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    Lobsters Site UI Toggle to Remove "Last Read" Line? ☶ meta
    ryan-duve avatar authored by ryan-duve 6 months ago | 4 comments

TL;DR let me know if you have thoughts about turning off the “last read” separator.

I mostly view Lobsters at https://lobste.rs/newest and see the “Last Read” separator when I am logged in and I would like to turn it off. The issue is I browse the site pretty sporadically, such as when I’m waiting ~30 seconds for something to run, and I’ll either just open a new tab and navigate to the link, or if I already see one open I’ll just go to it and optionally refresh. I then have to think about whether I actually already saw the links in another tab, or if I refreshed and lost the separator but there are new links to glance through.

I think it would be easiest if I could just not see the separator altogether.

I was considering removing it with Stylus (or just an ad blocker + lobste.rs##.last_read_newest, which @pushcx pointed me towards) but thought I would ask here in case others had similar/different thoughts or a workaround to point me towards/away from.

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      pushcx avatar pushcx 6 months ago

      To add context of where it came from: a couple weeks ago when I updated the story scoring to use hiding it turned up a bunch of surprising ways that users were using hiding. Several were using it in a value-neutral way to “put away” stories they’d already seen. That was common enough I thought a ‘last read line’ like hckrnews (you’ll have to reload in a few minutes or hours when new stories have been posted) would be useful for them.

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        dark_grimoire avatar dark_grimoire 6 months ago

        It kind of confuses me why we’ve ended up in a situation where every website has to constantly re-implement basic features that were well solved years ago.

        If only we could somehow create some kind of universal reader that would allow us to read posts under our own personal settings… but I guess that’s not the ideal situation for the website itself, as it would drive control to something else they can’t control. It seems almost like this control matters more than usability for users.

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          jmiven avatar jmiven 6 months ago

          If only we could somehow create some kind of universal reader that would allow us to read posts under our own personal settings…

          For what it’s worth, we almost have that with the mailing list mode. Some features like scoring are obviously missing but otherwise it’s very flexible.

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            dark_grimoire avatar dark_grimoire edited 6 months ago

            I’ve tried it, but it didn’t solve my issues (scoring).

            Later I’ve written my own NNTP gateway and now I’m just using tin to read/post to lobsters and hn. I have scoring, better (for me) dark mode, own editor, can hide chosen users, etc.