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

[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.