Anonymous stats on tracking

[yvi]

Title:
Anonymous stats on tracking

Area:
Stats/Notifications

Summary:
Since Dreamwidth allows users to track things, it might be interesting to have a page where we can look up how many people are tracking what things.

Description:
Dreamwidth users have the option to track (get inbox/e-mail notifications) of certain things: posts, comments, posts with certain tags,...

It might be of interest to know how many people are tracking what in your journal: how many are tracking post X, how many comments on post Y, are there people getting notified when I post using the tag "dreamwidth dev", etc. This suggestion has been brought up on Livejournal before: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/969654.html

For privacy reasons, I am suggesting implementing this completely anonymously: only the number of people tracking should be shown, no further identifying data.

As for the "security by seeing no-one tracking you" raised in the LJ suggestions community, a note on the page, as suggested here: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/969654.html?thread=15741878#t15741878 ("these stats have been gathered from XYZ however please note that they do not include who is tracking your journal using different methods") might be a good idea.

This would also fit in neatly with http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/253742.html , as part of a "personal stats" page", in my opinion.

Poll #2594 Anonymous stats on tracking

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
23 (52.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
6 (13.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
7 (15.9%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (18.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[cesy]

There would also be privacy concerns if a post or tag is custom-locked to a small group of people - e.g. if you lock it to 6 people and see that 5 of them are tracking it. It might be worth putting a lower limit, so that you only see stats if there are more than 10 people, and otherwise it just says "too little data" or something like that.

However, I do like this idea in principle.

[kyrielle]

This. Although "X people are tracking Y individual posts" would, honestly, be enough for my amusement, I can see where it might not be as much data as others might want.

[ct]

+1

I like the idea of being able to see what posts/tags/etc of mine might be popular things to track, but I think that not showing the results below some minimum number is a good idea.

[yvi]

I really don't like this because how many things are really tracked by more than 10 people?

[cesy]

Hmm. I suspect some of the big communities or BNFs achieve that. However, I don't really see how else anonymity can be properly preserved. Maybe it should just be "no-one" or "someone (number unspecified)", or it should be restricted to public tags and posts?

[ratcreature]

IMO just offering it with the public posts and tags would be fine. I assume that people would most like to know these stats for things they want to be read and watched widely to see that they have audience they didn't know of before. I know that that's what I'd be interested in seeing at least.

[yvi]

The problem with that is that there is no such thing as a "non-public tag". Posts, yeah, but not tags.

[ratcreature]

really? but in the tag editing they are divided as such? When I go to manage tags, on the right side that has a field "counts and security" and shows how many entries are for public/filters/trusted etc, and then a summary thing below as overall security. I'd always thought that if all entries tagged with tag A were locked then the security of the tag overall would be locked, and nobody not trusted would even see the tag. I have few locked entries and no tag that is always locked, so I have no experience with this, but that's what I thought.

[yvi]

I'd always thought that if all entries tagged with tag A were locked then the security of the tag overall would be locked, and nobody not trusted would even see the tag.

It is, I am being unclear. The problem I am seeing is that if a tag is on a public post and someone subscribes to it and then later the entry security gets changed - would the subscription just be deleted? What if the person then posts another public entry with that tag? It just sounds messy to me, as there is no offical "this tag is private" setting.

[ratcreature]

But how is that a problem as far as displaying how many people track a tag or entry? What I imagined is that you get statistics displayed as long as either the entry you ask them for is public ("8 people track new comments on this entry") or the tag you ask them for has at least one public entry with it assigned ("3 people watch this tag"). Even if 9 entries with this tag are filtered and only one public, then you still couldn't tell that X, Y, and Z must track the tag because they are the only ones who could ever see the tag, because scores of people might have clicked tracking for the one public instance.

[yvi]

*headdesk*

Oh my, I really am confusing everything right now. Just... forget I said anything? My brain somehow jumped to "not being able to track non-public tags" and yeah... don't know why it did that.

[yvi]

That said, we could always have intervals, I guess?

0
1-3
4-6
6-9

something like that?

(besides, I always thought people would only be bothered with this not being anonymous when they track someone in a journal they don't subscribe to... Maybe I am just thinking differently.)

[cesy]

Intervals could work, yeah.

You can subscribe by tag, and you can track different tags, though, and some of those can be custom-locked. I think it's still a concern if you're making public something that people are used to being private.

[ciaan]

That could be neat, but I think maybe limiting it to public stuff is a good compromise between stats and privacy.