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Filter to show only positive posts
In the past and more recently, there's been an issue of many negatively received posts being posted, leading to the front page being primarily negative. This is, of course, rather bad for image.
Could another front-page filter, "Positive", be added which would filter out the negative posts? Perhaps even set it as the default, so that new users (or just those who want a quick overview of interesting new posts without an extra click for a filter) aren't immediately exposed to a site full of negatively received posts.
(More or less a reiteration of my answer here, except as an actual feature-request post)
2 answers
Ultimately I'd like this to be one of the predefined filters when we implement this feature, which is on the roadmap but will take a while. On the other hand, it seems like we have a more pressing need.
One approach, which was the starting point for the question you linked to, is to filter the view for anonymous users, so at least we give a better impression to people just checking us out. But then, after you create an account and sign in, your view changes, which could be confusing.
I don't know how practical it is, but maybe instead of a filter that is on or off, we should show the non-negative posts and have a "show 13 more" (or whatever) link at the bottom of the post list? That is, the page size would still be 50 posts, but we'd show fewer than 50 by default and the remainder would be behind a click. Would something like that help? This way you'd get the reminder ("more to see here"), as opposed to changing a default once and then forgetting about it, but you wouldn't, by default, see those posts. (We'd probably need s "show me everything" user preference; as a moderator I would want to see everything.)
The advantage is that the casual visitor sees less crap. However, there are also downsides to this:
- It makes it hard to understand what the norms are. This is especially important for the same casual visitor that becomes a first-time poster. For example, if all the lazy homework questions are negative and therefore invisible, it's not obvious that lazy homework questions will be tarred and feathered.
- An exception would need to be made for your own posts. Otherwise, your bad post simply disappears with no feedback and no way to fix it.
- We'll have a lot of confusion about posts disappearing in the night. There will be endless meta questions "I'm sure I commented on someone's homework question, but can't find it now".
- Bad posts won't get all the downvotes they deserve. Once a post gets to -1, some people won't see it anymore, and therefore won't be able to vote on it anymore.
We should leave things as they are except if we can reliably discern casual visitor from user. Perhaps hiding negative posts is the initial default, which is then turned off as soon as the user engages with the site. That could be via writing anything, voting, adding a reaction, signing up somehow, etc.
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