“This is a slightly odd comment, if only because “hierarchical or tag-based structures” describes almost all extant websites that aggregate / archive / collect content in any way!”
Well, the emphasis here was on the “more”. I.e. there are more feed based architectures, and there are more taxonomy/tagging based architectures. There is a spectrum, and reddit very much leans towards the feed direction, which is what LessWrong has historically been. And wiki’s very much lean towards the taxonomy spectrum. I feel we want to be somewhere in between, but I don’t know where yet.
Certainly there is variation, but I actually don’t think that viewing that variation as a unidimensional spectrum is correct. Consider:
I have a blog. It functions just like a regular (wordpress) blog—it’s sequential, it even has the usual RSS feed, etc. But it runs on pmwiki. So every page is a wikipage (and thus pages are organized into groups; they have tags and are viewable by group, by tag, by custom pagelist, etc.)
So what is that? Feed-based, or tag-based, or hierarchical, or… what? I think these things are much more orthogonal than you give them credit for. Tag-based structure can overlay hierarchical structure without affecting it; custom pagelist/index structure, ditto; and you can serve anything you like as a feed by simply applying an ordering (by timestamp is the obvious and common one, but there are many other possibilities), and you can have multiple feeds, custom feeds, dynamic feeds, etc.; you can subset (filter) in various ways…
(Graph-theoretic interpretations of this are probably obvious, but if anyone wants me to comment on that aspect of it, I will)
P.S.: I think reddit is a terrible model, quite honestly. The evolution of reddit, into what it is today, makes it fairly obvious (to me, anyway) that it’s not to be emulated.
Edit: To be clear, the scenario above isn’t hypothetical—that is how my actual blog works.
Edit2: Consider also https://readthesequences.com. (It, too, runs on pmwiki.) There’s a linear structure (it’s a book; the linear navigation UI takes you through the content in order), but it would obviously be trivial to apply tags to pages, and the book/sequence structure is hierarchical already.
Thanks for the recommendations!
“This is a slightly odd comment, if only because “hierarchical or tag-based structures” describes almost all extant websites that aggregate / archive / collect content in any way!”
Well, the emphasis here was on the “more”. I.e. there are more feed based architectures, and there are more taxonomy/tagging based architectures. There is a spectrum, and reddit very much leans towards the feed direction, which is what LessWrong has historically been. And wiki’s very much lean towards the taxonomy spectrum. I feel we want to be somewhere in between, but I don’t know where yet.
Certainly there is variation, but I actually don’t think that viewing that variation as a unidimensional spectrum is correct. Consider:
I have a blog. It functions just like a regular (wordpress) blog—it’s sequential, it even has the usual RSS feed, etc. But it runs on pmwiki. So every page is a wikipage (and thus pages are organized into groups; they have tags and are viewable by group, by tag, by custom pagelist, etc.)
So what is that? Feed-based, or tag-based, or hierarchical, or… what? I think these things are much more orthogonal than you give them credit for. Tag-based structure can overlay hierarchical structure without affecting it; custom pagelist/index structure, ditto; and you can serve anything you like as a feed by simply applying an ordering (by timestamp is the obvious and common one, but there are many other possibilities), and you can have multiple feeds, custom feeds, dynamic feeds, etc.; you can subset (filter) in various ways…
(Graph-theoretic interpretations of this are probably obvious, but if anyone wants me to comment on that aspect of it, I will)
P.S.: I think reddit is a terrible model, quite honestly. The evolution of reddit, into what it is today, makes it fairly obvious (to me, anyway) that it’s not to be emulated.
Edit: To be clear, the scenario above isn’t hypothetical—that is how my actual blog works.
Edit2: Consider also https://readthesequences.com. (It, too, runs on pmwiki.) There’s a linear structure (it’s a book; the linear navigation UI takes you through the content in order), but it would obviously be trivial to apply tags to pages, and the book/sequence structure is hierarchical already.
How bout a circular hierarchy, with different color highlights for posts, comments, articles, wiki, tags,and links.
http://yed.yworks.com/support/manual/layout_circular.html
you could have upvotes contribute to weighting , and just show a tag cloud like connection diagram.