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Alternatives to the news feed taken as a default; the “attention economy”
It is common nowadays for social technology to include a “feed” of some kind, most usually as the landing page upon logging in. One can without difficulty produce some conventional arguments in favor of this design choice: “It increases user engagement”, “It increases ‘visibility’” (the awareness that other people are active), “It increases the likelihood of questions getting answers”, and much more.
That said, I have a longstanding vendetta, if you will, against the immense power technology companies have had over our lives, including the way software user interfaces have sometimes been designed to induce a particular usage pattern - even, sometimes, compulsive use, as is the case with the addictivity of Facebook. Software design which hijacks human psychological fallibility in order to trigger use patterns that may not be fully conscientiously elected or voluntary has been termed “dark patterns”.
I can expand on this later but am currently tired.
- What if we rejected the idea that the landing page should be a news feed of content, by default? Sure, it’s an option. But is it mandatory, or indispensable? I’ve seen users claim Codidact is “like Wikipedia”, which I love. But then, there must be many other options for what you actually see when you log in, and how you browse. What if it was more static, more bookishly informational? What if you saw the tag taxonomy, and instead could browse subjects, as one did in libraries in days of yore?
- Resisting the status quo of the “attention economy”. It is widely taken for granted now that software should kind of pull you in with red notification badges and pings and push notifications and so on. What about an intellectual site promoting quiescence and a much more placid user experience?
- What if, if this is almost like a collaborative knowledge base generation tool or framework, the landing page was your “dashboard”, which is not at all a collection of your content, but instead a collection of tools a power user can use to contribute to contributing more knowledge to this site? Sort of like your Google Cloud console or something, a page focusing on useful functionalities, organized.
1 answer
The front page can already be customised by each user, and more customisation is planned. If you think of specific improvements that could be made (such as being able to choose between the dashboard or the question list as the default page when you sign in), please raise them.
Existing customisation
Filter question list by tag
If you only want to see certain tags you can select them in the filter section near the top of the question list. You can also save filters and set one as your default so you see it every time you sign in.
Filter by answered/unanswered
You can filter to show only unanswered questions if you are looking for questions to answer. On days when you are only looking to read, not write, you can filter to show only answered questions.
Highlight favourite tags
The preferences section of your user page allows you to choose favourite tags that will be highlighted in the question list (so for example you could display everything, but have your favourite tags stand out).
Choose whether header is sticky
The preferences section also allows choosing whether the header bar scrolls off screen when you move down the page.
Future customisation
Codidact is already designed to let you choose what you see, rather than telling you what to look at.
Like all websites, Codidact is a work in progress. There are still more things that can be made customisable in future. At some point there may be a dark mode, and a customisable dashboard that you might want to use as your starting point rather than the question page.
As a non profit I suspect Codidact is less susceptible to the pressure to manipulate what users see, but if you see any specific examples that could be improved please raise them.
The software is open source, so anyone can help make these improvements. There is a roadmap showing what is planned.
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