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

[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.