Based on the history of how the code works (the original “like” hearts came first and reactions were originally an optional add-on) you are most certainly correct, but… there’s never not a good day for SCIENCE my friends!
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Does anyone else like the idea of being able to mute/hide posts from the headline list view without having to click on the post and scroll down past the comments to the bottom? I really love that feature on some site-browsing apps. But afaik here I have to click through and then scroll past the comments to the topic controls.
I don’t know how much of an ask that would be though?
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If you’re on the desktop, you can do it from the progress bar on the right. Immediately underneath the progress bar is a “reply” button and a notification settings button.
If you click on the bell it pops up the usual menu of notification setting options, including “muted”.
Not sure if there’s an equivalent on mobile, though.
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It would be a Discourse feature request I think, not something that boing boing would be able to implement on their own. @codinghorror?
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and @wazroth , @anon52120741
there is a slider on mobile, too. tap the number of replies thingy bottom right and the slider pops up (along with the bell), so you can get to the bottom (or don’t - just tap the bell and choose the action you want).
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I’ve been a little bit philosophically opposed to this historically because my thinking is you shouldn’t “judge a book by its cover”, e.g. the title alone is really not enough info to know if you want to mute or hide an entire topic (I assume you mean entire topic here, the post reference doesn’t quite make sense to me). The idea is, enter the topic, read first post enough to know it’s not for you, then use the control to mute that topic.
But as I said it’s a bit aspirational. I can get that some topic titles alone (and I guess the added ambient metadata of the additional tags and category attached to the topic) could be good enough to say “nope not for me for sure”.
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I think this is one of those “let the people moderate themselves for things that only affect them” things. Nobody on a message board has a right to make you see what they are saying, and recently even if it was accidental, there have been a few headlines that people simply did not want to see. This gives people an option to help themselves in that situation without it affecting anybody else…so why not? 
ETA: they don’t run ads against the bbs, right? So there should be no financial impact from something like this and I think that while it would obviously reduce engagement with specific threads, I think having the ability to do it would increase engagement with the site overall
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Or just keep wearied people from having to walk a too-familiar gauntlet without getting triggered enough to respond in a system in which responding is exponentially more socially destructive than non-participation.
Especially true if the library isn’t curated with that kind of thing in mind and the librarian is out for the afternoon.
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There are very, very few topics I will Mute on sight… but I’d say there are at least two or three a year that I choose not to see. Some subjects are just too gross and/or painful for my tastes.
I’m glad we have the ability to opt out when we need to, as a form of self-care.
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As a historian, I will just say that we deal with the things that actually happened, while those in the realm of “pure” philosophy deal with the diverse realm of the possible. I’m sure that’s nice to be able to take yourself out of the flow of history and imagine what’s possible. But some of us don’t get that choice.
The actual includes real threats to real people… anything that intersects with the real (including the internet) SHOULD take reality into account. We’re all REAL humans here, and no one should be forced to deal with things like descriptions of violent sexual assaults on the internet, among many other things. The daily slog that everyone who isn’t a white, straight cisgendered male has to deal with should be taken into account in any system meant to be inclusive. Even straight cisgendered white men have to deal with shit, so imagine the rest of us just seeking a little bit of kindness and humanity…
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Yeah I mean let me give my use case as an example…
I muted the misogyny thread. I don’t want to read it unless I want to read it. I know how to find it when I want to find it.
But this way if I don’t want to deal I can potentially avoid it and still participate.
Does this impede anyone else from participating in that topic? Does it make me less aware of misogyny in the world?
I dunno, but…
I don’t think so.
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If someone posted a topic like “watch nazis throw bricks at kittens” I’m quite happy to judge that book by its cover and mute it immediately if there was an opportunity to do so.
Some recent examples:
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I agree that the “make the most click-baity topic title / headline you possibly can” argument is a very strong one in favor of allowing it… as I mentioned, historically I was kind of opposed but not so much these days.
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Update: I have a count of exactly 10 hearts on this post (and no other reactions) and I got the “Nice Reply” notification for it. If @sqlrob and others used the react menu, then clicking on the heart directly must be equivalent to “react = heart” for badge reckoning.
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Unrelated to recent threads here:
Today is my cake day (yay!) and in checking related badge details I noticed the following oddity:
The date of my “Anniversary” badge seems to be creeping back by approximately one day a year over the last four years. The first five badges were all awarded on my cake day, but in recent years it seems like the badge is getting delayed by a cumulative day each year. I fully expect this year’s anniversary badge to be awarded on September 2nd based on this data.
I’m not bent out of shape by this or anything, but it sure does seem like a bug, and one that only started manifesting in the last few years.
My “rank” badges (“BBS Commodore”, etc.) all seem to have been awarded on August 29, including in recent years.
@orenwolf or @codinghorror or other BBS Admin / Discoursey types – any ideas?
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Dont let them know you found out!
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We haven’t changed how that badge works, which I think means it gets updated when Discourse does? So, the change likely happened there (in Discourse itself)
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Oh god. Time zones are a goddamn nightmare in programming, and I’m sorry:
specifically
TL;DR programming is hard, but representing time is… a PITA for subtle, complex reasons that most people don’t have to examine in excrucating detail like programmers are, uh, forced to do. This is not meant as an excuse, just an explanation of why seemingly simple things in programming are unusually often … a lot harder than you expect?
Which leads me to my favorite tweet of all time. I literally had it bronzed. Twice.
So, American sorry, bordering on Canadian sorry. We thought it would be easy. 
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Ah, time zones. That explains it; no further apologizing needed.
Related: twice a year when we switch on and off of daylight saving time, Great Kronos picks up the rug that is our codebase and shakes it and we discover a host of previously-undiscovered bugs related to our building hours API and room reservation systems. If you thought plain old off-by-one errors were hard…
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-
Do everything in UTC
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N months is N × 2,629,746 seconds
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N years is N × 31,556,952 seconds
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