Random idea that popped into my head. Dropping it here because I'll forget it forever so might as well share. Ignore me if this has been brought up before.
There is a natural tendency for large subs to get larger and gain more influence on sites like this. From personal experience, I know I'm going to reach more people if I post to s/whatever over some niche sub with 2 subscribers. Of course, I could post my content to every relevant sub but then s/new becomes a clusterfuck that nobody wants. So everybody congregates in a few subs because it's easier. But then these few subs gain power over the rest of the site.
One possible solution would be to implement a way to "tag" a post with all the relevant subs. Then it shows up in all the subs where it was tagged, and can be discussed in smaller subs while still being visible on the larger ones. You get the attention of a large audience while bypassing all the censorship that tends to plague the large subs. Give each post a unique ID, then s/new knows to only show one copy of that post without shitting everything up by displaying every instance of it across the website.
Obvious problems are:
1) Users tagging every possible sub for every post and effectively creating a methed up troll. Maybe cap the number of tags they can use based on how they new they are. Or just slap a global cap on it for everybody.
2) How to handle votes. This incentivizes people to post everywhere and whore out for upvotes. Maybe award them the average of the scores across all tagged subs.
I know Poal isn't large enough for this to be a huge problem, because you can pretty much catch everything on the entire site by browsing s/new. But as Poal grows, this would be one possible way to handle it better than other sites have in the past.
Random idea that popped into my head. Dropping it here because I'll forget it forever so might as well share. Ignore me if this has been brought up before.
There is a natural tendency for large subs to get larger and gain more influence on sites like this. From personal experience, I know I'm going to reach more people if I post to s/whatever over some niche sub with 2 subscribers. Of course, I could post my content to every relevant sub but then s/new becomes a clusterfuck that nobody wants. So everybody congregates in a few subs because it's easier. But then these few subs gain power over the rest of the site.
One possible solution would be to implement a way to "tag" a post with all the relevant subs. Then it shows up in all the subs where it was tagged, and can be discussed in smaller subs while still being visible on the larger ones. You get the attention of a large audience while bypassing all the censorship that tends to plague the large subs. Give each post a unique ID, then s/new knows to only show one copy of that post without shitting everything up by displaying every instance of it across the website.
Obvious problems are:
1) Users tagging every possible sub for every post and effectively creating a methed up troll. Maybe cap the number of tags they can use based on how they new they are. Or just slap a global cap on it for everybody.
2) How to handle votes. This incentivizes people to post everywhere and whore out for upvotes. Maybe award them the average of the scores across all tagged subs.
I know Poal isn't large enough for this to be a huge problem, because you can pretty much catch everything on the entire site by browsing s/new. But as Poal grows, this would be one possible way to handle it better than other sites have in the past.
(post is archived)