flagging/tagging entries as "important"

[ciaan]

Title:
flagging/tagging entries as "important"

Area:
entries, reading page

Summary:
A new kind of categorization metadata: separate from tags, separate from the adult content rating, separate from access filters: rate things on an importance scale when you post. Also be able to filter reading page to show only high-importance items.

Description:
How many times have you seen this on your reading/friends page, or posted something like it yourself?

"I haven't been reading for the past two weeks due to vacation/internet borked/final exams/cat tied me in the basement. Link me to anything really important that you posted!"

Or maybe you haven't been reading for two weeks and skip=5,000 scares you, so you look at some of the most recent entries and leave an inane comment to one agreeing that watermelons are yummy. Then the next day you go back further and notice that person just lost their job or had a parent die and you realize you must look like a jerk for not leaving any sympathy before you yammered on about fruit. Or you only have ten minutes a day to read your whole page.

Well, in some programs (like Microsoft Outlook, which is a tool of the devil but I have to use it at work) things can be marked "high importance." So if people used that on posts that were really major (those "comment if you want to stay friended" posts or announcements of birth/death/marriage/moves/name changes or whatever else they especially wanted people to read), then when you had missed a long period of time you could filter your page to only show high importance posts, and that way you could catch up on what you really needed to know from the past two weeks or whatever easily and then go back and maybe read other stuff later. It could also be helpful when you were short on reading time and wanted to skim.

Could possibly be a binary system, with most posts normal and some marked "important" or could be a multi-level system where posts could be given one to five stars, say, and then you could filter your reading to only five stars, or three and up, or whatever you wanted.

Drawbacks are that obviously some people would never use it on their posts anyway, and some people would mark absolutely everything as super-duper important, but oh well.

Poll #868

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
13 (37.1%)

Should be implemented with changes.
3 (8.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
18 (51.4%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.9%)

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Why not use tags?

[zvi]

Because this would be standardized across journals, instead of subject to the idiosyncractic whims of journal owners.

[ninetydegrees]

Do you mean we would have to rate our posts?

[cesy]

I don't think that was implied. The default would be not flagged, it would just be an option to flag things if people wanted to.

[ninetydegrees]

I know it wasn't what the OP implied. I was wondering why zvi thought this feature would not be "subject to the idiosyncractic whims of journal owners"?

:)

[azurelunatic]

D's tag-based rating system might be from 1-10. Mark's might be from 0-10. Mine might be from meme-nattering-update-personal-artistic-significant-showstopper. xdr4ma2w33n__x might start at omg and proceed through important!!, awesome, hrt attck u guyz, several others, and wind up at the world just ended!!!!. Someone else might rate from trivial-minor-normal-major-priority.

[ninetydegrees]

Oh I see what they meant now, thanks but I think it doesn't change a thing. Making people use the same rating system is not normative.

[ciaan]

It's funny because it's true.

[ciaan]

No, never!

[ciaan]

Because:

a) Everyone would call their tag something different, and some people's tag names would be rather obscure.

b) As far as I know there isn't yet a way to filter your reading page to show only certain tags, so you would have to either track people's tags or else go to each journal individually and click on the tag, thus making it all complicated and time-consuming and not useful.

[ninetydegrees]

Good arguments, thank you.

As far as I know there isn't yet a way to filter your reading page to show only certain tags

Hmm. I'd never thought of doing that. I'm pretty sure you can do it with a layer. Thanks for the interesting idea! :)

[ciaan]

Oh, yes, spiffing up reading pages to be able to filter in only certain tags, or exclude certain others, would be awesome.

[zarhooie]

You're in the right place, but not quite the right place. ;)

[ciaan]

MMMmm I've been all waitywaitywaity since the near advent of reading filters was announced. *wants* !!!!

[rebelsheart]

I can forsee issues with the drama queen who thinks everything they post is important.

[ciaan]

Trufax is true. But you could also filter them out once we get reading filters.

[ratcreature]

I can see the use in theory, but in practice I don't think I'd ever use it to label my own stuff, because trying to guess what would be most important for my readers would be anxiety inducing. What I mean is, that I don't really know for what kind of post others are following my journal, and not everybody will have the same reasons.

If someone subscribed to not miss the occasional piece of fanart (though considering how relatively rare that is they might be better off with tracking the tag, but let's say they subscribed as eternal optimist *g*), they might want that flagged as important to make te best use of such a function, but from my perspective as a poster that seems somewhat like annoying advertsing to do that for your creative stuff. OTOH for me personally the news that my pet just died might be important, but I suspect it is fairly irrelevant for most readers, even though they might offer sympathy if they happen to come across it.

[ciaan]

And in that case it would be totally your option to never mark anything, never make use of filtering for such markings, and pretty much forget the feature even exists.

I guess for me it's just pretty easy to know which posts I make are normal, and which small handful are ones I especially want my friends to pay attention to. And I would like an easier way to sort/skim when I'm short on time or when I haven't read in a while.

It's not a suggestion I'm hugely emotionally invested in, but I think it would make some stuff easier for me, and I also don't see it as in any way impinging on people who don't want to use it.

[(Anonymous)]

What I consider important info and what my readers consider important is not necessarily going to be the same, and this feature would not be of any help at all to me as a poster or as a reader. I don't necessarily think it's important for me to know that X, whose journal I friended to read their fanfic, lost a pet, while I would think that was important for me to know about someone I am actually close to online.

I don't want to have to decide whether this entry is important to my flist every time I post, so I wouldn't bother with the feature at all.

The concept of "importance" here is too indistinct, too individual and too open to interpretation for this function to be useful. And as you say at the end, not everyone is going to make use of it, or use it in the same way, so it would probably be more frustrating than anything else!

[ciaan]

It might or might not be helpful to some people, but would it actually detract from your experience if other people used it and you just didn't bother to use it? I mean, I don't use the adult flagging feature, and never will, and it does detract from my experience that I have to alter my settings to not have things hidden and collapsed, and that I have to see those stupid warnings when I'm not logged in. But any feature that's optional, I generally think should be included, and people can use or not as they please.

[ninetydegrees]

(Sorry for intruding)
I can't articulate why but I'm bothered on a fundamental level by the idea of rating your life or seeing people rate their life - this is what it amounts to for me.

[ciaan]

Hmmm. I can see that, but on the other hand... there are certainly events in my life that are larger than others. I think there's a pretty clear difference between "I had pizza for dinner" and "my house just burned down," and especially if I were posting "my house just burned down, can anyone put me up for the next week?" I'd want people to read and comment on that more than on the pizza post I made an hour before the house burned down. (Overlooking the fact that DW may not be the most efficient way to find housing in such a circumstance...) I know when I'm posting just to chat and when I'm posting because it's a serious announcement.

[ninetydegrees]

I see what you mean and yet... I guess I have a different vision of human life. I don't sort mine or other people's lives into important/not important. If I'm not interested into what something has to say, "important" or not, why have them in my Circle?

[ciaan]

If I'm not interested into what something has to say, "important" or not, why have them in my Circle?

Theoretically, in general, yes. But if I've been offline for two weeks, I don't have the time to go back and skim over the hundreds of posts people have made while I was gone. And yet I don't want to miss everything that happened during that time. I just want a way to quickly get to the key things I need to know.

Maybe DW's new reading filters already have stuff planned that will fulfill those needs, I'm waiting to see.

[ciaan]

(Although I can sympathize because I am basically fundamentally philosophically opposed to the "adult content" warnings and the way they are implemented.)

[(Anonymous)]

I just don't see the point, I guess, given that it's not actually going to do what you want it to do, which is enable you to locate only the "important" posts on your flist when it's at skip=500, it seems. If I and others don't use it at all, and some people use it to flag up things you don't think are important, what you get when you look at the list of "important" posts will not actually BE all the important posts, just the ones whose authors thought they were important enough to label as such. Which seems vaguely pointless, frankly.

[ciaan]

It wouldn't be perfect, no. But since everyone has been poking holes in my suggestion and no one has been suggesting any better ways to get that kind of functionality.... I am left still thinking something is better than nothing. I suppose I will wait to see how reading filters develop.

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[azurelunatic]

I would suggest using sitemap priority, so people who have an interest in making their journals search-engine friendly can do that, and make display of the page priority easy to toggle off/on in styles.

I also suggest making the default priority something like "not prioritized", so people who do not want to mess with it will not have to fuss, and (on site-scheme pages and official styles) display nothing for the priority instead of saying something like 'Priority: none'.

People who didn't care would still see priority ratings on site scheme pages and other people's styles, but it could be relatively easy to tune out unless someone was actively being a jackass with them, which is a social problem rather than a technical problem, and hard to provide a technical solution for (other than kicking all the jackasses off the internet).

[ciaan]

I would suggest using sitemap priority

That's a good suggestion for implementation. So long as the no-indexing setting for journals still held. (I have mine set to no-index and I hope that's never overridden by some other setting.)

Low-impact is best, so I was assuming default would be none, and that nothing would be displayed unless there was a specified setting. And yes, I would think some people would turn display of the info totally off in their styles. People should be able to do that. There could maybe even be something in your user settings where you could click "never show me priority flagging" or "turn on markings for priority flagging." (Actually I think flagging is not the term that should be used, since that is used for the adult content marking and reminds me too much of LJ and the ability other people have to flag/report your posts for "adult content.")

[7rin]

Reading through the thread (and taking into account I understand pretty much NONE of what azurelunatic linked to), ISTM that the 'best' use of the Important flag would be for the reader to be able to mark something as Important so that they can come back to it later (to save on having ten million tabs open, for example ;)).

Afaic, if you (specific) want to tag an entry as Important, then that's what tags and titles are for.

[ciaan]

That's how I use my "to read" memory category.

The thing about tags and titles is that they work when someone is actually looking at the entry- but they don't work if I've been offline for two weeks and don't have the time to skim through hundreds of entries, and want an easy way to call up just a key few.

[elfy]

Just because there was so much opposition to that suggestion: I like it pretty much :)

[ciaan]

:)