28
votes
Daily Tildes discussion - more filtering options?
I added topic tag filters a few weeks ago, which should make it so that people can more easily filter out certain types of topics that they're not interested in.
How much further should we consider going with filters? Should we allow filtering out posts from certain domains by default? Posts with certain words or phrases in their titles? Other possibilities?
Is there a point where it's possible to filter out too much, too easily and that starts having negative effects on the site? What do you think?
Yes to domain blacklisting. It's a measure that imposes cost on low-quality, weaponised viral clickbait crap.
I have a long candidate list already.
Would you care to pastebin your list? :D
It's scattered about. In part, from dnsmasq config:
https://pastebin.com/raw/YK62UxSn
Thank you!
It's possible, but my inclination is that I think it's a good thing for adding a filter to be a little inconvenient. I want it to feel like more of a conscious decision. If it's too easy (like being able to do it with 2 clicks), I'm a bit concerned that people will do it as a knee-jerk reaction whenever a post slightly annoys them, and we'll end up with a very fragmented site as everyone quickly sets up a ton of filters.
I'd like wildcard support for topic tag filters, e.g.:
lgbt*
would catchlgbt, lgbtq, lgbtqia
;*porn
would catchcityporn, designporn, earthporn
.That could be really handy, though it's worth noting that tags are intended to have a hierarchy similar to groups.
So you could theoretically browse/filter ~pics for the tag
nature
which would then includenature.landscape
ornature.flowers
.If we do get glob-matched filters, it might be nice to have some way to see what tags are actually picked up by the glob, in case I filter out
spam*
and don't realize I'm missing out on interesting content fromspam-detection-algorithms
.I think broad filters are fine, but specific filters (especially domain filters IMO) put the onus on the user to make sure that the posts they see are high enough quality. e.g “if you don’t like this post why don’t you filter it”. Instead of that, I feel the onus should be on the community and the moderators to ensure that content is quality.
For example, I have “ask” filtered as a tag because I don’t enjoy that style of post, which is different than filtering “imgur.com” because I think that imgur posts are typically low quality.
Some customization is fine, but ending up in a similar state as reddit, where the site is practically useless without an up front investment in filtering isn’t desireable either.
Re:tags - I made a post earlier today with the tag 'uk politics' and it got past at least one person's filter for 'politics'. I may have goofed on the tag (should it be politics.uk?) but it may be helpful for some if filters include partial tags too.
I think just separate "uk" and "politics" tags would have been best for that.
With the current simple filtering, i.e. any single tag gets filtered out, this isn't a great solution.
Maybe I don't want to specifically see uk politics for whatever reason (taking a break, get news elsewhere, whatever), but I'm interested in keeping up with global politics. If something is tagged "uk" and "politics" instead of "uk politics" or "politics.uk", the filter options are "uk" (which blocks all uk content, not just politics) or "politics" (which blocks all politics, not just uk).
More complex tag filtering rules, like boolean operators (e.g. "uk" AND "politics"), instead of a simple comma separated list of individual tags would help handle this problem and others. In addition to that, allowing filters per-group would be very useful (e.g. assuming a ~politics, filter "uk" only in that group while allowing it on the broader site)
We can filter tags out of the main page. Would be cool to have a filter that is basically like show all posts sitewide with this words in it on main page.
Is that just... search, or do you mean something different?
It's subscribing to a tag. So, I might subscribe to the tag "australia", and all posts which are tagged "australia" will appear on my front page, even if those posts are in groups I'm not subscribed to.
I think the other person is talking about a way to filter-in topics onto the front page, whether or not you are subscribed to the group those topics would still be seen.
+1 for domain filtering. It would be a greatly useful feature when at scale.
How about a way to hide individual topics that may be mistagged or just otherwise slipped through your filters?
Off-topic, but is there a way to set a global preference for comment ordering? The default is "most votes", which doesn't appear modifiable.
Not currently, no. It wouldn't be difficult to add a preference for that though, I'll add an issue to the tracker for it.
Thank you!
Thanks, I hope you assign
high priority
to this issue. The fewer pet peeves the better.