Post
Someone just pointed out to me something very true to my experience—that the chrono timeline is easily gamed by frequent posters. Is there any fix for that, other than just unfollowing?
Edit: unfollowing *and muting*, which places the burden on the user rather than the UX.
@ntnsndr
For me, I hate seeing my entire timeline populated by a user who boosts every single post in a 36 post thread. Gets an instant 'hide boosts' from me.
The UI could group the posts and just show a few, with the option to click to see more.
The user only sees one post from each followee per hour, with a small button underneath “click for 147 more”.
It’s too bad that multi-post “threads” don’t already work that way, at least on my instance.
@ntnsndr You can mute people temporarily (or permanently). You can also turn off boosts on a per-poster basis IIRC
@ntnsndr lists of course. stop gatekeeping 😄 my huge number of posts. u b u, let me be me 😄 And of course I view this "gaming" as a UX failure in clients. There should be some way to collapse the posts or mute the posts temporarily of frequent posters or something. This is not rocket science UX or is it 😄 ?!?!
@ntnsndr @phanpy groups *boosts* into horizontal/scrollable entities (thus visually diminishing their importance). I suspect doing something like that to frequent posters (when non-threaded by the orginal author) might serve the same function (a sort of visual penalty for lots of posts in a short period of time).
@ntnsndr I'm really curious what you mean by 'gamed' in this context
@scroeser I think of gaming as using the rules of a system to violate its spirit.
A chronological feed is supposed to be calmer and more grounded, but it isn't if someone posts a ton and fills it up. In this context, that's a form of attention-hacking akin to, say, SEO in a search engine context.
@ntnsndr Not everyone has the same expectations though. Remember all the posts from the November 2022 "migration" where newcomers complained their feeds were too quiet? I want my timeline to be manageable so I do not follow frequent posters.
Often an account you follow turns out to be much more/less prolific than one hoped. There are a few feature requests to improve the profile stats and other info.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/36909
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23059
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21164
@ntnsndr Perhaps you're following different people than me, I think there have only been a couple I followed who posted a lot in a way that felt just attention-seeking. I unfollowed them.
I have more patience for people who do a flurry of posts now and then, perhaps because I tend to come online, get excited about a bunch of stuff, then disappear again.
Yes maybe I just need to clean house:)
@scroeser @ntnsndr yeah not sure what you mean. If someone posts more, then yes, they show up more.
I love that mastodon lees you “mute for x amount of time…”. So if someone’s taking up too much space for your liking you can mute them for a day or a week — knowing they’ll reappear later. Less drastic than unfollowing, and no one’s the wiser. 😜
Also if there is someone you like to follow but they are REALLY active, you could add them to a “list”. Eg make a “politics” list and add your political folks there. Dive into that list when you feel like it, otherwise don’t.
Does that help?
@scott That helps, though it certainly takes labor from the user.
I don't know, I think it would be nice to be able to easily move between algorithms, bsky style.
