That's sort of sad. I would've hoped that there would've been a better system of dealing with them. For now, it could have been an easy fix like a check-mark on tribe settings that would designate the tribe as non-english and keep it off the front-page. I was just hoping for more support for an international community which reddit falls short with.
I was about to write something similar but then again, nothing we can do now, right? For now you have to decide. Risk getting downvoted or play by the rules.
I'm honestly pretty irked about it. If snapzu prides itself on being a friendly community where the downvote is rarely used and the correct answer to non-English content is to downvote, then I don't see much the difference with the time not so long ago Canadians were yelling at us to "speak white".
I think the fact that "Not English" is an official reason is dubious. In encourages downvoting which is supposed to be against snapzu's core values.
If you told people they should just ignore it (it's not like there's that much non-English content anyway), it'd feel more in line with snapzu's values.
That's rather insulting for people whose mother tongue is not English and not something I expect from a friendly place like Snapzu. As a temp measure, why don't you allow tribes to opt out of the front page instead of saying "deal with the downvotes"?
Also, you mentioned picking our language in our profiles, don't forget to turn that into a plural.
Maybe they're worried that people will attempt to use their platform for illicit purposes, and being unable to verify whether or not that content is not appropriate would leave them in a very bad position.
I find it kind of irksome that people are immediately jumping towards this being a cultural or racially biased thing; I wouldn't jump onto a Japanese forum and complain that my English posts were being removed by moderators, especially if it was already in the rules.
This is definitely one of the reasons why we need to grow into eventually supporting other languages as a service and not the other way around. Tribes opting out of being featured on the front page does nothing to solve the issue either, since content is owned by the users and not the tribes themselves. Tribes essentially host the content, but cannot decide if it's also posted in other tribes. This multiple language support functionality is a complex task, certainly something we are not yet ready for and thus have decided that supporting one language (the language we understand and can focus on) is the right direction for us at this stage of our development. Also, may I just bring up that many of us hail from Poland, and yet we don't officially support the Polish language just like we don't support other languages, this is definitely not a racial / cultural matter but instead one of resources.
But how can you grow a community of other language speakers on this platform, if they can't speak their language on this platform? Yes it is a complex task, but within the confines of having the community know that other languages do exist and can pop up in unexpected places, I don't see how it's any different from for instance English.
Yes, your snap posting algorithm probably can't discern what type of post I'm making, that's too bad, but it can be worked around. I can set the options right, myself before pushing Publish.
Yes, those posts can show up on the frontpage. Perhaps it'll make someone curious as to what language it is, and google translate it to learn more. And perhaps spark an interest in that language, et presto, a new hobby is born.
Just to have a rule state: "If it's not English, downvote it" seems rather shortsighted and quite frankly a little unsettling.
My native language is Dutch, but if I can't share Dutch stuff on here to try and grow /t/thenetherlands or a tribe just like that, without getting downvotes that will actually affect my reputation on this site, then what's the point of trying to grow said community on here? Bunch of other sites where I can try that without that rather silly handicap.
Your feedback is very much appreciated. I mentioned in another comment that we will be working hard to figure out how to change our policy to support content made in different languages.
Well... Think about it that way. If they do the API now, they might have to redo it or seriously break compatibility in the face of multiple language support.
Actually, the goal is reversed here, we don't want to chase anyone away, but instead want to open up to many more communities as we become able to host more. Language support is something many services open up after they have built up and reached critical mass in the space/demographic they chose to focus on, focusing on too many demographics will always result in failure.
We cannot reach critical mass by spreading ourselves too thin, and thus need to wait for the right time to open up. Even Facebook a behemoth of a social network didn't open up it's services to many countries until years into their expansion. This is important to understand, as we need to do things in the right order and focus on a specific demographic at first if we want to have a good successful platform.
Having said that, I am absolutely for the idea of figuring out a quick solution to allow all sorts of content in different languages, we just need an approach that isn't heavy on the already limited resources while doing a good job to allow communities to sprout up and not disrupt the general flow of things. (Can you imagine a front page that has content in 15 different languages, 90% of which you cannot understand). Right now our main focus demographic is individuals that can communicate using the English language. The best way to put it is imagine us a single language forum (in this case English) that covers a number of subjects, no one bats an eye at those and they never grow large enough to need to be more. We however absolutely want to support all languages, but we are simply not at that stage yet.
My guess is the NSFW tag functionality is implemented in a flexible way already. So adding more tags would be a simple first solution. Tags could be as simple as "foreign language" or even more specific as "de", "fr", "pl" ... In addition to that you could block all snaps with these tags from the front page.
Besides that it would be necessary to make it possible to set a tribe to one or more default tags. This would also be useful to make a tribe NSFW by default btw.
If the NSFW functionality is built in an extensible way, then this would be the best solution since it will also allow for users to filter their front page for just that content.
I really like this idea. It seems relatively easy to implement and infinitely scalable.
Being forced to pick a default language seems counter productive. If one were to pick German as their default would the site stop displaying English posts? What if you wanted to view English, German, and French for example? Would you have to create three accounts?
Actually, the goal is reversed here, we don't want to chase anyone away, but instead want to open up to many more communities as we become able to host more.
Yet you will. Just take a look at the “Where do you hail from?” thread to see how staggeringly international we are.
No one questions that the shared area ought to be in English. But being told I can be downvoted for not posting in English in my own tribe is, pardon my French, offensive as fuck!
We have an ethos of not downvoting unless it's spam or similarly unpalatable. Most of us speak at least one other language than English and if we dare to lost in it, we're treated no better than spammer.
Look at the community you have, friendly international people, and plan for them.
We're not asking for a large i18n infrastructure, just that we can post in our mother tongue in our own tribes.
I'm sorry you feel offended. It is not our intention to be offensive to non-english speaking individuals, we are simply working with the resources we have available to us to create a service that we are able to manage and grow a community in. We are not a multimillion dollar business, we are just a few guys trying to get something off the ground. But I can promise you this, we have heard all of your arguments and we will work very hard to create functionality that will allow for tribes to host content that isn't in english. Please bare with us as we figure this out, we are already overwhelmed with the amount of things we are so obviously lacking in, please don't consider our shortcomings as a means to offend.
BTW, you don't need to translate the entire site just to be able to host other language speakers, at least not currently, and you could even crowdsource that.
I can remove this reason, but currently this reason does not effect user reputation and only effects the placement of the content from the source the vote was placed from. If someone was to down vote the content because they don't understand it and therefore don't want to see it on the front page, they would simply choose another reason to do so, which would then have an effect on member reputation. It's a tough call, what do you think? We are always wiling to make adjustments to our approach if the ideas behind it are sensible.
Our language template system is built with crowd sourced translations in mind, but again this was prepared with multiple language support in mind as we expand.
My issue is with the mixed signals this sends. We have a culture of not downvoting because we don't like or we disagree. And people listen to that.
We downvote on spam and hate and things that ought not to be on snapzu.
And then you tell people to downvote things if they aren't in English. And once again people listen. If it's part of the menu then it's what I ought to do, right? It moves us towards a casual downvote culture like reddit's.
Ideally we'd have a "hide" option to mask things we don't want to see without downvoting but even without it I think we'd be better off removing the option from the menu.
As mentioned above, would it be difficult to implement a temporary solution to have a checkbox which says "Don't post to front page?" and filter those posts from the fp of all users? That way the snap only shows up in the tribes it was posted to and doesn't run into people on the front page downvoting it for language reasons.
Another option would be to just include Front Page as a default tribe new snaps are posted to, and give the ability to remove it. Make it a free tribe posting which doesn't affect the current default of 3 tribes.
The solution we are working towards needs to be easy enough to quickly implement but at the same time needs to be intuitive, users need to understand right away what the functionality is for without having to go read a manual to understand its context. Again, we are going to discuss this at length and work on creating a low impact intuitive solution to allowing members to post multiple language content without the worry of filling the front page with content from every language imaginable.
Honestly i really do not think the "community" is offended. The admins have given clear reasons for what they have done, and ideas as to what they will do.
(1) They DO NOT for the moment have the infrastructure to support multiple languages and are looking into a solution.
(2) They CANNOT from a security standpoint allow all languages to run rampant while there is no proper infrastructure for it.
(3) They ARE currently working as fast & as hard as they can towards developping a solution.
English is NOT my native tongue, yet I am far from "offended" that they can't immediately right this very moment satisfy my "NEED" to post things in another language...
They had to pick ONE language, if you ask me english was the right choice it's the most internationally used language, especially in the computer/tech domains.
Huh. That's a bummer. I was really hoping for varied language discussions in my tribe for the French football club /t/psg as it has a huge number of fans that speak either French or English. Do I have to remove content that is not in English, or can it be allowed on such a small, niche tribe?
I understand the reason for it, but on the other hand I find it very offensive to 80% of the world. Isn't there a better way than saying "we don't accept your kind here" before we find a more permanent solution?
I seriously thought we grew out of that segregation phase in human history.
- You pick accepted languages in your tribe settings (plural again).
- When you post to a group of tribes that are not of a same single language, you must pick the language of the text / snap (no default) and you can't post to incompatible tribes (let say French only and German only).
- The frontpage shows only snaps in languages you know.
Eventually, localized interface but it's a very minor concern.
While being a great solution of which the groundwork is already partially laid out we must consider the resources that a language support system such as this will require, resources we don't yet have access to. At this point the funding needed to spin up more servers and develop a system that manages languages on a platform that is yet to fully develop it's footing is a really difficult task to tackle not to mention the dozens of other things we should be focusing on. What we have now is momentum, and with this momentum we will take steps to expanding our functionality in the order we believe will help us grow. While we hope to have full language support soon, we need to consider other more important functions like giving our members proper content management tools, proper organizational tools, better moderation tools, a monetization system that will fund our hosting bills and let us to focus full time on this platform instead of switching between other jobs that pay the bills. Having said that, we have a great plan to introduce a lot of great functionality over the coming months, and once we complete our scheduled releases we will focus on making sure we have proper language support across the platform.
I get that and I understand it will take some time.
But as /u/Bastou said, inviting people to downvote is not acceptable. Just let people keep off their submissions from the frontpage and you bought yourself some breathing space.
This is great down the road. I was referring to the way the system works now while we wait for these (awesome) features. Simply saying "downvote content that is not in English" is unacceptable to me.
It's not the resources, it's the recommendation to downvote everything we don't understand.
Edit: I perfectly understand that it's a lot of work and I'm more than willing to wait a long time to have any small improvement. The only thing that bothers me is the way content in other languages is treated now. Just changing the recommendation to ignore it instead of downvoting it would already be fine by me.
I understand your point, but the problem is, this is a community: things spread because it's so connected. If I'm posting in German to a German-based tribe, that goes out to all of my followers. If one of them comments on it, then it goes out to all of their followers, and so on; it would be chaotic to say the least, and it could end up driving users away from the site. Until there is a way to filter content by language, downvoting is the only way to prevent that content from spreading.
Well, they should have though about that before making a website available all around the world. Honestly, in 2015, this baffles me.
If it makes such a mess to start with, this should be priority #1. To be fixed in the next month. If not, this site will remain 100% English, and loose its international user base before it can even reach a size worth mentioning.
And if you think this is chaotic, you should see my facebook posts, I speak six languages and I'm connected to people speaking them too. No one ever complained. And neither did I when I saw content in languages I didn't understand. I just ignored it.
We have thought about it, we have thought about it a LOT. Multiple language support is a difficult task for even average sized media companies with dozens of developers, because it's a huge step at a point in time where the service is ready to expand into other demographics. We are not even remotely there yet, we have no outside funding, we have a small team, we don't even have the full-time hours to pull this off and considering there are so many other things we also need to focus on, I find it perplexing how you arrived at the conclusion that we are even remotely capable of creating such an advanced system at what can only be described as the infant stages of this platform.
Well, start ups in Europe usually build their software solutions around this issue, not the opposite, because they live with the problem everyday. There are frameworks that allow this. I know perfectly well that it can be a nightmare to turn around once the core features are set. But the more you wait and put it back, the more difficult it'll become.
I guess my comment came out as a bit more rude than I intended. I don't mean any disrespect to anyone, especially not the creators and admins of Snapzu. But the fact remains that this will be a very important issue sooner than you'd wish for it, whether you like it or not. So we need to all think about a good solution and start to work on it, with whatever resources you do have, when it's still time.
I don't see how you can claim it would "lose its international user base", there are over 1.5 billion English speakers spread all over the planet; there are more English speakers in India than there are people in Canada and the UK combined.
They simply don't have the resources for multi-language support. I'm sure that when they do, they'll implement it.
I don't think you have an appropriate appreciation for just how chaotic this could potentially be. When you follow someone, you see just about everything they do on your Activity Feed. From the Activity Feed FAQ:
Your activity feed is a private news feed of all actions made by you and the users you follow, including their new snaps, comments, submissions, pinups, and other social activity.
If only a few people you follow regularly post/comment in other languages, it can make your Activity Feed all but unintelligible, which is why websites have language filters in the first place.
How many of them have access to internet and use it for leisure?
I meant that there are many similar sites competing for users. People who want to be able to post and read stuff in their native language, whether they speak English or not, will choose a platform where they can do so. Snapzu looks very promising and I which them all the best. They really seem to be going in the right direction and to listen to their user base. But user fidelity to a website is all but an illusion, they will go where they can find the content they're interested in. It's not a threat, it's a reality of the modern market space.
I for one will stick around. But I'm suggesting what I think would be a cautiously wise move because I do care about Snapzu.
And although it feels like I'm repeating myself over and over, I'm perfectly aware of the effort and resources needed for such big changes and I don't expect anything to be flawless in a short time. They already made the easiest and smartest move : they removed the "this is not in English" reason for downvotes, and it satisfies me completely for the time being, while we patiently wait for a better support of foreign language content. I only suggested that the small resources they can spare be put to improving this weakness of their website so it can continue to grow as a community we all love around the world.
Still, what I'm saying is an opinion of mine, and it may very well be that this opinion is not shared with all that many international users. I can't predict what will happen in the next few months if nothing is done towards fixing this issue anymore than anyone else. But I speak as someone who doesn't have English as his first language and who knows many people like him. This is the only advantage I have in predicting what said people might do here.
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