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I'd like to hear initial impressions about subscribing to fellow stackers. Maybe I went a little overboard. I like reading a lot of people's posts. I find it kind of overwhelming and maybe counterproductive. I'm looking for tips, tricks and opinions. For instance, my notification bell is always red!

1337 sats \ 9 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep 2023

I'd recommend following one or two people you don't want to under any circumstances miss. If people want to use subscriptions more than that, we'll eventually need to do one of:

  1. group subscription notifications together
  2. make subscriptions a tab in your notifications
  3. move subscriptions completely out of notifications (where idk)
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This is how I intended to use it. There’s really not so much content here that you’re likely to miss much, so really it’s for like uber-important content you’re looking for

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Makes sense

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The cool thing is that people can come up with creative ways to use things that those who built it didn't even consider! So go wild! :)

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I just realized I shouldn't chime in on these to start.

It probably prevents stackers from thinking it's worth coming up with their own ideas.

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Oh interesting, that would really be like a feed of your stalked followed users

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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 2 Sep 2023

A stalkeds followeds tab would be interesting. We have to be mindful of ui clutter though. It's not a big deal for those of who spend a lot of time here, but it's really really intimidating to newcomers.

Before we introduced this feature, I was considering a milder version that we'd implement after we introduced personalized feeds. Basically, you'll "follow" someone and it'd bump up all their content in your personalized feed. There's something really nice about having two ways to sort data (hot/recent) rather than N ways.

All the features are WIP though. so. many. branching. independent. possibilities. It can be exhausting to consider them all. I have some things I'm intuitively very confident in but most others are worth experimenting with.

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Yep I was just thinking this is ripe for experimentation!

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My impression after subscribing (and seeing all those bell notifications) after a handful of subscriptions was:

"Uh oh, this ain't right. I messed up. Gotta find a way to reset this..."

I was hoping for a notification whenever those people posted - I was shocked by having all those comments.

Not sure if I did manage to 'reset' it - but my notifications seem back to normal now.

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Your proposal of being able to subscribe to posts and comments independently would certain help this!

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Yeah, I basically just wanted to be notified when @grayruby made his sports posts. Now I get notified every time he replies to someone (and he always replies to everyone).

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Try subscribing to @nemo. Holy shit! I had the two of them posting all afternoon.

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That's nothin'.
Put yourself in my shoes - being subscribed to
@nemo, @grayruby AND to yourself.

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You're Welcome! I for one am enjoying all the notifications I can zap and comment on that I normally wouldn't have even seen.

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Damn. I thought I had it bad.

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A sprinkling of Darth giving shitcoiners a tongue-lashing at the same time might have given it a certain pep though...

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I'm truly sorry. I'm pathological about replying to people, because one of my goals is to increase engagement on alternative platforms to help increase network effects and drive adoption.

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You're welcome Siggy!

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Apparently those unfortunate enough to subscribe to you, me and nemo have a real mess.

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I for one think they should be grateful we have enriched their lives. Hopefully no technical people sub to me. They will be unimpressed.

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You're welcome!

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Yep finer grain control might help

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As we're not using a regular app, I guess there wasn't any chance that a few users could have volunteered as 'beta' testers.

However, could have a few volunteers have been given the ability to subscribe, and give feedback, before rolling it out to everyone?

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Do you really want to wait several months for us to test features before you get to try them?

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No. Let it out in the wild and kill it if you have to,

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Hell no. We get to mess around and complain.

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Jeff Bezos has a line. It's something like, "the speed in which you make a decision should be based on how permanent the result is."

Most the things we do these days is easily reversed so we ship it once its good enough.

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Although I can't help but think Bezos as Dr. Evil with his little finger to his mouth...

I think that's 'neat and groovy' man!

Good strategy. I had a business partner once who used to like to use the phrase "you need a think tank but I just need a do tank"

Well, it only took a couple of minutes for me to use it, for my chin to hit the floor and to formulate feedback.

I did wonder if it was just me for a bit though...

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IMO given that it’s opt-in, and you can opt out, I don’t see harm in rolling it out to everyone and iterating based on feedback. If it applied across the board and you couldn’t not use it, that might be a different story

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Exactly. Ain't that big a deal

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Thank you for making this post, this is all really helpful feedback!

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@k00b would you like me to explore subscribing to posts separately from comments? I can work up a draft PR just to see how we like it. That might be the first baby step we can take to incorporate feedback without changing how you view subscribed content, etc.

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Yeah I think that makes sense. Should be pretty straightforward on the backend at least

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PR is up, I encourage anyone interested to take a look!

https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/pull/470

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Yea, I agree. I've been thinking about how to present it in the UI. I'll think on it some more and get a PR opened once I have something worth reviewing!

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How do you subscribe?

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After all this, do you really want to know? OK. You go to the user profile page and find the three little dots.

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Will try it out

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The stalking mode is a bit overwhelming, but now I know @darthcoin is building his citadel.😂😂

Is it possible to have the option only getting notifications from their new posts?@k00b I would prefer to read their comments section directly on their pages.

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Just when I sub to Darthcoin he goes back to build the citadel :)

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Exactly right! You articulated the way I felt better than I could.

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