You can now ignore individual topics, which will stop showing them in listings for you
It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again.
As I said in that comment, the next major steps for Tildes are going to be bringing in more people, along with more (and more varied) content. To help with that, I'm going to be working on some structural and functionality changes to make it easier for people to see the types of content they want, as well as avoid content they're not interested in.
So, I've just deployed the first piece of that: you can now ignore individual topics when you don't want to keep seeing them in your listings. Thanks yet again to repeated open-source contributor @what, who got this started a long time ago in a merge request that I was able to finish up and add a little more on top of.
Currently, the only thing that ignoring topics does is hide them from your listings, but I'm still thinking about some of the details and possible other effects and wanted to ask for input first:
- If you ignore a topic that you posted a comment in, should you no longer receive notifications about new replies to you in that topic? What about username mentions?
- Should users be able to ignore their own topics?
- Should ignored topics be hidden everywhere, or should there be exceptions? For example, if you do a search that matches ignored topics, should they show up in the results? If you're looking at the poster's user page, should ignored topics be shown?
- Is there anything else that ignoring a topic should (or should not) affect?
A listing of only topics you've ignored is also available through the sidebar on your user page as "Your ignored topics", in case you need to check on any of them or unignore one of them.
One other piece of this is that there's now an "Actions" dropdown available on every topic in a listing, underneath the vote button. This dropdown allows you to bookmark or ignore topics without having to go into their comments page first. I'm not totally certain about this yet, and will probably make some more adjustments related to it. In particular, it's pretty far off to the right on a wide desktop monitor, so I might try some other options after seeing how it feels to use on the live site.
Let me know if you have any feedback about these changes, or notice any issues. Hopefully there should be multiple more updates coming up over the next week or two.
And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
Wonderful! Glad to have this.
Absolutely, in both cases. If users can avoid these notifications, this becomes an excellent tool for de-escalating conflict and having the chance to get out of an argument without being pulled back in.
Maybe the "View unfiltered list" toggle could be included in searches, and ignored threads would count as part of that filtering?
A bit offtopic, but any plans for adding further options to the new Actions menu, e.g. 'Report' or 'Exemplary' for topics?
Edit: I will go through this topic later and add any suggestions/bugs/etc to Gitlab. :)
Speaking of which... I just noticed that if you both bookmark and ignore a topic, that topic doesn't show up in your bookmarked topics page. It's probably not a huge issue, but I can forsee a few scenarios where someone migh want to have a topic bookmarked (for posterity) and also ignored (so they don't get further notifications from it), so IMO ignored topics should probably still show up in the bookmarks page.
Yeah, definitely planning to add more in there. Reporting topics is planned soon (long overdue, really), and it could probably include some of the other existing tools for people with the relevant permissions: moving between groups, editing the title, etc.
It might be nice to have a message like "3 topics have been hidden from this listening" on search or user pages. That way we can respect someone's wish to hide a topic, but still leave an avenue to understanding why a listing looks incomplete.
I'd imagine it adding new, highlighted, items to the current page (they could just be hidden with CSS).
I like this a lot! It's a great addition. I'm a fan of any tool that will let us declutter a bit. Do we have to worry about ignoring too many things? Will the site slow down for me if I have a lot in my ignore list? (I'm asking this as an abstract question, not because I actually plan to ignore much of what's posted here)
Like many others have said, I think it's a valuable tool for disengagement, so I'd say that notifications and mentions should be silenced, and I think that people should be able to ignore their own threads. To me, I think it makes the most sense that ignoring something should make it invisible everywhere except for the ignored topic list and in searches. For searches, I like @teaearlgraycold's suggestion of having some sort of notification of hidden items that can then be accessed if desired.
Though disengagement isn't the only goal of an ignore feature, it's definitely a worthwhile usecase, so it might be worth considering that as a more fully-fledged feature in the future. Perhaps we could allow people to ignore a thread for a certain interval before the topic comes back into their feed? For example, if I find myself wanting to respond out of anger to someone, I can instead choose to ignore the thread for, say, 1, 4, or 24 hours, and then it automatically returns to my feed after the ignore request expires and I'm more likely to have calmed down.
You shouldn't need to worry about ignoring too many posts. If that gets slow, that's a problem for me to solve. I would like to find a way to not store a user's ignores forever because I don't like keeping that kind of data indefinitely, but I'm not sure if there's a good way to do it that wouldn't end up with people getting annoyed if ignored posts reappear later.
Maybe there could be a "Snooze" in addition to the "Ignore". Snooze can either eventually fall out of the database like read-comments data or have some explicit value like "Snooze for [1 day, 1 week, 1 month]". Then "Ignore" can, on first usage, come with some sort of warning about how it will keep track of that (possibly) forever. Users can decide, much like enabling read-comments, what they're comfortable with.
I hope you enjoyed your time off.
This looks like a pretty great change. I have opinions on the questions you've asked; these bullets match the order of your questions.
Finding the "ignored" page was easy and I think it's in the right spot.
I'm also not convinced that the dropdown is in the right spot / is the right interaction for this. I'm giving it a shot though.I think it paves the way for more actions down the line, but might be prematurely optimizing; I think there is room for these two actions near the place that bookmark already existed. Edit: but I want to give it a try, because I don't want to be resistant to change if the change makes sense.
That's a super interesting idea. If it worked that way, "Ignore" could almost act as a self-imposed "Locked" topic, which could also be even more useful for deescalating arguments and avoiding being drawn back into new ones. I like it!
Ah, but there wasn't a place where Bookmark already existed. Previously you always had to go into a topic's comments page to bookmark it (or take any other action except voting).
And yeah, it's a little excessive to have a dropdown with only 2 choices so far, but we're definitely going to need more over time, and I don't really want to end up cluttering up every single post with its own set of 10 rarely-used buttons like Reddit has.
If you'd asked me earlier, I would have sworn up and down that in the same bar as the comment link there was an option for bookmark. (obviously not the case, but just an interesting observation on memory)
I think that if there's even one or two more items in that dropdown it's going to feel better, so just knowing that they're coming is sufficient to fix about 90% of my feelings on that matter.
Thanks for this, it was one of the improvements I thought needed for some time and noted in the census.
Yes and yes. In my opinion ignoring a topic is because I no longer want to see it in the feed even if I have participated in it. A later option for individual comments should be to ignore replies if you want to get out of a disagreement. Any attempts to bring yourself back in to such via mentions is malice and should be flagged as such.
Yes. Just because I've made a post and it has garnered a lot of attention does not mean that I have any interest in continuing to see it.
Ignored topics should only be hidden on topics/feeds. Searching or viewing a user's profile should show them as the person doing so is looking for it and it is outside the normal topics/feed.
EDIT
It'd be nice if the ignored topics disappear a couple of seconds after hitting ignore like the hide button on other sites.
If someone replies to your comment or mentions your username, they expect that you will see their comment. They don't know you've ignored the topic. They won't know why you don't see their comment. That would be changing functionality for people who did not use the "ignore" feature. It might also create bad feeling, because they'll assume you're not interested in what they said, or that you're ignoring them personally. So these notifications should still work.
No. You posted it, you're responsible for it.
If you've ignored a topic, you don't want to see it in general feeds. It also shouldn't show up in searches.
Yes. The user page is a history of a user's activity, not a general feed. It should show all of that user's activity.
It took me a while to find the drop-down box for the "Ignore" feature. Having it on the right side of the screen seems counterintuitive. I looked for it under the post title. Also, I think it gets lost among the vote counts.
EDIT: And, yet again, I've put myself in the firing line without even trying. <sigh>
It's true that that is their expectation, but why does someone else's expectation overrule my ability to opt out of reading about things that I'm no longer interested in? I realize that we are hoping that this won't happen on tildes, but on reddit, "weaponized mentions" are a thing that people certainly do. For example, if someone is discussing the new star wars film, and I ignore that thread because I haven't seen it, why should it be possible for people to ping me into that thread so that I experience things that I don't want to?
To me it comes down to the level of freedom for a user; my freedoms about myself outweigh your freedoms about me, or to be more succinct, my freedom to ignore others outweighs others freedom to talk to me.
If I start a thread, and I no longer want to participate in it, but I recognize that there is value in the discussion, is it not better to put it on ignore instead of just deleting it? Otherwise, my option is just to delete the thread if it goes in a direction I do not want. I think "ignore" is a superior option to deletion in this case.
I feel as if I contributed to putting you "in the firing line": I apologize for contributing to the feeling that people piled on to your comment. That absolutely was not my intention.
I want to further clarify that if I had thought your reasoning was stupid, then I would not have responded; I lack patience for dealing with stupidity. I think you made very valuable points that were well reasoned and smart; what you wrote was a viable way to move forward. That's actually the reason that I responded; if it was stupid, then I think that Deimos wouldn't consider it, and your points are, generally, something that should be considered, especially when it comes to how a thing should be on Tildes.
The responses to my previous comment have indicated that people want to ignore topics in order not to see comments and discussions under those topics, rather than necessarily block the topics themselves.
Would you be able to expand the "ignore" feature to apply to comments? So, someone could ignore a comment, and they would not see it, or any children or grandchildren of the comment. And user mentions in that sub-thread would have to be blocked to achieve people's goal of not being dragged into a conversation they can't walk away from any other way.
Because not all discussions under a topic are toxic. Often it's only one particular sub-thread, started by one controversial comment. So, people could prune that one rotten branch, while still being able to enjoy the rest of the plant.
Yes, it should be possible to apply the same sort of idea to comments as well. I have some other plans for changes to notifications that I'd like to try soon, and it might fit in well with those. Hopefully we'll talk more about that soon.
I said that first ಠ_ಠ.
Yes, you did. You are technically correct, "the best kind of correct". :)
If you look at the time stamps on our two comments, you'll see that they're only two minutes apart. Or, technically: 1 minute and 33 seconds apart. You got in 1 minute and 33 seconds before I did.
However, it took me longer than 1 minute and 33 seconds to type my comment. Are you willing to allow me the benefit of the doubt, and assume that I didn't see your comment before I typed mine?
Yes, also my comment is now a quite practical example of your/mine/our point that we should be able to ignore individual comments.
Give him this one. He got a bit swarmed after his last suggestion. ;)
LOL!
I noticed you deleted your comment there. Thanks.
LOL, NP. I figured there was no point leaving mine when so many others were being thrown at you that basically said the same thing anyways. :)
p.s. I do like this new suggestion of yours though, and agree that it would be nice if people could just "prune the rotten branch" rather than block out the entire discussion. I will add it to Gitlab when I run through this topic again tomorrow.
This is great, thank you for working on it!
... but the "Actions" dropdown doesn't do anything in Safari, on both desktop and mobile. I click it and nothing happens. No adblockers loaded or anything like that.
Can confirm... no joy on Safari on iPadOS or iOS (both latest versions). Yes, I finally replaced my old iPhone 4S ;)
Edit: pretty much fixed now
Hmm, it's a pure-CSS dropdown, but I thought the compatibility of the way it works should have been pretty good.
Do the dropdowns shown here work for you? https://picturepan2.github.io/spectre/components/menu.html#menu-dropdown
Yes, but clicking again to close it (which is what I'd expect from a dropdown) does not work.
I added a little bit of Javascript that should have fixed the browsers it wasn't working in, as well as making it so it will close if you click again. Let me know if it's still not working or if you see any other issues.
This must be maddening, but different to cfabbro, it now works for me in Safari on all platforms. Thank you for the quick fix! :)
That fixed it for FF on Win10, but not Safari on iPadOS or iOS.
Edit: Tried clearing all browser data, just in case... still no go on either Safari version for me. :(
Not OP, but yes, that dropdown works just fine on Safari on iPadOS and iOS (latest)... but Tildes implementation does not. Weird.
Looks like this is probably the issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42758815/safari-focus-event-doesnt-work-on-button-element
The "Does clicking on a
<button>give it focus?" chart on MDN that one of the answers includes probably explains @suspended's Firefox issue as well, since the answer is only "no" for Safari and Firefox in OSX.The reason that the example ones in the Spectre.css docs work would be that they use
<a>elements where I'm using<button>. So I'll probably need to switch, or use some JS or something.It's working just fine on Firefox Desktop for me...
Does anything happen when you click on the Actions button on the front page? On Safari (which appears to be broken too), it highlights the Actions element but the dropdown menu doesn't appear.
Neat, especially the new actions menu for bookmarking posts. @whom liked your idea on the basis of de-escalating arguments, so could this be applied on the thread level? I think ignoring a whole topic because of one angry user or thread would probably be counterproductive for discussion and letting us ignore individual threads would probably be a quite efficient way of signaling to the ignored to knock it off.
Thanks for adding this.
The answers to your questions depend on why someone ignored the comment. Is it just something they aren't interested in and are tired of seeing it in the listing, or is it something triggering or otherwise something they really don't want to see? If it's the former then things like username mentions, searches, etc should all be visible. If it's the latter then it shouldn't show up anywhere except the ignored topics list.
Because there can be such a big difference in why someone ignores a topic I think there should be two different levels: Hide and Block.
Hide would keep the topic out of normal listings, but it would show up on searches and replies and mentions would still create a notification. Conversation in a topic you're not interested in can drift into a subject that does pertain to you. For example, I don't care about Grand Theft Auto, so I might hide this topic; but if someone mentioned me in that topic for some reason I would want to know.
Block would stop all visibility entirely (except a blocked topics list), no searches, no mentions, no replies.
As for should someone be able to ignore or block their own topics? Yes, people should always be able to walk away.
https://tildes.net/?unfiltered=true
It ignores all your current topic tag filters:
https://tildes.net/settings/filters
Nice work! Just a heads up, the actions dropdown from the main page doesn't work in macOS Safari, it's almost like a no-op. No console errors as far as I can see.
I can see it works in Chrome, but the
box-shadowglow is kind of weird (this is probably a per-theme thing), and the animation doesn't really seem in keeping with the motion (or lack of motion) aesthetic for tildes. I'd default to no animation personally.On my phone the actions button is on the left but when clicked expands further to the left offscreen so that I can't see the options.
Do you mind describing your phone make/model/OS, and perhaps taking a screenshot? (so I can put it all in the bug report once I write it up)
Try doing a full refresh (possibly even clearing your cache, if you know how to do that), and see if it helps. My guess is that you just still have the old CSS file so it's not displaying properly.
If it's still not working, could you take a screenshot so that I can see what it looks like?