, necessarily, but it’s a user experience I remember fondly.