A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.

[deborah]

I've been thinking a lot this week over what my ideal Dreamwidth UI would be. To be honest, it wouldn't be that different from what we have now, in many ways. This is possibly an unpopular position. 😉

Here's what I'd like to see on Dreamwidth:

General things

• Accessibility remaining at least as good as the status quo no matter what features we add. Since our accessibility is pretty awesome, that's a nice high bar.
• A site that works well on desktop and mobile, where all pages scale well on mobile. A solid, highly-usable mobile-friendly site is in many ways superior to an app (since, among other things, it doesn't put you at the mercy of Apple).
• A posting interface that allows you to use rich text, markdown, or HTML, with easy-to-find help links describing how to use each of them.
• A dynamically updating (AJAX) preview mode, in a side-by-side or in-page tab interface, not a whole new window.
• No reblogs / retweets / shares. I think I was pretty clear about a small fraction of the reasons I think those are a bad idea.
• No like / kudos / ❤️, though I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging.

Little things

• Increased options in the "embed" link, specifically including the ability to use twitter's embed code (and then probably reformat into something that uses a Twitter-esque stylesheet but doesn't actually pull JS from their site).
• A posting interface which lets you add images directly when posting.
• A la carte image hosting increases for paid accounts.
• An image upload page which integrates well with phone upload.
• A general improvement in the image user experience, including integrating the view and manage pages, making it clear which bit of the image text becomes alt text, and having a better UI than "copy and paste this HTML into your post."
• Scheduled posts
• Making it much easier to choose an all-site tag search as well as a single-user tag search. maybe as a paid feature.
• Tag and word blacklists (ie. "don't show me that post"), preferably with an indicator about the blacklisted post, along with some metadata, so you can make an informed decision about whether to read it.
• A paid model for small video snippets. None free, but at least little Twitter videos. Heck, we could do six second videos and do Vine.
• An optional way to generate a card snippet from a URL in a post (the way many sites turn a URL into the page title, an image, and a brief text snippet
• More legal CSS, well document, and an easy way to create a user stylesheet you can use in your posts (as at the AO3)

I also have very mixed feelings about adding a "someone is talking about you" feature. Sometimes in a threaded conversation it drives me up the wall that if I say "It's like mark and denise said upstream," and yet mark and denise will be unlikely to see my comment. But on the other hand, on Twitter, it's clear how much people abuse at-mentions, to the extent that it becomes a form of harrassment. So I have no idea how to make it work.

I know I don't understand how roleplayers use the site, too; they have their own use patterns.

What else would you like to see?

Comments

Thoughts on "someone is talking about you"

[thetransintransgenic]

Okay so DISCLAIMER I literally just got here* so like heck if I know what I'm talking about or if I'm totally misunderstanding standard Dreamwidth concepts or whatever,
but
Maybe if you restrict it to only people you have a prior relationship with?
Like, "notify me when people I've given access to mention me in a post"?

Or like it can be customizable levels -- "notify me when these people mention me: [ people I've given access to / people who subscribe to me / anyone ]".

... but like I've been here for less than a day, I am probably at least minorly misunderstanding the intuitive conception of those measures of connection that have built up over time, etc.

... also, I just realized that that actually didn't even solve the use-case you thought of, because you were talking about up-thread. Maybe some sort of "within this community" sense, or something?
.. I have no idea what I'm talking about. (But maybe something I tossed out there could hit a useful idea, by luck..?)

_{(* Like I'd heard about Dreamwidth and been aware of it's existence since at least half a decade ago but no yeah in terms of coming here I'm, uh, Tumblr Diaspora. Hi.)}

Re: Thoughts on "someone is talking about you"

[deborah]

Those are good ideas, and could be adapted for my use case! Especially because Dreamwidth already has the notion of various circles of access. You could totally use existing circles, and have it be: notify me when

• anyone uses my username
• anyone in any of my circles does
• anyone in these access circles does

And then just like you can sign up on each post "notify me of new comments in this post", you could add "notify me if someone uses my username in this post".

And then if you want to be sure people aren't notified, just don't use the username tag, instead just type their username.

I don't think you are misunderstanding. Dreamwidth folks are generally much more private than many of the other social media sites, but the general cases still apply.

(If Twitter and Tumblr are a whole bunch of people crowded into a huge banquet hall where some people are finding friends and some are shouting at each other and some are holding up signs that say #MARVELFANS and some are pointing out all of the other people, Dreamwidth is more a whole lot of people who are holding open houses in their own living rooms, inviting folks in to chat about interesting things, and renting out little public halls to host our communities. Er, that metaphor got away with me. But that's why we're more careful about concepts like notifying people if you say their name. We're missing a lot of the tools that make it easier to find people, but that also make it easier to harass people.)

Re: Thoughts on "someone is talking about you"

[lb_lee]

I really like your idea, newbie! Having those customizable levels would be okay. The idea of getting a notification of every time someone is talking about me would be TERRIFYING. God, it'd be so easy to use for trolling and harassment. But rigging it so only my friends would notify me? That'd be pretty okay, I think, especially if I could turn it off whenever I wanted.

[ambyr]

I'd like the ability to reduce the size of images at time of upload. I would use up my 500MB much more slowly if I could squash everything down to lower resolution, and it's not like I need the photos I upload here for use in posts to be at full printable size. It seems like a win/win: DW doesn't have to provide as much host space and I get to upload more images.

[vass]

This. And I'd also like more granular image privacy settings, in line with the post privacy settings.

Also I'd like it if the image uploading process could be accessed from within the post creation page, and there was an optional field on the image hosting page to tie the image to that particular post. You'd still be allowed to link to the image elsewhere, but you could see at a glance that this image belongs to this post. For context.

[deborah]

oh, clever. Like the mediawiki "what links here" page. It would be so useful to find out if your photographs are even linked at all. I have uploaded some as tests and never posted with them, and they are using my file storage.

[deborah]

oh, excellent point. For a long time I didn't worry about those things because I only uploaded from desktop and I can just edit them there, but these days the photos are almost certainly being uploaded from a mobile device.

[vass]

No like / kudos / ❤️, though I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging.

Would you feel better about like/kudos/❤️ if there was no counter?

e.g. I click ❤️ on your post or comment, and you get a notification (if you have notifications turned on for that feature) but my ❤️-ing your post is not visible to anyone else, and when you look at the comment/post there's a field you can unhide that shows you the usernames who ❤️-ed it, and maybe the icon changes for zero ❤️ versus one or more ❤️, but it doesn't say how many ❤️?

That way the "unobtrusive wordless support" functionality would still exist, but the "keeping score of how popular a post/comment is" functionality would be removed.

[deborah]

there's so many ways in which kudos have been polluted for me by the algorithmic problems of facebook, twitter, youtube et al: popularity that makes things appear earlier in a search result, things that other people have liked appearing in a timeline, and yes, the visual indicator of virality.

But all of those interfaces specifically don't have the IMO sensible sorting of DW and AO3: give people what they ask for, in first chronological order, unless (on the AO3) they ask for a different ordering. And they don't have traditional relevance ranking, either. They specifically have an algorithm that rewards virality, which rewards gaming the system and outrageous content, while punishing thoughtful or slow or content-rich posts. And we don't do that, so a kudos button should be no more problematic than it is on the AO3.

But the last several years have made me so gunshy about anything which creates a twitter/YouTube/Facebook style reward system that I can't want the feature. I recognize that that's not fully rational, which is why, I guess, I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging. It still has the anti-pattern of maladaptive rewards, but it's probably not a problem if implemented well. And allowing people to turn off notifications, and hiding how many there are, and definitely not changing the algorithms, are certainly ways to contribute to people having the interactive mode that they want without it being nearly as problematic.

[jeshyr]

I totally respect your reasons for not wanting kudos/likes/hearts type thing, but here's my use case: A LOT of days now I can't type at all (not today, clearly) and it would give me a way to interact that's sufficiently low energy to actually be feasible where otherwise I'm reduced to being a ghost who just reads posts.

I realise this is totally an edge case and doesn't align with the way most folks would use it, but it is at least a thing.

[deborah]

Honestly, I feel like part of being an accessibility person is recognizing that edge cases are legit use cases, and should be respected. Why is my social anxiety more important than your pain/fatigue/brain fog? (I'd be curious to see Rah's take on this, because she cares passionately about the site health but also is frequently fighting overwhelming pain and medication-fog.)(When I have too much pain to be interact, I just have too much pain to be in a good enough mood to kudos anything. Pain makes me into more of a dick.)

I think there'd be workarounds for my concerns which would make more people happy. Hiding kudos counts, batching kudos notifications daily (as the AO3 does), having kudos be something a user needs to enable, and not allowing kudos to come up in any site metrics or sorting algorithms, all would go a long way to help address my concerns.

I worried for a long time about how paternalistic this attitude of mine is, but it's not about protecting users from themselves, it's about protecting dreamwidth from becoming a community that encourages gaming the system for cheap viral hits: paid instagrammers, fake news, et al.

[lb_lee]

I would be willing to accept like/kudos/<3 if I could turn off the notifications so I never have to see or deal with them. If other people find some satisfaction in liking my posts, then fine, let them, but I don't want to have to see them or clean them out of my inbox like dustbunnies.

All the things you said plus

[allen]

Alternate reading view that shows entries in reverse chronological order by most recent comment.

Reading page where 'previous 25 entries' actually gives you the previous 25 entries based on the last post you saw. That way if 10 more entries are posted since you loaded the page, you won't have to scan through the last 10 messages from the previous page before you get to new content.

More other-site integration so I could post here and have people on twitter (or some other site) see it too.

Re: All the things you said plus

[deborah]

<Marcy voice>
You're weird, sir.
</Marcy voice>

But agreed, there is apparently a use case for your horrifying vision of an alternate reading view.

(I'd pick: alternate reading view that is in forward chronological order picking up where you left off.)

[flamingsword]

Scheduled posts

There is a way to do those, sort of. If you post something with the time and date corrected to something in the future, then it will show up on your page immediately but not in your circle's timeline until the scheduling on the post itself. I have had people's stickypost show up on my feed because they forgot to move the date forward and did not think they would still be here in 2015.

Making it much easier to choose an all-site tag search as well as a single-user tag search. maybe as a paid feature.

HARD SAME.

Tag and word blacklists (ie. "don't show me that post"), preferably with an indicator about the blacklisted post, along with some metadata, so you can make an informed decision about whether to read it.

You can use cut tags with trigger warnings for this. It's not as integrated a feature here as it is on mastodon, but it's not that hard to say Trigger warning for talk of rape and consent issues and then the HTML for the cut tag.
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=88 <-How to in the doobley-do

[deborah]

Definitely, though that relies on the poster using the trigger warning or content note, and a word blacklist could just be something people would never warn for. (Eg. I am given heebie jeebies by the entire notion of Hannibal, and wish I could block posts mentioning it from my reading page, but nobody would ever think to warn for just mentioning a TV show.

[flamingsword]

Well, I will warn for mentions of Hannibal and its attendant squick now that you have asked me to. Most people will try if you ask them to, they just need to know it is needed.

[lb_lee]

Ditto on the accessibility. It's why I love this site! I also totally support the no reblogs/likes/etc.

Honestly, the image hosting is very important to me (DW is the only place where I can easily lock an image to specific folks), but it is a bit clunky. I STILL don't know what the "full description" is for. It doesn't show up in the alt text, it doesn't show up when you click the image it's for, HOW DOES IT WORK? Am I supposed to copy paste it into the alt text? But if that's so, why does "brief description" exist? I am so confused.

Also if I could organize them into folders (Marvel, Sherlock, original, whatever), that'd be a HUGE boon in being able to sort through them.