Hashtag Plugin

The CredSperiment Initiatives Wish List
1

@LB Has been using hashtags in a few posts. Example:

Frankly this seemed confusing because, as far as I know, we don’t have hashtags (although they are kind of a cool evolution of language and human communication). Thinking about it though… what if we did have hashtags? What if instead of having to go to the Discourse search bar, look for the artifact you want, copy the link, and add it into a comment markdown - you could instead just use a hashtag. Could we create a plugin that connects hashtags to Artifacts?

  • Example: you could reference the Initiative Artifact via #Initiative vs Initiative

A few questions/thoughts:

  • Would this break the overall UX where people are used to linking to other comments or threads? In the small game of linking to more permanent items such as Artifacts using a hashtag is definitely easier, but in the larger game of linking to stuff to flow Cred hashtags might inspire people to be lazy and only use hashtags which would bias Cred towards things that have hashtags vs things that are valuable.
  • Is this technically feasible? I assume it is, but if Discourse makes it hard to crawl for hashtags then this would be a no-go.
  • Hashtags are already used to call up categories, so not sure if using hashtags for other things might get confusing for users.
2

Haha, some cute context on why I used that:

The community house where @decentralion and I used to live had a Slack to organize ourselves with. In Slack, like Discord, channels are demarcated with a “#”.

One of those channels was #didathing (which I see is being used in the SC community) and was originally used in the Slack channel for all the housemates to share tasks they completed for the good of the house. It became pretty common nomenclature to shout “HASHTAGDIDATHING” as you did a chore.

However, you don’t always remember to post in the Slack after every chore you do, so when I saw someone take out the trash but not post in #didathing, I’d post there on their behalf saying something like “#props to Chas, I saw him take out the trash.”

So really, there’s no reason other than ingrained habit that I used a # in the title of that post. :laughing:

3

That’s awesome. Hashtags have great UX and are highly underutilized in Discourse. Would be cool to figure out how to integrate them into the SourceCred protocol/game more.

One idea would be to have #props be a way to send Cred to a person to say thanks as a tip.

Could also maybe explore hashtags as an MVP for simplified boosting (with a standard/fixed boosting value) before creating a dedicated UI.