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.