Should long-running content be bumped to the top of activity view if a certain heuristic is reached?
Basically the title. I'm not going to navel-gaze too much here because it's not that much of a complex problem.
Currently, as it stands, if a submission is older than x days (where x may be 3, but I'm not sure), new comments in that submission will no longer cause Tildes to bump the thread to the top of the list in activity view. Additionally, after 2 weeks, a note will be appended to the comment posting view indicating community standards around commenting on older threads.
The scenario I'm seeking to solve is where one submission covers an event of some duration longer than a few days—where Tildes users feel repeated or recurring submissions are not warranted. My example is this thread about a YouTube video series that was released in three parts, but all discussion has been placed in that submission, presumably because no one has felt that duplicating a post for each new part of the series is worthwhile.
Perhaps if a certain proportion of comments occur within a timeframe, after the submission has been aged out of the sliding window where new comments cause a bump in activity, a bump should still be allowed, but should require more than 1 comment to trigger said bump?
There's some fairly good discussion in that thread that feels wholesome enough that it could be exposed again to the wider Tildes community—because right now everyone interested in that thread is operating under the implicit assumption that to read and participate about this topic, they have to remember to go back to thread y.
New comments do always bump threads back to the top, regardless of topic age, unless:
That Norway thread is currently 4th from the top on Activity sort and has been bumping back up throughout the day.
Oh. Derp.
I think I'm doing this. I guess for some reason expecting to see it pop back to the top even within a "3 day" view which makes completely no sense.
Yeah, I feel a bit strange in general about the time limit on Activity sort. It just feels weird and unintuitive. Like, I think it makes intuitive sense to have a listing like "topics with the most votes from the last 3 days", but it's weirder somehow (and less useful) to look at "topics most recently active from the last 3 days".
Like you were probably thinking, it almost gives an impression of "topics that were active in the past 3 days", but that's not actually what it means. I've occasionally thought about just removing the ability to have a time limit on activity sort, it might be more confusing than useful.
Maybe grey out or otherwise deemphasize older topics, rather than removing them from the list altogether?
It’s a bit weird for “new” as well, because it just truncates the list, and in inactive groups, sometimes that means you get few or no results. It might make more sense to always show at least 10 results rather than making it time based.
What if the time limit on the Activity was combined with personal views? Since the system tracks if there's new comments in a thread I've viewed before, it knows what I've looked at (and how often?). So what if the default Activity view showed all threads from the past X days, and any thread that I've actively viewed from all time? There are threads I don't read that I also don't ignore because I may feel like reading it later, but I don't get around to.
Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Visits to a topic's comments are only stored for 30 days, but that would probably be long enough in almost all cases. It's very rare for a topic to be bumped after more than that long.
In a similar vein I want to suggest an "unread comments" view. It would only show topics that you either haven't visited, or that have comments you haven't read.
I'm wondering how many people have the "Activity" tab switched away from the default? I did for some reason, but on second thought, I switched it back.
It doesn't make much sense to me to ignore activity on older topics now that we have "ignore". But that feature didn't exist before.