I’m annoyed by all these “What are you doing this XXX” threads. Is it possible to automatically hide them?
They are usually tagged with “ask” and “programming”. So hiding all “ask” and “programming” threads in my settings probably would do the trick, but then I’d also miss the interesting questions…
Maybe a “community” tag is in order, to enable filtering for all the introverts out there ;)
Joking aside, I feel these submissions are worthy of something other than “ask” and “programming” - especially for the weekend threads, where “programming” implies people don’t have a social life.
Edit I have proposed a “community” tag: https://lobste.rs/s/umyfx6/tag_proposal_community
Edit edit submitting a story isn’t the correct way to address this. If anyone else wants to carry this idea forward, go ahead. I’m neutral either way.
I find them annoying too but… I just ignore the threads. Why do we need more tags? We’re boxing things into ever smaller categories and making it easier to filter bubble ourselves.
Dunno, I’m not a fan of having to check tags all the damn time cause everyone wants to paint the bikeshed a different pantone color slightly different than the current shed.
Totally agree. There’s even a perfectly functional
hidebutton for the most delicate souls. Or, you can write a little in-browser filter script – some apparently do. My built-in brain filter still works fine, for the volume of content we get here.The only time I really use the tag system here is when searching. The whole restricted-set-of-tags-for-use-as-filters thing seems a little perverse, honestly, but my tagging sensibilities were conditioned by del.icio.us and Pinboard. Nonetheless I regularly make suggestions about “correct” tags on new stories, ‘cause I guess I’m OCD like that. I read /newest exclusively, and mostly ignore the vote and flag numbers, because I don’t care what’s popular or unpopular with the crowd here.
The hide button is fine for individual stories or tags, or even domains or users.
But this is a thing that gets posted twice per week and I don’t want to ignore everything @caius posts just because I don’t like these posts.
Yeah, I think a separate “community” tag is a good idea. That way people can filter on it if they really don’t want to see it.
+1 for hiding, but I think a separate tag of “regular poll” would be in order. I don’t hide any tag, but these are recurring twice per week and I have zero interest, but people engage a lot so I don’t even want to argue against it.
Regular poll sounds good (the idea of a “recurring” tag isn’t new) to me but we would also have to define what it means. Are the “who’s hiring” threads regular polls, or are they not frequent enough to warrant the tag? What about the “show your battlestations/desktop” threads that happen about twice a year?
What is the difference between the hypothetical “community” tag and the already existing “meta” tag?
“Meta” is about the site as site - history, traffic, hosting, discussions about new tags.
“Community” would be about the site’s users - what we’re doing this week, how we’re holding up in the current pandemic, what our workstations look like.
Tagging a “what are you doing this week” with [Meta] would be akin to asking the site’s maintainers what features or bugs they’re working on… we have GitHub for that.
Is this something like the hierarchy you have in mind?
Yes, that’s a fair summary.
👌🏾 I don’t differentiate between the site itself and the community; what is this site without its community?
I think they’re so common that a
whattag would be more applicable :)It’s two threads a week. Is it unreasonable to just ignore them or click “hide”?
I use lobste.rs in mailing list mode. There are no buttons in the good ol’ plain text ;-)
Does your email client have filters?
I tried mailing list mode a while ago, but 70% of the emails went into spam. I couldn’t set a proper outlook rule for this. Do you have any recomendation on how to fix this?
Does Outlook or your mail server move them there?
This was an outlook.com email so it is the mail server too. So I guess server moved them there, but I am not 100% sure.
I’d suggest a
chitchattag for undirected discussion.Those threads have been around a long time and I’m kind of used to them, but on the other hand I think they should just be tagged “ask”.
I’ve felt for the last little while that those threads deserve some sort of special status because they are more like chat than stories. Maybe a “community” or “chat” tag is more appropriate.
Perhaps instead of a new tag you can just hide the stories?
I’d rather that’d be used for interesting questions, which is a subset of questions that happens to exclude “what are you doing this weekend?” threads.
They’ve been through a couple of iterations in terms of tagging. They were originally tagged with just “ask”, until validation around that tag changed and submissions are now required to add a second tag alongside “ask”. Initially we were tagging them with “ask” and “culture”, around two years ago we changed to using “ask” and “programming”.
(I’m saying we, because although I try and submit them regularly, I didn’t start submissions way back when and others often submit where I’m unable to so it’s very much a community thread!)
Maybe we could just ask @caius to slow it down to a weekly thread and drop the weekend-specific part? That’d cut the issue in half.
(Amusingly I hadn’t seen this thread until you posted this comment 🙈🙉)
More than happy to adjust postings based on what people think/want. The weekend posts are a more recent change, maybe 18 months old? It originally was just the week threads every Monday.
Personally, I like having the separate during-week and week-end threads. Would much rather just offer a tag that folks can filter on if they don’t care for such posts
Why is it the only posts I ever feel the desire to filter are the “meta” posts asking to remove / block / hide content?
I think that might be called “irony”? Used to be more popular.
I would also like it if people would not message one another or use too many adjectives.
Seriously, this is an interesting meta question. I love the tech focus here, but it was a combination of a curated membership, only-tech, and the “what are you doing this XXX” questions that made me believe this was actually a forum for programmers. You take away all color and you turn into yet another marketing niche bullshit site.
But there are two (!) of these posts per week. Obviously that’s too much for some. Maybe we could still have them and only post replies in source code? I get narrowing the focus, but to the exclusion of being normal, social people? Seriously?
I don’t get it. Maybe the author could try harder.
The author doesn’t want to rain on the parade, they just want to opt out of these threads that they are not interested in, which is one of the design objectives of the tag system. This seems in order to me.
Seems like a #wyd tag is in order?