My conclusion from the comments is this: There are specific users here that want to use this site in order to be delivered extremely relevant information according to very specific interests (#tags). This new update ultimately and unfairly benefits users who want to be delivered interesting, but definitely more random content. While this is a primary goal of the site, I think there are a few tweaks that could be added to also include users like kleinbl00 who want to stick to less randomness. My proposal? An "upvote" system that is personal to each users preference of tags. Put another way, a system that adds weight to a specific tag which in turn determines frequency of posts in their main feed; possibly a popularity threshold requirement with the following properties. - numbers of submissions per day
- divided by the number of upvotes in the first hour
- a logarithmic type scale determines this And for you TL;DR types
You'd get to upvot #technology to +3 in order to see more technology related posts.
Reddit does this in their backend code, but if I'm seeing too much of a certain subreddit I have no way of changing any setting in order to see less of it. I think the solution lies in the ability to create a scale that is individual to a given #tag. Some #tags are not going to be too active except for a couple submissions per month maybe; being delivered these needles in the haystack is important. Right now, on Reddit anyways, if I don't go on for a day or two I could easily miss the one submission from my niche interest. What I'm trying to say regarding this other spefiic problem is that this community needs a solution which does the following: - posts above the threshold setting per tag need to be marked (for what we'll call in this example) "important". I don't want these gem articles leaving my feed until I've somehow "marked them as read" (ie. opened the comments or clicked through to the link). I hope I've made the problem clear; the solution might not be the best, but it's a start in the right direction.
There are a couple of ways that I could see rating tags coming into play. One would be to give posts with these tags more 'staying power' in your feed (and possibly popular), and the other would be to favor posts with these tags in external posts. Both would have the effect that you would be more likely to see the best posts with that tag. I can appreciate the effect of not following every post with a specific tag (therefore avoiding the a subreddit-like phenomenon), but biasing a user's discovery with certain tags in mind.
Furthermore, the community needs the ability to tag comments. I'd even be satitsfied for now just being able to add one specific tag (or just add a button ^-^) to comments like:
I really like the "unshared" idea. Great addition. Especially the part that "this will be an interesting way to enhance discovery." If that type of reply could immediately get tagged with, for example, #bot I think it would work wonders for my.... scroll wheel! ;) And again, but put another way:
Some sort of tag excepted by the community where the criteria for this one tag simply is described as:
- this reply could have been made by some sort of bot type program
- adds nothing to the conversion
- is considered a pat on the back to the post author The main advantage to this being you can unsubscribe from certain types of replies. I'd be eagerly awaiting to unsubscribe from replies tagged #circlejerk, #duh, #conspiracy to name a few. This is sort of irrelevant right now as the quality of discussion is fine. I'm more about the content discovery anyways.