August 10, 2010 at 17:48Chaos and Order: Peaceful Coexistence
Human thinking and communication have a component of chance. This is their nature, this is not a flaw, because it allows you to unexpectedly go out to new interesting things. Therefore, moderation in collective venues is always an art, the ability to maintain the line between thematic purity and the natural urge of people to create offtopes. But imagine two things.
Firstly, the ability to typify texts within the discussion, i.e. position them in a certain way. For example: argument, thesis, consideration, opinion, summary. This is not quite the same as assigning tags to tags, since tags associate text (as well as photos, videos, audio - in other words, content objects) with a certain topic rather than with a certain positioning.
Secondly, the ability to assign labels to everyonecontent objects. Typically, tags are assigned only to certain objects, for example, a blog post or a topic on a social resource such as Habrahabr. But I have not seen tags assigned to comments. Which by the way is clear - as long as there is a distinction between the author and commentators, the space is not entirely collective. There is much more collectivity in forums, but text tagging is not used there at all. It has been replaced by forum topic categories. Which, by the way, is very limited - I have not seen forums with unlimited nesting of sections and branches. Usually something is in the region of three attachments, and the branches inside the section are “tagged” with the names. Although the names may still be those, their tagging function is very arbitrary.
Having done these two things, we essentially get a rich set of criteria for filtering / aggregating the desired content. For example, we can quickly isolate from the general mass of discussions, including flood and offtopic, all arguments, theses or opinions on any topic. True, the highlighted elements will not be related to each other in the same way as texts in discussions are usually related when a post or comment is associated with another specific comment. In other words, communication naturally creates a structure of relationships between content elements.
Well, this can be solved if you also implement the ability to link content elements, regardless of existing relationships. In this way, we can create “parallel” structures that correspond to some of our goals, the purity of the topic, etc. The content is one, common, and the structures of its elements are different. You can switch between them, see one and not see the other. What will be the peaceful coexistence of chaos and order. More precisely, of different orders.
It would seem that I did not indicate two things, but three - typification, tagging, and the establishment of relationships. But by assigning a tag to a content object, we essentially declare its connection with a topic. If we consider topics as objects of a special type and include them in common structures with content objects, then the need for separate tagging disappears and there remains the need only for declaring links. So the bottom line is still two things left - a declaration of the types of objects and a declaration of relations between them.
Firstly, the ability to typify texts within the discussion, i.e. position them in a certain way. For example: argument, thesis, consideration, opinion, summary. This is not quite the same as assigning tags to tags, since tags associate text (as well as photos, videos, audio - in other words, content objects) with a certain topic rather than with a certain positioning.
Secondly, the ability to assign labels to everyonecontent objects. Typically, tags are assigned only to certain objects, for example, a blog post or a topic on a social resource such as Habrahabr. But I have not seen tags assigned to comments. Which by the way is clear - as long as there is a distinction between the author and commentators, the space is not entirely collective. There is much more collectivity in forums, but text tagging is not used there at all. It has been replaced by forum topic categories. Which, by the way, is very limited - I have not seen forums with unlimited nesting of sections and branches. Usually something is in the region of three attachments, and the branches inside the section are “tagged” with the names. Although the names may still be those, their tagging function is very arbitrary.
Having done these two things, we essentially get a rich set of criteria for filtering / aggregating the desired content. For example, we can quickly isolate from the general mass of discussions, including flood and offtopic, all arguments, theses or opinions on any topic. True, the highlighted elements will not be related to each other in the same way as texts in discussions are usually related when a post or comment is associated with another specific comment. In other words, communication naturally creates a structure of relationships between content elements.
Well, this can be solved if you also implement the ability to link content elements, regardless of existing relationships. In this way, we can create “parallel” structures that correspond to some of our goals, the purity of the topic, etc. The content is one, common, and the structures of its elements are different. You can switch between them, see one and not see the other. What will be the peaceful coexistence of chaos and order. More precisely, of different orders.
It would seem that I did not indicate two things, but three - typification, tagging, and the establishment of relationships. But by assigning a tag to a content object, we essentially declare its connection with a topic. If we consider topics as objects of a special type and include them in common structures with content objects, then the need for separate tagging disappears and there remains the need only for declaring links. So the bottom line is still two things left - a declaration of the types of objects and a declaration of relations between them.