What should the first two tabs on the homepage say?
"for you" & "to me" (status quo)13%
"for you" & "to you"13%
"for me" & "to me"0%
"following" & "inbox"47%
some other combination27%
@fastidiousprofilefollow
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied to:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied to:What the "for you" means? Often I find things there, but, why are they "for me"? What's the criteria? Same for "to me". Are "to me" replies to my notes, or comments, or are they something else? I will start by defining what exactly are those two, before getting into further weeds.
my suggestion :
@ my feed hot all
@ = to me
my feed = for you
hot = hot
all = latest
@ → smallest token, visited less often than the rest, very visible when it has a counter that you need to pay attention to (someone interacted with you)
my feed → largest token, this is where you should be spending your time mostly. right now it’s everything you’re following, but in the future might be enriched, so it’s a feed of information, my feed of information
hot → obvious, unambiguous
all → simply everything that’s posted. clearly communicated.
All have different dimensions & shapes.
for you -> personalization -> feed / my feed / my textlog / >_ (branded)
for me -> directionality -> mentions / my mentions / @me @ is also directionality signifier
hot -> popularity -> hot
all -> firehose/chronology -> latest, tho it does create a endo-hit
Goofy shorthand experiments (maybe superscripts?):
>_ @me !hot *all
or: >_ @ ! *ooh this looks nice
cryptic af lol very cool idea, though it changes the design a lot
As long as we're doing this, may I put forth that the "hot" tab runs counter to the principle that removing view counts and timestamps seemed to embody? I'd rather have a "random" tab than a hot.
I liked your impulse to design around dopamine rather than at it.
I’ve given a lot of thought about that. My thinking was to keep some older nice posts a bit more alive to keep the discussion going. And it works to a percentage. But as it is now with the new conversation views it overlaps a lot with “latest” as the active conversations get bumped to the top anyway, so the current “hot” topics are in latest’s first page naturally. So I might refactor the algorithm a bit to favor top level posts. I think it’s worth it, new users especially discover posts there..
Made another important decision to remove all counters — notes, replies, following, followers — from both people and hashtags, so you focus on the content not the numbers. It was creating competition which feeds the dopamine system, which we have exhausted and try to avoid.
…
The rationale is clear. However, I have found it useful in other arenas to have a total-post-count of the user on show as it easily enables me to avoid following people who favour quantity over quality. Even a posts-per-day number would do the same job.
As others have said, this made me join (textlog has been open in a tab for weeks now without my creating an account). I'm on the fence about timestamps but everything else is great. The lack of dopamine from not being able to like or get liked is both painful and incredibly freeing. Also, I LOVE the design of this site.
numbers
In a past life, when I was a statistician, I often though that the primary goal of statistics was to communicate numerical ideas without actually using any numbers. Numbers make people anxious, manufacture false certainty, project false confidence. They invariably appear to say something that's related to but not quite exactly the truth.
I love the experiment of just not having them. I also wonder about the experiment of: could something fuzzier, less fraught replace them?