A myriad of Qyriad

(i've been thinking about the organization of Posting Websites some in recent weeks, for obvious reasons, so i want to try to distill some of it into discrete coherent chunks)

i think i would like a website that does this. but i'm not sure. because no website has ever done this.

everyone shows them in the reverse of the order they were made, with very little extra ui built on top. several gigantic technical and social issues leak through as a result, and i've never seen anything try to address them, and that is very strange to me

you already know what this is like, because you use cohost. the reading model is:

• you go to your home timeline page thing
• this shows you the newest posts
• which is actually the tail end of a huge mystery block of new posts made since you last checked the website
• you do not know how big the block is and there is no indication of when you've reached the end of it
• and so you read backwards in time until you either see something you recognize, or give up
• in the meantime new posts are trickling in, creating a new mystery block

which means that instead of the "posts in the order they were made" model where you read in this order:

you actually read in this order:

surely, this is ridiculous. right?

• you can miss stuff, sometimes without even realizing, obviously

• it requires more mental effort, for something the computer already knows

• you don't know how much is waiting for you when you sit down, for better or worse

• you see responses before you see what they're responding to, which was infamously annoying on twitter

cohost has the additional problem of shares looking almost exactly the same as the original posts, so you might be fooled into thinking you've finished the block but actually it was a share of the last post you saw.

twitter (and mastodon in turn) makes this uniquely worse: it has an "infinite" scrolling timeline, so when you scroll to the top and refresh, all the tweets you've already seen are still there. so now you have a small batch of new tweets, a very small "load more" button to get another batch of them, and then all the old tweets underneath. the "infinite" scroll has at least one arbitrarily sized hole in it.

oh, and you can't use tweet times to reliably gauge where the "load more" button might be, because a significant amount of twitter activity is retweets, and those show only the timestamp of the original tweet, not when the retweet happened. so good luck figuring out where in time you even are.

there are social repercussions for this too. consider: it is 2 in the morning, and i have just finished writing something. do i post it?

if my goal is to maximize the number of people who will see it, the rational answer is no, i should wait til the morning. because most people have probably gone to sleep in the last few hours, which means i am likely to be very far back in the next morning's mystery batch, and thus most likely to be missed by people who stop reading before they reach the end of the batch.

and this leads to people trying to "game the system" (despite that there is, supposedly, no system) by posting at "peak hours"... which in turn creates a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation where there are even more posts made at certain times, and thus posting before those certain times makes it even less likely that your post will be seen.

this seems bad.

lots of us (mostly nerds) dislike twitter's default "home" timeline for loading you up with a bunch of crap to read that you didn't ask for, which then drowns out the stuff you did ask for.

but there is one twitter feature that i sorely miss, and that i always wished i could've gotten as a separate tab or something.

that feature is "in case you missed it", a collection of several tweets that would appear on your timeline by the normal expected rules, but chosen such that (a) they seem to be especially interesting, and (b) presumably, twitter was fairly confident i hadn't actually seen them.

and you know what? it was right like 95% of the time. they were almost always good tweets, i had almost always not seen them yet, and they were always tweets or retweets from people i was following. absolutely stellar. i always wished i could get more than three of them at a time, especially for when i hadn't checked twitter in a few days and could not possibly catch up with everything.

i wonder what cohost could do here. i would like to think this team is interested in improving the Posting Experience beyond merely "make tumblr again", and i hope that means experimenting with some things that haven't been tried before.

obviously reducing duplication of shared posts will help, but i assume that'll be done one way or another anyway just because it's kind of annoying.

this is a hard problem, not least because "most recent post" is a much clearer endpoint than "where you left off", but i will attempt to get us started with some spitballing

• i don't know if showing how much you've missed is a good idea. if i look at cohost and see "300 new posts!" then the rational thing is to either start going through them or hit "mark all seen", but my squishy monkey brain is more likely to panic and close cohost and allow even more to rack up.

  there is a certain danger here of turning Posts Website into something more like email, which everyone hates, because every single one of them is an Obligation.

• similarly, i don't know if starting where i left off reading is a good idea (but i think it's a better start than showing a count). the problem is that there's a risk of falling behind and not really having a sense of when that's happening or how i'm supposed to catch up.

• it would be nice to know when i've caught up, because currently it feels like a guessing game where i start to get distracted from actually reading things

• it might also be nice to have an "imma read this later" list, because i don't generally stop to read long posts in the middle of trying to catch up on the timeline. on the other hand i also have like 20 cohost tabs open for posts i've been meaning to read so maybe there is no helping me

• i think part of what exacerbates this, specifically on "catch-all" sites like tumblr and twitter (as opposed to "this is for posting art" like deviantart), is that everything is treated equally: the big serious posts, the release announcements of a huge months-long project, and the jokey jokes are all counted as 1 post.

  and so, bear with me here: what if i had a "priority" flag for my posts to suggest how important i think it is that other people read them. then if my timeline feels overwhelming i could at least filter it down to the "important" stuff. (i don't think this should persist across shares; if i don't follow someone then i don't care how important they think their posts are. i didn't ask!)

  "ah!" i can already hear you saying. "we had that for email, and some people just always set every email they sent to high priority, because they are so full of themselves that they think everything they say is critical!"

  that is true, but misses a critical distinction: email is push, whereas website posts are pull. if someone overuses priority you can unfollow them! (or, ideally, just set them to "ignore priority" or whatever.)

  maybe this is a terrible idea with horrendous social implications and just enough UX friction that it wouldn't end up used anyway. i am, after all, a huge nerd with the impulse to believe that all social problems can be solved by more database fields. but idk maybe it's worth a shot, and at the very least it would give me a way to clearly delineate my own posts between "here's a thing i spent the weekend writing" and "here's a bad pun i thought of at 3 in the morning" — which is a real concern i've seen other people express

• cohost could use number of likes and shares to determine good-ness, like twitter's "in case you missed it".

  oh? oh you think that sucks?? ok well the priority thing doesn't seem so bad now does it?? at least that's something a human being picks

• the theme i'm circling here seems to be: if i can't catch up, at least let me cut down on the number of posts in my backlog. currently the only way to do that is to read the most recent N posts and then give up. but perhaps there are other ways to filter the timeline in times of desperation, such as omitting all shares or omitting very short posts?

  again there's not a lot to filter on here, which makes this kind of difficult. but man it would be pretty good to have a 🚨 button i could slam my palm on that would only show me the most important posts. i think we should just get the computer to do that

• more bad ideas are available for a modest consulting fee, hmu @staff