(Optional!) Interaction analytics and suggestions

[azurelunatic]

Title:
(Optional!) Interaction analytics and suggestions

Area:
circle management

Summary:
Allow the option to automatically suggest circle modifications, a la Facebook except with less creepy.

Description:
The thought that the website is watching you and has all sorts of helpful suggestions about your personal life is at heart amazingly creepy. Despite the fact that you trust the website for rather a lot does not mean that you actually want the website peering over your shoulder.

However, that changes if you invite the website to peer over your shoulder, and know the things that the website will be looking at. It's the permission that changes the perspective, and while knowing the factors is counter to a "this is our proprietary algorithm" outlook *cough*facebook*cough*, it sounds positively Dreamwidthy. It should also have an easy and intuitive way to turn it off, if it winds up not being what a user wanted for whatever reason.

If turned on, the analytics could suggest possible interactions between users, such as: "You comment to Anna and read their journal more than many other users who are not on your reading list. Do you want to add Anna to your reading list?" or "You have deleted 99% of the comments left by Bit in your journal in the last 2 weeks. Do you want to ban Bit from commenting?"

This might introduce users to features they were not previously aware of.

Any suggestion should be able to be ignored or declined; ignored (no interaction with suggestion) would be left in place; declined suggestions would go away and not come back; declined suggestions would have the option for the user to leave a note; declined suggestions would be listed in a user-accessible place, along with the notes (if any). Saving the declined suggestions would let the user recover from dismissing a suggestion if they did not mean to, and the notes would be a reminder of why the user dismissed that particular suggestion, in case things changed later (for example: "Add Charlotte to reading list?" might have been dismissed with "I'm not interested in Iron Man"; upon looking in the bin later, the user might re-visit their decision on the grounds that they love the Avengers now.)

Poll #10463 (Optional!) Interaction analytics and suggestions

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (12.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
25 (50.0%)

(I have no opinion)
15 (30.0%)

(Other: please comment)
4 (8.0%)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I am very curious to hear potential problems (including "still too creepy; no"); this is half-formed noodling around rather than spongebob I've fully thought through.

[melannen]

How would you visualize this being implemented?

As shameless2shoes mentioned, a "stat tracker" type page that showed all sorts of analytics, including these, would be really interesting, I think. An alert that went to your inbox/email when DW decided you should know about somebody would be really creepy.

LibraryThing actually has implemented a bunch of stat/analytics options, including pointing out people you might want to get to know, but managed to remove the creep fdctor by a) being very up-front about how they're calculating it, and b) making it part of a page of all sort of stats. (Not linking it because their actual interface is less-than-ideal, but the concept works...)

[ratcreature]

Is all this data already there? Like for example the deleted comments, does DW already keep track of all comments and their authors I ever deleted even though I deleted them from my journal? I mean, how would that be assembled? I'm not against new ways for me to access data that is already there for number crunching, but I don't want to be monitored more just for some friend suggesting algorithm.

[sorchasilver]

Still way too creepy for me.

[deborah]

one of the complaints I see from Facebook users is that this feature brings their accounts to the attention of exes, stalkers, or just generally people they dislike who (as is usual in such situations) share the same social circles. I wonder if in order to avoid that we would have username-identifiable analytics disabled by the endpoint user by default, with an option to turn it on.

It could end up being something like a couple of the LiveJournal features, where if you opt in to see what other people are doing, you are by default opting in to being seen?

I don't know how feasible this would be from a user perspective; I wouldn't use it.

[msilverstar]

I had the classic problem of buying a horse book for my MIL from Amazon and then being inundated with horse book suggestions.

I don't mind recommendations when they are based on something logical and I can turn them off selectively.

[strangesequitur]

I'm pretty firmly in the "Ye gods, do friend/product/service suggestions ever annoy the crap out of me," camp, myself. If there were a way to opt out of your own information being shared, and if it was presented quietly on a page you had to seek out and navigate to, though... I suppose I could see the utility in it?

("Had to navigate to" as opposed to an ever-present infobox, that is. [Look, Facebook. The fact that my mother's friend's daughter is now a co-worker of the girl who constantly verbally and physically assaulted me in middle school is a somewhat amusing example of what a small world we all live in; and I genuinely hope that she's having a happy and wonderful life. But I'm never going to "friend" her, no matter how long she languishes in the corner of my screen. Also not adding my roommate's sister's boyfriend's mom; I've heard stories about that woman.])

Of course, most of the metrics that would be useful to me strike me as things that would cause disproportionately high server load. (Specifically, the only data points I'd really care about are mutual friends and shared interests. "You and [this user] share 57 listed Interests!" "You subscribe to 23 accounts that [this user] also subscribes to!" "3 people on your reading list are members of [a community] that lists 7 of your interests as its own.")

If Dreamwidth chose to take this on, I'm sure they'd do it better that most services do, but it all feels vaguely problematic and wow this is a long comment, considering that my well thought-out and considered opinion on the matter is: "Meh."

[elf]

(I'm reading through old dw_suggestions listings.)

One of the problems with "you comment to Anna a lot; do you want to subscribe to her?" is "maybe Anna is WRONG ON THE INTERNET a lot, and I feel compelled to say something about that, but I don't want her any closer to me." Or, maybe Anna posts a fuckton of picspams with no cut tags, so I check out her journal when I've got time, and we chat nicely, but I don't want her posts cluttering my readlist.

I've got people & comms whose DW's I read through Google Reader's RSS feed because of things like that. I sometimes want to look in at them; I don't want them in my daily what's-going-on activities.

I remember using the "find users similar to you" feature at LJ, and realizing that I knew most of those people, and had specific reasons for not friending them. (Ranging from "ugh, why are the stupid people in my fandom" to "that's only a crosspost from her wordpress; she doesn't read LJ" to "we used to be close; drifted apart; zie never updates anymore anyway.")

I think experienced users don't need a "you might like to subscribe to [X]" feature; they mostly know how to pay attention to the people they interact with. And inexperienced users would just find it creepy--or would think there's some obligation to take the suggestion, and be stuck with a read/access list of people they don't like. (I know you're not saying it'd suggest giving access to anyone. But inexperienced users coming from LJ or FB may not realize that you really *don't* have to do both at once.)

I could see more use for a feature of "this person you *don't* interact with posts a lot of things with tags the same as yours; you might check out their journal." But that starts getting really complicated.