I think one of the more underused features of the forum is the ability to adjust the visibility of posts according to their tags. If everybody used this feature and wanted to see fewer community-tagged posts, they could downweight their visibility. The fact that they don’t could mean that most people do want to see these posts, but it could also mean that they’re unaware of this feature, haven’t had the idea of turning it on for community posts, or just haven’t gotten around to it.
I could see you doing either of these:
Making this feature more visible. Perhaps a hovertext option to adjust the visibility of certain tags, a pinned post explaining how to use it, etc. Edit: hovertext adjust is already a feature. What might be a nice add would be some common “adjust bundles.” For example, there are a lot of community-related tags (“criticism of EA culture”) for example, and posts aren’t reliably tagged with all applicable tags. It’s kind of tedious to manually search for and enter adjustments for each relevant tag. Having a single button to adjust all tags related to community by say 100 karma increments would be nice.
Nudges, such as enabling this feature for new users by default, or even for all users. Potentially you could turn it on for everyone, but send everybody a PM saying what you did and how to reverse it if desired.
A subforum also seems fine, it just seems like a potentially more expensive and buggy option that adds complexity to the forum structure.
Thanks for this comment — I agree that tag filtering/following is underused, and we’re working on some things that we hope will make it a bit more intuitive and obvious. I like a lot of your suggestions.
I think one of the more underused features of the forum is the ability to adjust the visibility of posts according to their tags. If everybody used this feature and wanted to see fewer community-tagged posts, they could downweight their visibility. The fact that they don’t could mean that most people do want to see these posts, but it could also mean that they’re unaware of this feature, haven’t had the idea of turning it on for community posts, or just haven’t gotten around to it.
I could see you doing either of these:
Making this feature more visible. Perhaps a hovertext option to adjust the visibility of certain tags, a pinned post explaining how to use it, etc. Edit: hovertext adjust is already a feature. What might be a nice add would be some common “adjust bundles.” For example, there are a lot of community-related tags (“criticism of EA culture”) for example, and posts aren’t reliably tagged with all applicable tags. It’s kind of tedious to manually search for and enter adjustments for each relevant tag. Having a single button to adjust all tags related to community by say 100 karma increments would be nice.
Nudges, such as enabling this feature for new users by default, or even for all users. Potentially you could turn it on for everyone, but send everybody a PM saying what you did and how to reverse it if desired.
A subforum also seems fine, it just seems like a potentially more expensive and buggy option that adds complexity to the forum structure.
Thanks for this comment — I agree that tag filtering/following is underused, and we’re working on some things that we hope will make it a bit more intuitive and obvious. I like a lot of your suggestions.
We also just deployed something that makes them somewhat more prominent. (For example, blue instead of grey.)