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deborahI'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:
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![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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?
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?
