Tildes Daily discussion - let's talk more about filtering

Deimos
Wed, 06 Jun 2018 21:54:20 +0000

In the daily post yesterday, I mentioned that I was planning to add filtering for topic tags fairly soon. I have this working now, but I'm balking a bit on actually adding it. So before I do, I wanted to take some time today to talk specifically about filtering, and how we can try to make sure that it doesn't get "out of control" and hurt the site in different ways.

"Filter bubbles" can be a real issue, but on the opposite side, I don't think that trying to force people to see content that they don't want to is a good approach either. You can't force that—people will add their own filters with browser extensions, just "mentally filter" the posts, or even leave the site if there's too much that they don't want. Overall, it's one of my goals that people should have control of what they see, and being able to filter some things out is an important part of that.

So there's not really a specific question I want to ask or anything, I'm just looking for a general discussion about filtering and if there's any specific things that you think would work well, or pitfalls we should try to avoid with it. Thanks, I'd appreciate any thoughts.

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