I’ve been considering a very similar but distinct idea for a while now. I want my subscribed feed to be based on user weightings. Give subscribed community a default weight of 100. Then if I see too much from worldnews, I can scale it down to 50 and see half as much from that community in my feed. The goal being that I can adjust the proportions of different contents types without blocking users or unsubscribing entirely.
Sure. I can get behind that.
But do many people actually mix up the two platforms? I haven’t seen it much. The devs and sys admins certainly know that there’s a difference between the two. And most end users seem to know that there’s a difference. But even if the end users can’t identify one platform from the other, I still don’t see that it matters. I’m familiar with both nginx and apache… But I also don’t shout in public forums that the two tools are not the same.
Why does this matter?
Also, please try using grammar. I had to read that awful block of text like 5 times before I understood what you were saying. And it felt like shouting. Just why??
Exactly. Me too 🙂
Agreed. Reddit has loads of problems sand bad motivations. But I think people are trying to turn lemmy into reddit 2.0 because they lost the actual reddit. Sure, many people wanted less nose and higher quality… But that’s probably not true for most people that signed up over the last month+. They just wanted a reddit alternative.
I expect that much of the reddit obsession will dissipate as those users settle in and forget about reddit.
A few thoughts.
Actually. I don’t think I would want it presented as a probability from a usability perspective. If everything has to add up to 100, then increasing one means lowering all the others and vise versa. Similarly, those numbers will all change when I (un)subscribe to a community. This sounds extra confusing for users. Want to see half as much? Divide by 2. Let the computers do the math and turn it into probabilities.
Agreed that it might be an over engineered solution. But I think it would make a very good experience for users. And if a user doesn’t want to bother with it, they can easily ignore the feature.
While I do think better sorting algorithms are good to explore, I see that as a separate initiative. Yes, weighted subscriptions and better sorting algorithms can address the same problems but they can also be implemented separately. And they can work together to improve the user experience.
My big concern is performance. These are all assumptions but here are my expectations: Giving every user a distinct sort will send memory usage crazy high. Thus, you have to apply the weights dynamically when a client gets data. Can it be done fast enough to not slow down those calls? How much extra cpu will this cost?