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.
Your site, your rules, but this is not one that I'm particularly happy about. It has the potential of chasing entire communities of people away.
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.
What do you think?
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?
You should pick the languages you understand (plural).
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.
Can you at a minimum remove not being in English as a reason to downvote?
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.
I understand, and if there's a way I can help, I volunteer. (I'd gfycat that, but I'm lazy)
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.
Especially given how multinational we are!
It certainly puts a damper on my enthusiasm to recruit people to join snapzu.
Hopefully, the admins listen their community and will change their stance.
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.