A page has been added to view the posts you've voted on (up to 30 days old)
It was offhandedly mentioned in last week's post about voting data, but thanks to an open-source contribution by ajbt200128 (whose Tildes username I don't know) there's now a page available for you to review posts you voted on recently. It's linked as "Your votes" in the sidebar menu when you're on your user page.
There's a warning at the top of the page about it, but please don't try to use that page to keep track of posts overall. Because the voting data is being deleted now, you won't be able to keep track of any posts older than 30 days through it. Use "Bookmark" for that—there's a link just above "Your votes" for "Your bookmarks" where bookmarked posts will stay forever.
I've also just noticed that these pages aren't paginated yet and everything's in one big list, so if you vote often, be warned that they might be quite large. I should probably work on fixing that now. Let me know if you notice any other issues with it.
And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
I like it and have a preference for it not being paginated!
Why not make it a literal preference you could choose? My only fear is that it could be bad for people who have limited hardware, data, or connection speed.
The problem with saying "Why not just add a setting" is eventually you end up with settings bloat, like Reddit, where there's so many options it makes it impossible to find what you're looking for in the UI, and it adds another set of conditionals to support in the serverside application.
I doubt this is going to be a popular opinion, but frankly I think Tildes already has too many settings. It's okay to be opinionated.
I thought s/he explained it fairly well... too many settings making it harder to find what you're actually looking for. Plus it adds more technical debt, and more room for variables when a bug does occur.
This seems like a fairly niche thing already, and I can't really imagine too many people will want a toggle for "voted on pagination".
If there were a setting for it, doing it on-page with a cookie would make more sense to me than a full user profile setting. eg. List 10, 100, All.
I was hoping to keep the discussion abstract without going into concrete details because I know a lot of people immensely disagree with what I've said (take a look at the other reply I received!), and listing off the small amount of Tildes settings I consider unnecessary is just going to further devolve into a "x vs. y" debate which is going to completely derail this thread :)
Like, this is not at all even close to my biggest nitpick with the site. It causes me next to zero grief and I honestly am not fussed if most preferences stay or go. But the vehement disagreement of my general view makes it appear as if their strong disagreement also means my opinion is similarly as intense. It's not.
We can continue in PM if you're interested, but like, it's a showerthought for the most part that people like to blowup into a massive deal.
Fair enough; thank you for clarifying! I'd be curious to hear which settings should/could be cut as well. I think it's an interesting topic to discuss.
This position lacks empathy. And it's also a slippery slope argument. I am vehemently opposed to the "preferences are bad" fad in software development because it is quintessentially exclusionary based on the perspective of the person making the argument. It lacks empathy for users other than the person making the argument; "these preferences are fine (for me) so they should be fine for everyone" does not take others' views into consideration.
I'm sure this isn't your intention, but that's the way it comes across. It reads as you saying that you don't want the software to work in the way that others want it to work, and your justification is that users shouldn't want it to work in the way they just asked for because of an arbitrarily- and poorly- defined concept of what "too many preferences" is. Your own preference for what the software should do is met by fewer settings, i.e. the defaults, but this isn't the wider userbase. People who say "this is settings bloat" tend to actually mean "I don't want or need this setting and so the software shouldn't have it" which is utterly selfish and inconsiderate (even if unconscious and unintentional).
There's a difference between too many settings and settings that aren't organized well. There's a difference between the settings that you want and the settings everyone else wants. reddit could do a much better job about organizing settings. And your browser's search feature can be very helpful for finding what you're looking for. Alternately, a filter dialog that supports aliases for settings would be great, too. As the number of settings increases, discoverability becomes more important.
This is a slippery slope argument as there's no clear point at which we reach "too many" settings. As mentioned above, I'm sure that any setting you mention as "too far" will be something that someone else needs to use the site, and I'm sure there are settings that others don't care about that you find utterly essential. Recognizing that others are different from you and understanding their needs is a crucial part of the development and maturation of a software developer, and this fad really gets in the way of that.
I sincerely hope it's not a popular opinion, because this fad needs to die. It's an inconsiderate, poorly-defined position that only seems to have currency because of an artificial valuing of "simplicity" without really understanding what that means or how it affect other users.
I hate this fad. I hate it so, so much.
I understand you disagree with me, but calling my opinion a fad, saying it's "utterly selfish", "inconsiderate" and lacking in empathy when my intent is none of these things isn't going to be conducive to further conversation—literally. I'm totally put off from replying to the actual argument here because I know it's going to eventually devolve into yet another a tit-for-tat point-for-point showdown.
I accept your opinion, and I know you don't accept mine, but there's no need to twist the knife in with emotive language.
You're right, I should have waited to calm down a bit and responded then. This is something I'm passionate about as you can see, and I'm sorry that the opportunity for discussion has passed. And I'm sorry for any upset I've caused because of my wording. Not at all my intent!
That's okay! All is well.
You keep saying that others are being inconsiderate or lacking empathy, but I don't think that's fair. Others are being empathetic. They're being empathetic to the user for whom they want to make the interface simpler, and to the developer that has to both implement and maintain the feature indefinitely.
That's a UI problem though. Reddit's issue is that it's all just dumped on a page without any descriptiveness or legibility-improving formatting.
Then everything should be paginated and cater to the lowest common denominator. Would that make you happier as long as you couldn’t change it?
I would rather everything be paginated, personally, for all the reasons you’ve outlined. I just got nervous by the top comment here expressing a preference to the contrary.
I was expressing an opinion on the design of settings in web applications, I don't care about the particular concrete implementation here.
I just don’t see the harm in giving people choices as long as your default settings are such that a majority of users would never even be interested in changing them. I don’t think I’ve ever even looked at the current Tildes settings.
You could even expose these changes as “profiles” for people who feel overwhelmed by choice and still let people who are willing to put in the extra work create custom profiles.
Nice, that should make finding recent posts easier. Also a big shout out to "bookmarks", I only recently found out Tildes has that button and it's surprisingly helpful (as is "save" on reddit).
This is a pretty good page for seeing if there's new discussion on topics you were interested in. Very useful, thanks!
It's a good thing this was contributed after last week's post, otherwise I expect we'd be seeing a lot of XKCD "Workflow" comments today. ;)
Seriously though, thanks for the contribution ajbt!
That was intentional
Thanks a lot!
Since the voting timestamps are recorded, can there be an option on that page to show these timestamps?
It's definitely possible, but a little harder since it makes the display different than how topics/comments look elsewhere. Is there a particular reason you think it would be useful to see how long ago you voted on something?
This is basically tracking one's own activity. However, I would agree that it is probably not worth making the topics/comments display different.