Scratch

I simply love this idea! I think it would seriously improve the frontpage and other aspects of the website.

One idea I have for the Front Page is, instead of having Top Viewed, Top Loved, etc. it would be customizable.

To start it would display the 5 main categories (Art, Simulation, Animation, Story, Game) and which among them were most tagged recently. For example

Top tagged "Game" recently:
Game1
Game2
Game3
Top tagged "Story" recently:
Story1
etc.
etc.

But you would be able to add and remove your own categories. So for example, Addzero, your frontpage might have

Top tagged "1s1s" recently:
Top tagged "Card Game" recently:
etc.

With this new customizable front page no one could complain they were seeing "too much art" or "too many games" because they could choose what kinds of projects were on their front page.



For the collaboration aspect, I don't think names should have to be individually approved, they should just be appended with "[Group]".

On your "MyStuff" page there would be a "Create Group" link, which would allow you to create your own group page.

On this page there would be a section like friends, listing group members. Below that there would be a "Request to join this group" link. So you could ask the group's creator if you could join.

The creator of the Group Page could set the permissions of the group members (ie Contributor, the lowest level, Moderator, able to remove projects, and Admin, able to add new members to the group).

On projects on the Group section of Tagged favorites, only members of "GroupX" could tag the project with "GroupX [Group]"



I hope these ideas make sense, if they don't I'll try to explain more simply.

Interesting ideas here! Since the issues are complex, it would be great if you could make a Scratch project that describes your suggestion. A mockup is always helpful  - especially if it shows how what you propose would work in practice.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/AddZero/1011150
So did this mockup make sense?  Most of the actions shown are mouse overs to show the current number of votes on a tag and allow vote down.

It's mostly showing that per-tag voting can be easy to use: You can just click the icon and you're done.  (it just votes the top tag.) and/or you can vote up and down specific tags.  these tags are then used to categorize the users' page, so I think users will tend to use helpful tags to keep their favorites page organized.  (perhaps feature helpful/well organized user favorites... to encourage helpful taggers... sort of like curators.)

So this replaces love its, favorites and tagging... (todo, I'll show how groups work that would replace private galleries... as explained above.  Regular public FaveTags replace public galleries... by also having a comment section.)

You can show more support to projects (like love it, or favorite it?) by tagging as "awesome", or other positive tags.  You can then organize a select few of your favorites with "awesome".

By doing so, it shows up on that project towards the end of the tag list.  It's like that project is nominated for the tag "Awesome".  If the tag's score drops below -5, that tag is hidden. (but can be revealed and used by anyone to organize their favorites.) People that visit the "Awesome" tag page, see "newly tagged" (nominated) as "Awesome" and can vote up or down (but to vote down a tag, they have to vote it up with another tag.)... so the community decides the best keywords to describe a project.  If tags are deemed abusive, they can be flagged and moderated.

More importantly, I think this will strengthen the mini-communities in scratch around varied interests like "performers", "games", "doll dress up"...  as each of tag pages could have a comments section.  And because each tag page is in sections "newly tagged" (like nominated) The "Top Tagged" section shows what the community believes is the best examples of that tag.

I think this system would be more healthy than the current front page centric site: popular or spamming users that know the system (making an enticing thumbnail image or sensational topic or other methods) get more views... those on the top views that beg for love-its get love its and more time on the front page... 
and higher ranking in irrelevant tag pages like waffles... that then get more views, and more ranking.
Then there's complaints that there's not enough X projects on the front page. 

I think strengthening the individual tag pages by letting the community decide what projects are relevant to the tags, and making them centers for discussion will enable the varied interests of the community... and put less stress on the front page.

So is this making more sense?  What do you think?  Some opinions from the scratch team would be nice.   

Last edited by AddZero (2010-04-30 13:31:52)

I quite like this idea    Slick, easy to use, and simple once you get the hang of it.

I moved this discussion from here so we can discuss easier!

Lucario621 wrote:

I like it - but I still don't think it should replace love-its or favorites.

AddZero wrote:

Thanks for responding. I wrote reasons why I think this would be better than the current love its/favorites (and current tags&galleries) in the forum: (link to forums) Would you please respond to that? (and later posts.) This idea is still being defined/refined with your help.

Lucario621 wrote:

Love its: they are not often abused. Although some project creators sometimes beg for them, only a few do, and it's not that big of a worry.

The current top loved "Click love it if you think that there should be Scratch Pro 7", its whole point is to ask for love its.
Perhaps saying that they're easily abused is not the strongest argument.  (and I don't want this to sound negative, "Love it's" have worked fine... I just think this would work better for our community.)
I think FaveTags would be an improvement because the community would decide how relevant each tag is to the project.  It's like they're being voted (loved it) for each tag.  So the community decides what a good "game" is, and "platformer" and "doll dress up"... individually. each tag (and type of project) gets a chance this way... and each tag becomes a mini-community, because each tag page has a place for discussion.  I think this would reduce the complaints for not having enough "games" on the front page, or other specific interests- because it's making it easier to find other projects people like, by making tag pages better.

Lucario621 wrote:

Considering Scratch has no way to rate projects really, it's the best thing yet.

Yeah, "Love its" is Scratch's current rating system. It just doesn't have vote down... (perhaps so it would not be discouraging.) 
Well, Favorites are almost the same thing as "Love its", there just isn't a "top favorites" on the front page... why not consolidate them, to make it easier?  (That's what FaveTags do.)

Lucario621 wrote:

Favorites: Having your favorites based on what tags you have, and not necessarily the individual projects, is just not very good. Although I would like being able to sort them by date, and popularity, and stuff, I don't think tags are necessary. I hope you understand.

I haven't drawn out the user's favorite pages yet, but they won't look very much different from now, except on the side you'll see my frequently used tags, in order of my use.  (You can quickly see what my interests are: "Games", "Racing", "Football", "Art"...)
By clicking "Game" it narrows down all the projects I've tagged with "Games".
By default it would be sorted by last tagged, (Like current favorites) but other sorting methods might be nice... (like sort by 'top FavTagged by the community' (popularity), or by date like you suggested.

Last edited by AddZero (2010-04-30 19:24:10)

Lucario621 wrote:

The thing is that any project you enjoy, you can love-it. Though it doesn't store it on any list - because than you would have a humongous list of love-it'ed projects. But favorites is like projects that are your absolute favorites that you like the best; so you favorite them so you can remember them later. That's why you really shouldn't consolidate them.

I understand the concern over the loss of two levels of appreciation.
I believe this issue is addressed:  With FaveTags we would gain many levels of appreciation: you have your favorite 'games', favorite 'racing' projects, then you can tag a select few with 'awesome', 'fun', 'addictive', 'inspiring', 'cool'... or other positive keywords.  This will help you remember WHY you favored it, and make this list more useful to you. (and others that visit it.)

True, you'll have a humongous list of favorites, but they'll be easily sorted by tags.
you can click 'awesome' to see all of the projects you think are awesome, then you can click '+ games' to just show the 'awesome' 'games' in your favorites.  (and others may be exposed to more projects that you like, that they might think are awesome.)

This filtering by keyword is called 'faceted search'.   It's used on many sites to allow the user to filter by tag... to narrow down quickly to what they are looking for.
http://delicious.com (a social bookmarking site) is a great example of this in action.
(imagine web links are scratch projects.)
checkout: http://delicious.com/supermathman
This user recently tagged the scratch website with "art, children, computer, design, education, free..."
(And you can see that 10,711 other users tagged this... with more or less tags, that are useful to them.)

At a glance you can see this user likes 'programming', 'education', 'software', 'kids', 'animation'...  you can click tags to quickly filter down to what you're looking for.
(solr is a free system that could enable faceted search for scratch.)

People pick tags to describe links for their own use on Delicious.  Only when a significant number of people use a tag on a link that it becomes popular on the site.  I think because of this, delicious tags are not very spammy... (but FaveTags would also allow discussion on each tag page... and in other ways are a bit different.)

So I think a per tag voting system would be more helpful to scratch than the current love it/fave it/public tag systems...  IF it can be very simple to use.
I still need to work on this mockup, but I believe it will be. 

Did this help your concerns?  Thanks for the discussion!

Last edited by AddZero (2010-05-01 02:51:41)

I like the direction of this and I echo Paddle2See's call for simplicity. I wonder if something like this could be enabled by simply embedding some JS code. One example of this approach is disqus.com.

jeromi wrote:

Cool, but the user will have to put up with all the game projects tagged with "game" if they just meant to add one game to their favorites. So no, this is not a good idea.

EDIT: If anything I think it would be less scratchers have to "Put Up" with because tag pages will have projects that have to do that tag.  You have your tag page that you organized with tags you like, so you can easily remember WHY you liked projects (because of the tags you picked to describe that project) in your favorites and sort through and find them again... then each time you use a tag those are like votes that influence the public tag pages.  So tag pages are what the community thinks is a good "game" "art" or whatever.

Copied this comment from the mockup project's comments:

jeromi wrote:

Nope, i do not like a bit. there are "Tag this project" projects, and they have all kinds of random tags. Plus, you will have to sort through all the projects tagged with that tag. It is a lot easier to just play project from your favorites.

Thanks for responding.

I believe this will be easy to use and helpful to our community.  I'm slowly getting better at explaining it.  Please be patient with me.

I'll try to address your concerns and clarify:

I believe tag pages will be much more useful and less spammy because the community votes on each tag for each project.  and by adding or confirming tags, people are building and organizing their own favorite list...

So, I believe with this system, there will not be many useless random tags.  People will pick and help protect tags, to keep them useful.

-----------------
Here's a commonly misused tag as an example: Waffles that I think this will fix. 

With FaveTags, each tag page becomes a mini-community.  People that like waffle projects will go to the 'waffle' tag page often to dissuss waffles and see newly tagged waffel pages, and popular waffles projects, in the last 24 hours and the last week, month and all time.

When a new project has the "Waffles" tag added, it will show on that page under "newly tagged Waffles projects."  If the people that like waffles agree that this has to do with waffles, and they like it, they'll vote up with the "Waffles" tag. 

If it doesn't have to do with waffles  I believe they will be protective, and vote down with that tag, to keep the "Waffles" tag page clean.

I believe this will happen for every tag...  So when people visit a project they like and a nonsense tag shows up, they can easily vote it down.

If they REALLY like a project, they can also tag it with "awesome", "fun" or something positive like that, so that they will have a list of "awesome" projects in their favorites.  the people that frequent the public "awesome" tag page can decide what awesome is for the community. 

Even if the community doesn't agree with how you tagged your favorites, your favorites page still organized with those tags that make sense to you.

FaveTags are like more specific love-its  you love it BECAUSE it's a Game, and/or because it's Awesome, or Art or whatever... then these favorites are also votes that help the community help people find things in categories they like...  and let people find and communicate better with like minded scratchers.

is this making more sense?

Last edited by AddZero (2010-05-04 14:39:06)

I love the flexibility of the system...and the possibility of allowing self-organizing interest groups.  But do you think an interface can be designed that is simple enough for a 9 year-old to understand?  Maybe there is a simplified interface with limited functionality and an Advanced interface that let's you use the full power of the system? 

Another concern...would this lead to exclusive cliches with voting block groups deciding who is "in" and who is "out"?

<go to[ <when green flag clicked>

I like this idea. Using this system of weighted tags, we'd not only be able to search for content that is relevant, but it would come to us! (I haven't read the preceding 45 posts, so I don't know how many times this has been suggested). When you log into Youtube, it gives you a few videos you might find interesting based on what you've recently viewed. The scratch homepage could do something similar: find projects that are heavily tagged with tags of projects you have loved/rated/whatever'd recently. The "friends' latest projects" thing does something similar, but I have no control of what happens there other than to prune my friends list of users I find uninteresting.

The only problem I can see with the "tag groups" page is small variations in tag strings. If a project is tagged "Mario Platformer", does it automatically get thrown into the "Platformers" tag group based on the similarity of the tag? Again, I haven't read most of the discussion above so I don't know if this has been addressed already.

This is a very innovative idea, and I'm all for it. I'm just glad I'm not the one who'll be writing the PHP! 

Good thoughts fullmoon, thanks! 

fullmoon wrote:

The only problem I can see with the "tag groups" page is small variations in tag strings. If a project is tagged "Mario Platformer", does it automatically get thrown into the "Platformers" tag group based on the similarity of the tag? Again, I haven't read most of the discussion above so I don't know if this has been addressed already.

I think simpler, less specific tags will be used more often, like "platformer", "mario" instead of "mario platformer".  (because the more popular, less specific tags would be suggested first.  I think people are more likely to click something that's suggested in a popup or auto-complete than typing a longer tag in.)

The bonus is that "mario" projects would have all kinds of "mario" projects: "racing" "baseball", "platformer", "animation"
and "platformer" would have "metroid", "sonic", "game engine"

In your favorites you could easily find it, by filtering by "favorites" then "mario"
Perhaps on tag pages, also suggest other popular used by these projects tags.
and allow filtering by tags...

But people that really like "mario platformers" enough to have a separate "mario platformers" tag, could add that as well.  this tag page would become a place for them to discuss and find other "mario platformers".  I don't think this would become more popular than "platformers" or "mario"  but becomes a more specific and less noisy place.

(crazy idea: perhaps have children tags, or tag combinations that link back to the less specific pages?  but that may make it too complicated or require moderation/special attention.)

fullmoon wrote:

This is a very innovative idea, and I'm all for it. I'm just glad I'm not the one who'll be writing the PHP!

Yes it will be large project to program, but hopefully scratchr would move to an open source powerful community supported framework/cms. ( Drupal, like they did with ScratchEd.    )  Drupal has modules for solr integration, (for faceted search and suggested projects.) taxonomy, voting, collaboration, (Most of the current scratch website could be pieced together from existing modules, in a day.)...  although per tag voting would need to be something new or heavily adapted.  I bet many other community-generated-content websites could benefit from this feature and would help with development and/or maintenance and improvements.

I think tags should be positive- I think the "awful" tag would be moderated.

But yes, perhaps: 'bookmarks' or 'tag votes' might be a better name for this.
You may use the "awesome" tag on your absolute favorites. (and find other projects the community thinks are awesome.)  And if you want to help defend the "awesome" tag-- you might vote up a less great project as "game" and "inspiration" (or some describing word.) so that you can vote it down as "awesome".

I may think something is awesome that you don't.  It's still listed in my favorites as awesome, even if the community disagrees.

I think most (if not all) all projects have some merit or attributes others like to some degree, and there will be other people that like that type of project, or projects with those certain attributes...  Hopefully tag voting and tag discussions would help them get together, collaborate and improve.

Last edited by AddZero (2010-05-11 11:01:53)

fullmoon wrote:

But just because I tag something as "Mario" does not mean I want it thrown in my Favorites bin...or are you proposing to get rid of the Favorites list entirely?

Yes!  This would replace favorites.

This is not your "favorites" anymore, it's stuff you helped tag for the community. 
It's more like the "Love it" level of appreciation, but with a purpose: helping to categorize the project for the community.  "People that like "Mario" projects may like this."

So, you can tag with category tags, ('game', 'mario', 'popcicle')
OR if you really like it, you can also add positive value tags: ('cool', 'inspiration', 'awesome', 'challenging', 'fun', or even 'favorite'...)

So you can have an "awesome" and/or "favorite" category in your bookmarks, that you can use like your current "favorites", but with more flexibility if you want, so you can remember WHY you liked it, and why you would want to go back to it.

So yeah, our 'favorites' or 'bookmarks' will be larger, but easily sortable.  (see discussion on faceted search and delicious.com above.)... and these tag votes would help the community by keeping categories more relevant.

Last edited by AddZero (2010-05-11 12:32:19)