Dreamwidth has Reading Filters!

[marcmagus]

I've said a few times that the reason I'm at Dreamwidth and expect in the long-run to migrate as much as possible to Dreamwidth is that they seem to be doing a lot of things right that LiveJournal and most other things I've encountered does wrong.

The first of these was splitting "friends" into "access" and "subscription", so you can track the entries of somebody without giving them trust permission to your private entries, or give somebody trust permission to view your private entries without having to see all of their entries.

Now they've released the alpha version of one of the other huge things I've been claiming for years these sites need: reading filters. It's a paid user only feature, which is a little disappointing, but they say you'll be able to filter on tags! I hope this will begin the death of "I have these filters, let me know if you want on/off them" stuff that, while it serves a valuable purpose, has always felt like a horrid hack of a misuse of technology because the proper technology didn't exist. Instead, I hope to see "I regularly use the following tags; feel free to filter any out you don't want to see."

I don't really have enough readership that I expect this to be terribly relevant, but I'd like to set an example. I try to tag all of my content appropriately, but I know I can be a bit haphazard about it. I am officially soliciting suggestions for tags which I may not have thought of but should use. I would also welcome suggestions for past posts I've made which should be tagged differently.

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I currently use the following tags with some degree of regularity:

• tools - the things [often software] I use to make my life easier/better/more productive. Often user-interface related.
• dance - should be self-explanatory
• dw - DreamWidth features, babbling, etc.
• hands - related to the hand/wrist/arm/etc. health issues which interfere with my ability to do things like type a lot.
• rant - rants about something I feel passionately about at the moment [may be silly]
• navel-gazing - thoughts about myself/my life
• food - what it says on the tin
• convention - convention reports and the like, which often don't actually get written

Comments

[denise]

Just FYI (I came in through a search), reading filters themselves can be used for everyone, it's just the advanced filtering like by tag that's a paid-user feature (because rendering them is resource-intensive). :)

[marcmagus]

Thanks for pointing that out; I knew it as I was writing it, so I didn't realize that I'd managed to make it sound like all reading filters are paid-only. I'll edit to clarify.

As it happens, though, I consider filtering by tag the long-overdue feature which sets dw apart from the competition, and which I'm disappointed can't be made available to all users. I feel really strongly about "Do you want to be on my filters?", and tag filters could make it finally go away forever, much to the betterment of the world, while retaining the value people get from it; but probably only if it were available to all users. I understand you have to draw these lines based on expected resource usage; I just wish my pet feature could make it on the other side of the line. ;)

I see basic reading filters as being functionally the same as LiveJournal's ability to look at customized friends groups, minus the odd conflation with trust. Are they more powerful than that?

[denise]

Nope, they are pretty much the same. :) We started with the LJ functionality as a baseline, since we knew the resource profile for that.

And yeah, it'd be really nice if we could let everyone use the advanced options. (When Mark first showed it to me, I think I called it 'genius'.) But it is a really huge load on the machines. :(