Daily Tildes discussion - limits/restrictions on viewing user history?
Currently, Tildes user pages only show one "page" of the user's history—their most recent 20 topics and/or comments. This wasn't really a deliberate choice, I just haven't added pagination yet (it's a bit tricky because of the combination of topics and comments). But I wanted to talk about the general idea of being able to look through users' histories and see if there's anything we should consider doing differently.
In some ways, being able to look through user histories is nice. Sometimes I find a user that makes good posts, and I like to go back and see what else they've posted. However, a lot of people use it in a malicious way, going back through people's posts to find "dirt", or even sometimes using it as a way to doxx them. This happens a lot on Twitter especially, where attention will land on someone for some reason, and people will dig through years of their previous tweets to find things to attack them with.
Even reddit (unintentionally) puts a limit on how much history you can look back through because of their 1000-item limit on any listings. That's not a limitation that I'm going to have, so adding pagination will mean that it's possible to view all of any user's previous posts.
Do you think we should add some restrictions to how much history is visible to try to reduce these bad uses, or is that futile/unnecessary?
Unrestricted access to user history is best, IMO, otherwise you're just asking for a 3rd party "black market" archive services to spring up immediately and see widespread use here... and with that, it's completely out of your control, even deletion, removal and editing policy. Yes, those services will likely pop up no matter what, eventually, but at least you won't be actively encouraging their use.
However if you are dead set on having a limit, then you need to find the right balance between your privacy goals and yet keeping a long enough history that mods can still do their job properly by identifying patterns of behavior. One page is way way way too small, 30 days worth is still way too shallow... 6 months - 1 year maybe? Or even allow people to choose for themselves how much to show, within a set range (e.g. 6mo to forever).
And personally, I would just choose to leave my entire user history completely open and accessible since I often enjoy going back through my own history looking at things again (which says a lot about how pissed off I was at reddit to delete 10+ years of history with /u/cfabbro).
I feel the same way. It's a matter of public record, really.
I wonder though - what if only the last month or so was visible to new/untrusted users, and the full public history of any user's activity was only browsable by people who had reached some sort of trust milestone?
It won't flat out prevent the bad behavior, but it will make it more difficult for gangs of new users or people without accounts to hassle tildes users. Only trusted tildes users could go back through an entire user history.
Yeah, walling it off behind some sort of minimum trust level would probably be a good idea eventually but I would have that at a reasonably low level since, in order to crowd source accountability you need a crowd. That and hopefully/ideally most bad faith actors will not be able to earn much trust here anyways.
Yeah, I wouldn't put it behind a lot of protection like the mod tools or trusted reporter status. Just something basic, low tier stuff. Sometime we should probably hash out what all of these trust levels might look like.
I use post history as a mod and user to see if someone is acting in bad faith or if they don't understand some core concept. If they don't understand a concept, being able to see their perspective fleshed out more in their post history helps.
If they're trying to 'uncuck' me or have a ton of rare Pepes in their post history I can not waste my time.
I think it would be good if you can only see a post in a person's user history if you are subscribed to the ~group they posted it in. That way people can't use unrelated stuff against a person.
I think I disagree with that—it doesn't really apply now while the set of groups is so small, but in the future I think this would hurt some neat "discovery" possibilities.
For example, say that a user leaves a really good comment in a group for a game that I'm playing, a comment that gives me the impression that they have extremely similar taste to me. If I check their user page, I might see that they also comment in groups for other games that I haven't heard of, and that could give me some new games to look into. It would be unfortunate if things like that couldn't happen any more.
I absolutely thought it was a feature and thought “neat, it’s nice to not feel your past drunk posting sprees lingering.” Funny to hear it was an “accident”.
I hear the modding concerns, though. Seems better to add full histories.