There are a lot of repeat posts such as “What are people doing this week?” or “What are people doing this weekend?”. When I see them on Twitter, I can unfollow the person and I won’t see it again. There doesn’t seem to be a tag for these repeat posts.
I propose we add a tag for them, so people who enjoy these conversations can easily search for them and for those who don’t, they can easily hide them permanently.
I mean they only happen twice a week. Seems harmless but also unnecessary
Yeah, it’s not like there’s enough posts active for anything to be pushed off the front page. It’s not hard to default to checking “Recent”
It’s kind of annoying to have to mute them manually when they spam the comments page.
They stay up on the front page for days and constantly make people feel guilty for no good reason.
huh?
The real huh moment is the fact that every post has a sentence “Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.” at the bottom.
Has there ever been a time when this was not okay?
it’s always ok! this is the value of reminder, to try to avoid having folks feeling pressure for any reason, social or otherwise.
Of course it is. It’s always been and always should be. The fact that it must be said tho, means some people think it’s not okay. If we not careful, we might be gaslit and guilt-tripped into thinking otherwise and have our weekends ruined as a result.
With respect, I think that’s probably up to the one having their weekend ruined to solve with a therapist.
We can add a little nicetie to convey the general feeling of the community that we try to build, but the purpose of a space isn’t to try to cater to every possible way of engaging — or not engaging — with it.
Why do they make people feel guilty? That might be the problem to solve.
I enjoy the random threads, because they often have links to interesting projects that are too niche for a front-page story and so I wouldn’t see any other way.
I don’t enjoy them one bit. I’ve seen them so often these days it’s feels like they are following me around wherever I go. It’s even worse than ads. I can block ads but I can’t block these what are you doing noise.
As to why they make people feel guilty, the answer is simple, it makes reader thinks everyone else is hustling except him at first glance. It takes strong mental defense to say to yourself you’ve worked hard and studied hard all week, you deserve to take some rest over the weekend and not devote any heavy mental energy into any intellectual pursuit. It shouldn’t be this way, but that’s how guilt-tripping and gaslighting work.
These posts they can’t hide automatically sap mental energy unnecessarily from people who already work hard and don’t feel the need to dispense their excess mental energy to intellectual pursuits during the weekends, they don’t have any left.
Why does this not apply to all of the posts of projects?
There’s a lot to unpack here. The ‘what are you doing’ posts often have things like ‘I read this new book by an author I liked’, ‘my family is having a holiday in this place, anyone know of good things for me to visit?’. In contrast, the front page yesterday had an article about someone who put an LLM in a TrueType font. I don’t really see why the former is a problem but not the latter.
Honestly, it sounds like you are completely burned out. I’ve been there and it sucks, but filtering tags will not fix it.
All of these posts tell me what people have done, not asking not what I will be doing or have done. It feels like an extra stand up during weekends reminding people of more work. I mean, there’s a WAYDT weekend, and WAYDT week posts. It’s still on the front page now. They stay up for days. Why? Implementing faster decay for old posts won’t work cos that affects all posts, so tag it is.
Filtering tag will definitely help me hide all of these posts so I feel more relaxed when I should be relaxing.
Either that or I just stop coming here.
As I understand it, posts stay on the front page as a function of how many people click on them, post comments, or upvote them, and decay over time.
Looking at your history here, you posted a hello message, then four years later you posted three one-line comments. Then, a few months later, you posted one long (and interesting) post. And then nothing for nine months until this.
The ‘what are you doing’ posts are, to me, an important part of building this community. They’re a way of sharing the things that people are doing that are not big projects and of having informal discussions.
I’m trying to phrase this without it sounding mean, but if you stopped coming here how would we know? You’ve submitted no stories, and a single substantial comment (excluding this thread), in five years of having an account. It’s hard to read this request as anything other than ‘I don’t want to participate in the community, please change the community so not participating is easier’.
Clearly this is going nowhere. The best way not to sound mean would be to focus on the proposal instead of the OP.
It’s hard to think about the proposal without thinking about the rationale for the proposal, and to so that requires understanding the motivation of the person making the proposal. If the person wants to treat lobster.rs as a read-only medium, that’s their choice, but I don’t believe that @pushcx spends his time and money running this site for that use case.
It feels telling that they disowned all of their posts in this topic. I’m not sure we should cater to people actively trying to not be part of the community.
Not trying to sound mean, but I don’t recall a rule or any social norm that requires a member invited to a bulletin board to add comments or submit posts.
Also not trying to sound mean, but I’m suggesting adding a tag will actually allow those who are “trying to build a community”, perhaps by constantly injecting low signal to noise ratio, short, informal and disjoint content as if the world doesn’t have enough of them, to easily go back and search for their precious little tidbits of conversations while sparing the rest of us who are not interested.
It’s called killing two birds with one stone.
Building a “community” would suggest a continuous improvement of its value on offer, or how welcoming a “community” is. I’m afraid I don’t find the previous reply particularly valuable or welcoming. Not trying to sound mean of course.
Just “weekly”
SGTM!
When we talked about this 3 years ago @gerikson suggested a “community” tag. Other suggestions were
whatby @adamo andchitchatby @mperham andwyd:https://lobste.rs/s/xhrskw/is_it_possible_hide_all_what_are_you_doing#c_m71wwa
SGTM too, as long as these posts are tagged as a matter of discipline
Would you include the quarterly job posts?
no
@phy1729 suggested
cronas a name in chat, which is fun but maybe a bit non-obvious? Maybe “weekly-thread” even if a bit specific?+1 from cron or perhaps periodic
Nah, let’s not bikeshed on this.
I think it’s perfectly valid to bikeshed with it. Why does it need two tags? What if a new kind of regular/scheduled post gets popular?
then we get a tag. we only have 2 weekly posts that stay up for days every week now, let’s not solve problems that don’t exist right now. YAGNI.
Even worse are the “what color is your underwear” type posts. For all of these posts I just filter the “ask” tag. I don’t think there needs to be a new tag for the underwear posts that happen to happen regularly.
Yes, yes, yes! This tag will be very helpful. Also, “week”/“weekend” is too generic. “week-plans”/“weekend-plans” sounds a bit more specific.
These posts are usually tagged with “ask” already. Combining “ask” and “week” or “weekend” should make it clear.