there’s been a lot of feedback on the previous Following reply proposal that filtering by whether you follow the thread author would hide too many fun conversations. i wonder how y’all feel about this variation — replies appear in Following when you follow at least one person in reply’s context - ThreadSky

danabra.mov • 295 days ago

there’s been a lot of feedback on the previous Following reply proposal that filtering by whether you follow the thread author would hide too many fun conversations.

i wonder how y’all feel about this variation — replies appear in Following when you follow at least one person in reply’s context

Reposted from dan

alright there we go github.com/bluesky-soci...

Comments

alephnaught2tog.bsky.social•295 days ago

I'd have to try it (and fwiw, am happy to test/beta at any point, I love trying things and giving detailed feedback), but I think this makes a lot of sense to me.

It gets the vibe of replies and also sort of circles in on things being more contextual/related to your follows.

alephnaught2tog.bsky.social•295 days ago

My *personal* take, as someone who uses a variety of feeds, is that I am happen to go look at something like a Replies-only feed that preserves the current behavior if changing the Following experience is better overall for folks; _however_, I'm a dev and am thus pretty comfy with extra config.

alephnaught2tog.bsky.social•295 days ago

(I can see the basis of a toggle argument, but IMHO as someone who's done a lot of UX work at this point is that I think most people wouldn't realize it was there and if the default were the new behavior [last night or today's], you'd get the same feedback as now)

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

Yes, relaxing the "must follow OP" constraint revives access to direct downthread conversations between folks I follow, which I've found very useful.

(In fact, the 4880 heuristic is even more broadly inclusive than what I was asking for here)

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

I really admire the attempt to do better thread coalescing at the feed level. Thinking about "conversation" visibility rather than just "reply pairs" is a hugely positive conceptual shift here.

However ...

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

My hunch remains that the underlying problem behind "big account replies" may be a result of feature pressure elsewhere -- specifically with notification spam.

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

As I implied on that subthread, it may well be that receiving too much attention causes abuse scenarios beyond just sheer conversational volume. (As a small account, I have zero historical visibility into those risks.)

If so, then gating access might be an appropriate risk reduction approach.

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

My remaining concern -- even with the 4880 heuristics -- stems from a different use case entirely.

This one's trickier though, because it's how + why I follow @rahaeli.bsky.social, who's been one of the most thoughtful advocates for the problem you're trying to solve.

pevohr.bsky.social•295 days ago

There's a lot of EDS/MCAS/dysautonomia in my family. (Me less so than others, + manifestations vary a lot, which is great fun when trying to communicate with medical providers.)

Back in the day, we each learned a ton via the affordances of #DisabilityTwitter.

szstrw.bsky.social•295 days ago

If I’m reading this correctly I think it’s better. It seems like this won’t hamstring engagement and discovery on the following feed for small accounts as much. Doesn’t seem like as big of a change - am I missing something?

danabra.mov•295 days ago

yeah this one i find interesting because it’s a middle ground between the options we had — slightly more expanded than “only followed” but more filtering than “show all replies”. allows for serendipity once you follow a few people but avoids blasting literally every interaction from chatty accounts

szstrw.bsky.social•272 days ago

well I was wrong, I didn't think this change would have a noticeable negative impact but I'm sorry, I think it does. I realize the hope is to limit unwanted "virality" but this is just as much a community building crusher. If you'd like, I can give you an example of what I mean - just let me know.

szstrw.bsky.social•295 days ago

I like it, but admittedly I'm far from an expert on all this. I'm re-posting your proposal to try to get some more smol accounts to check it out. Really appreciate your work on this Dan.

daniskitchen.bsky.social•295 days ago

I agree w Scott this seems like an improvement. I def use the following feed to participate in a lot of convos where I'm not necessarily following the original poster or the most recent interlocutor. I know yinz are doing a bit of a balancing act, appreciate that you're listening to feedback 🙏🏼

szstrw.bsky.social•295 days ago

One trick I'd like to have in my quiver to temper chatty accounts that I love but occasionally go hot is a timed mute.

tinavstammy.bsky.social•293 days ago

Okay *this*, I understand. 😄

Sounds great!

Thanks so much for listening to the feedback. We really appreciate it.

https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3kz2klwsdq22e

davidsnow.bsky.social•295 days ago

this is over-thinking it...as is works for me; in following I see every post, repost, and reply the users I follow make - with the reply it shows the exact post they've replied to above it if I don't follow that user unless the replier I follow reposted it just beforehand - this way works perfectly

mackuba.eu•292 days ago

Hey Dan! Thanks for having the patience and for working on new PRs at 6am 😅

I think this new proposal sounds very good. I'd probably use this option now even if there were toggles for more or less replies.

mackuba.eu•292 days ago

I have all replies on atm b/c I don't want to miss interesting threads I find e.g. via Sam or Shreyan, but it does get noisy on some days. And I especially don't want to miss conversations between some two of you folks. This "expanded follows-only" + my OnlyReplies feed sounds like a good balance.

mackuba.eu•292 days ago

It might make sense to still have a (non-default) "show all replies" setting for the people who really want to keep the current behavior of follows-only=off, I think?

mackuba.eu•292 days ago

And regardless, I think it would still make sense to look into: 1) turn off replies from a given user option, 2) some setting to decrease visibility of replies in feeds from the poster's side - but I know, more work :)

danabra.mov•292 days ago

showing literally all replies (even as an option) becomes very busy with the root thread context being visible. maybe it’s incompatible with this improvement and it would have to be two very different modes. there’s also the snowball effect of this setting propagating every minor conflict globally

danabra.mov•292 days ago

we’re still discussing what’s a good way forward there and i don’t think we’re close to a decision yet. on a technical level options are always easy to add. and i agree about your point that extra user control is good. but there are more things to consider than just that

rahaeli.bsky.social•295 days ago

Very low brain power this week but 👍 from me: no obvious/immediate things leap out and I think it will still fix the vast majority of the social friction reply surfacing is causing! Also, y'all rock

turtle.bsky.social•294 days ago

How would you feel about, in addition to this model, the ability to explicitly ‘follow’ a thread?

The idea here being that you might want updates from a thread without following the original poster, or want to ensure that the post and updates from the OP are guaranteed to be part of your timeline

syzara.bsky.social•295 days ago

this sounds exactly like i would want to see it

/y'know, in theory at least ;)

danabra.mov•295 days ago

note that this proposal would show more replies than how the site already works by default. currently by default you only see replies *between* people you follow (aside from a bug that was causing double replies to show up for everyone). the proposal is to fix the bug but broaden the condition a bit

danabra.mov•295 days ago

i appreciate the feedback about options but we need to nail the defaults regardless of that. causing very different experience depending on a toggle doesn’t help most users (who won’t change it) and often has unintended consequences (eg the current like-based filter causes people to avoid threading)

sev.yote.social•295 days ago

The more I think about it, the more I think "threads involving 2+ people I follow" is a much more useful heuristic than a Likes threshold. Opens up the possibility of lots of replies in Following, but should be far fewer* where it's just some popular account and a small rando.

sev.yote.social•295 days ago

* The cases where that WOULD happen would be if 'small rando' joined a thread or subthread started by somebody I follow AND either OP replied or somebody else who I follow replied, if I'm following this correctly? That seems fair.

danabra.mov•295 days ago

yep that’s the mechanic

rahaeli.bsky.social•295 days ago

Very very different context and different set of restrictions so not 100% relevant, but on the off chance it helps at all in explaining options and the endless balancing act, I offer the explainer I wrote for our dev process ages ago: https://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/229267.html

aparker.io•295 days ago

this would probably work better for me... maybe have this be the default, then have a 'show fewer replies in following' toggle that goes to the other behavior?

danabra.mov•295 days ago

would you use the toggle?

futur.blue•295 days ago

definitely would

aparker.io•295 days ago

... sometimes, maybe? like i said the other day, sometimes it is kinda exhausting to watch people argue with randos in the replies.

aparker.io•295 days ago

but i also _do_ find new people and conversations thru the current default.

syzara.bsky.social•295 days ago

not what you're asking but i'd like to see a bright shiny notif in my face when options like these change or get added, so i can adjust my settings accordingly

i would, in theory, have a look at them every now and then anyway, but i'm too much of a chaos person to remember

archane.bsky.social•294 days ago

Yes. 1000% yes - as long as there was clear notification of the change with new toggle so I knew it was there.

Otherwise my general feed becomes so unwieldy or full of multiple friends replying to *almost* the same spot in a conversation that it's unusable & I just create a custom feed.

mackuba.eu•292 days ago

Do I understand correctly that with the deduplication of threads, even if nothing else changed, for someone with "replies to everyone" setting, this would mean less replies in the feed and less reply blocks from one chatty person having a long conversation, because it'd be just 1 block? @danabra.mov

danabra.mov•294 days ago

yea that’s a large part of what we’d like to improve with tweaking the defaults

syzara.bsky.social•295 days ago

i do not use (and have never used) the like-based filter bc i am a fast skimmer of text so i just pick what i like

however this filter has made me 'like' a lot more posts so others might see them and i feel like i'm a minority in that approach

it's nice if i don't have to take that into account

lucidillusions.in•295 days ago

i think, for the time being we need to have more networks and connects to retain user -- so the default should show random conversations. (can't we do a discover like - show less of this?)

and then the current toggle for followers only is pretty good (also the like threshold for those who want)

stonkers.bsky.social•295 days ago

I'm just a pleb user and don't fully understand all the jargon, but what I read of the newest iteration looks like a really good solution to me. I think having a toggle to turn off seeing lots of replies (and making it obvious it exists) would help folks tailor their experience as they like.

kathycook.bsky.social•295 days ago

Yes, please; much better

citizenkate.satan.social•295 days ago

I don’t care about any of this, I do wish my reply to a post was easier for me to find. Just basically rip off all the old Twitter tools instead of rediscovering them one by one?

danabra.mov•295 days ago

you can find your own replies in your profile’s Replies tab, same as on twitter. can you clarify what’s not working?

citizenkate.satan.social•295 days ago

Thanks but I mean when I’m scrolling the replies right on the post. In Twitter after you posted a reply it would show first under the post so you didn’t have to go anywhere or scroll through them all to look for it

danabra.mov•295 days ago

it should already work like this, would you mind doing a screenshot if it doesn’t? i’ll check what’s up

citizenkate.satan.social•295 days ago

I don’t know how a screenshot is going to explain. I would have to send a video - I just went back to your original post I replied to here and had to scroll all the way to the last comment to see mine. Is this my settings? Is there a toggle that prioritizes your own posts?

danabra.mov•295 days ago

ahh you’re right, this seems like a gap, i misunderstood how it works. thank you for raising!

tinavstammy.bsky.social•293 days ago

I don't understand what this means 😅

danabra.mov•293 days ago

with this proposal, you would see the replies in your Following feed if there is at least one person above (the person who the reply is for, or the person who started the thread, or the person two replies above) that you also follow

tinavstammy.bsky.social•293 days ago

Great explanation. Much appreciated!

evankirshenbaum.bsky.social•295 days ago

Personally, for me the Following feed (which is what I use most) uses people I follow as the filter (as the name implies). If they feel a user is worth responding to, I'd like to see the context, even (especially?) if I don't know the others. It's how I find people worth following.

serendipidude.bsky.social•294 days ago

When I click a reply the intent is to see what they are replying to. The reply is at the top of the thread viewport, thus failing to meet intent.

Better the reply is at the bottom of view port so I see what they're replying to and only scroll up if the post isn't visible and I'm interested enough.

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