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votes
Follow a Tilderino suggestion
Currently it isn't too difficult to follow people and their posts. That will likely change as Tildes participation grows. I for one would appreciate a feature to follow individuals and their posts. I realize this is likely low on a priority list and since I'm relatively new, my apologies if this has been suggested before.
Thanks for all the hard work.
Counterpoint: This would achieve nothing positive that the existing design of Tildes does not already allow for.
Let's say I want to follow user X. If I want to follow them because they post content relevant to my interests, I could just as easily follow or filter those tags. Alternatively, if I want to follow them because I like or dislike the cut of their jib when discussing certain issues being able to do this would give me the content I'm looking for (for one reason or another), but in a way that makes you able (and likely) to read and vote without the context of the whole thread and based solely on who they are rather than what they are saying. In my opinion, this goes very much against the spirit of Tildes and the notion of reading and thinking before forming opinions and voting, rather than relying on what is essentially an appeal to authority in the positive or negative.
I'm open to having my mind changed on this if you can give me a use-case where following individual people would serve a useful and unique purpose.
I didn't consider the negative aspects to following someone. The reason in my mind was to follow those who produce content that I find of high value, @wanda-seldon post on physics as an example. She and perhaps others that may do content in categories I don't often visit but would be interested in. If I'm not here on the day it is posted, then I'd likely miss it.
No worries, this was just a not well thought out, thought.
It's not necessarily a bad thought! I just suspect that the idea comes from wanting the feature because it's available elsewhere, rather than because of the merits of the idea in the context of this site.
The base example of enjoying someone's posts on physics would seem to have the simple answer of following the physics tag (or ~science.physics if/when it gets created) and go from there, but the case of someone who does not regularly visit does change things slightly. I suspect that simply expanding the time range of the topics viewed on the filtered page may not be sufficient for this purpose, but I'm not convinced that getting notified on another users's actions is the way to go about it. Indeed, if you're just interested in seeing what a certain user posted in the period since you've been away, you can just check their profile page.
An interesting compromise might be to allow links to certain users profiles being in the nav section of the right of the homepage, but I think that may have many of the same negative effects as I outlined above, and perhaps even encourage it more explicitly.
I'm torn on this. It sounds like a cool feature and I absolutely appreciate the desire to be able to ignore certain belligerent users, but could potentially result in some people voting/etc. on a post because of who is posting rather than what they have actually written, which is against the spirit of Tildes.
If we're talking about the ability to ignore/hide a user's posts, that'd be fine IMO but it's not the the use-case I was talking about as causing the issue. I was thinking more along the lines of if someone was to tag a user they don't like as, say, 'SJW' or 'Alt-Right' in their own system, and then if they see a post by them they respond (or vote) based on that alone rather than actually considering what the other party has actually written.
An ignore/block function would be different because the whole point there is that you aren't interacting with what they write at all.
Yes, the group, tag, and filtering features are still forming themselves and so far they're very incomplete. As they mature I think we'll see many interesting uses.
Thanks very much for taking the time for a great explanation. Your suggestions makes perfect sense to me. I appreciate that breaking old molds are important to success and that the mechanics are a central part of that. :) It will take some people like me a little more time to get used how to do some things.