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Changelog: Adjust the weights of tags you follow

Ben Halpern on November 30, 2018

New feature! You can now adjust tags you follow to make certain topics more likely to show up in your feed. You can adjust your tags at ...
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Vinicius Stock

What an awesome feature!

I have not seen this anywhere else. In reddit, for instance, I often visit specific subreddits to make sure I didn't miss anything because my front page is overflowed with posts from the more popular communities.

This will certainly make it easier to have a granular control over that behavior. Great ideas!

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David J Eddy

Ability to edit and save all please? :)

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Ben Halpern

Makes sense

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David J Eddy

;) Shall I submit a feature request on GH for the team?

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Ben Halpern

Go for it!

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Ben Sinclair • Edited

@ben I've been thinking about this and think that maybe some clarification on the settings page would help.

Other systems sometimes use "weight" to determine positioning in a kind of floating metaphor - heavier weighted items sink to the bottom, meaning that they'd be farther from the top of your feed. Perhaps a line paraphrasing "set higher numbers for topics of greater relevance" or a name of "relevance" or "bias" instead of "weight" might be clearer?

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Bjarne Magnussen

I just registered a few days ago and was already hoping for a feature like this. And here it is!

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JavaScript Joel

Great feature! I wish I could adjust the weights of people I follow on social media. Uggg... people.

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Ben Halpern

Well this same weighting feature should be pretty easy to implement on people for dev.to at least, because it's actually stored on the Follow model, which is shared between tags and people.

People seemed a bit too complicated for the first iteration but the groundwork is there for this feature. 😄

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Stacy Montemayor

Love this! I literally just unfollowed #javascript in the last couple of days because my real focus is python and js was flooding my feed. Thanks for this!

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Daniel Golant

Wait this is so creative! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a system like this. Did y’all draw inspiration from anywhere in particular?

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Andrew Bone • Edited

Is there a reason it's not an AJAX call and has to rerender the content?

(I wrote this on mobile, I hope it didn't come across as passive aggressive)

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Ben Halpern

Nothing other than wanting to make this live and usable sooner. Started with the most basic implementation and we'll add additional usability after gathering some feedback.

When we make the second pass to improve "negative" score follows, we can look into UI improvements. PRs are also welcome here, of course. No opinionated reason for not using AJAX for the time being.

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David J Eddy

"Do not let perfect be the enemy of done" Love it @ben ! The Dev.to team rocks!

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Andrew Bone

Cool, I'll have a look tomorrow 🙂

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Meghan (she/her)

Nice! Add "Feed" options to only see posts from following tags/people?

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Ben Halpern

Yeah stuff like that may be possible in the future

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Jesse M. Holmes

This is great, @thepracticaldev ! Now I’ll never miss an introduction!

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Allan N Jeremy

Sweet! Great job @ben & team. Always churning out useful features

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Ben Halpern

Heck yeah, glad you like it!