Word/tag filter option?

Features and Ideas
1

Heya folks.

I was a bit inspired with ideas after that bit with the fellow that brought up the child safety and all that.

I had the idea of a possible word/tag filter for Diasporians. So that the users can blacklist words that they feel are offensive and tags of their choosing that get associated with NSFW content in their profile settings.

I thought of maybe having a simple text field where one enters in the word “hell” and/or the tag #boobies and then confirms their option and let the word and/or tag get replaced with asterisks (A bit of a visual pun since the Diaspora logo IS an asterisk hehe) of equal character values.

What do you all think? I’m not really specifically thinking about children in this case but people of any age who don’t want to see the “C” word in their stream.

:slight_smile:

Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

2

This is more or less a duplicate of https://www.loomio.org/d/pGs86ULi/feature-tag-filtering-old-diaspora-pistos-feature , and there’s also https://www.loomio.org/d/R3zBvnfc/improving-and-expanding-hashtags-usability which is closely related.

3

interesting … I am not a programmer at all so not sure how feasible things are but I keep thinking that the more controls and settings you can play with regarding the way you share or manage things , the better a social network gets,. :slight_smile:

4

It a waste of time, guys… Nobody forces you to register to a tag. Furthermore, a tag does not resumes a content…

Concerning the NSFW tag, again it is already safe ! You cannot display #NSFW content until you agreed to display it ! Meaning you have been informed that it actually is Not Safe For Work !

Guys, whats the matter with porn ?! It is not going to destroy our society ! Stop trying to lock the children in a golden cage ! They’re not stupid !

5

Well sort of Goob, the tag bit is. But I didn’t see anything in that post about profanity and the like. Unless I misread. Lemme read that first post again.

6

Well, filtering words which aren’t tags is the same as filtering words which are tags - it is just an extension of the same feature.

I think filtering of posts is something that no one is going to object to - it just requires someone to create the code for it.

7

I was talking about words Augier. Not pornography. I’m talking about asterisk-ing words out like fuck, bitch, whore, etc. (Excuse the words to future readers of this) or any other words that a user would experience offensive feelings from. I’ve seen pictures of boobs in my stream that didn’t have a #nsfw tag associated with it but it DID have “#tits” and the like. But I digress. I know if my mother were to sign up on Diaspora and saw the word “Cunt” that she’d get all flustered about it. :slight_smile:

8

@Augier I don’t think tag filtering is a waste of time. I think for the most part, it could be incredibly useful as a user setting.

It’s not even just about avoiding content that you find as offensive, although that’s certainly a valid use case. It’s more about empowering a user to take control of what they’re seeing in their stream.

A Linux user might not care about seeing a bunch of mac-related posts, or maybe a person doesn’t want to see a bunch of posts about surveys, for example.

9

Ok, let me be clear on it : I’m not against the idea. To be honnest : I totally don’t care. But I consider it a huge waste of time and ressources since there actually is only 30 active contributors and lots of work to be done.

And, as I tried to explain to @l4c0f, to me, this is not the way D* works. The thing is : if you’re not happy with your pod, set up your own !

Yes, I agree that it is currently not easy. But to me, we should work on an easy deployment feature to let each and every user set up his own pod for his mother, than trying to implem some dictatoriship-typical feature like blocking, filtering, reporting and others…

10

Very interesting points Sean. Didn’t think about using a word/tag filter that way :slight_smile:

11

@seantilleycommunit : you mark a point, I didn’t see things this way.

12

@augier Umm, I’m a bit confused with what you said and the way the pods work. I thought all the pods could talk to each other? Now, my confusion with what you said stems from my interpretation of what you said. Are you saying having a/the user(s) put up their own pods which will help them filter out content? But I thought… err… ugh… headache!! :frowning:

13
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Well AFAIK, the pods can exchange some informations like posts, mails, subscribed content, but not all of it. Particularly, in a matter of bandwith limitations, pods do not exchange content marked by tag, even though you subscribed to it.

The only way, you can recieve a tagged content from a user of another pod is having mutual relation. So, by having your own pod, you will nly recieve tagged content from your own pod.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

15

Nevertheless, a feature I’d like to see is an option to display or not contents by aspects and by default on the flow section.

16

How do you mean @augier?

17

How do I mean ? You mean : what do I mean ? Well this discussion is meaningless… Wait ! I mean not your discussion being meaningless, more like my meaning is meaningles. Ow… I forgot What I wanted to mean… -_-

What I mean is : by default, in the flow section, all the posts of all the contacts are displayed. To show only the posts of certain aspects, you must go to “My aspects”. It would be cool if we could parameterize which aspects being displayed on the flow section by default.

Sorry if what I mean isn’t very clear, I’m french so… But hey, the end is more important than the means, isn’t it ?

18

Why don’t we do both? :stuck_out_tongue:

19

redmatrix had similar issues and I’ve provided a word filter there and nobody has issues with it. It’s entirely optional. We don’t specifically filter “tags”; we match text that shows up in the stream - and provide a “click to open” wrapper around the post if the text was found. So nothing is removed from the stream, it’s just collapsed.

The first step is a simple string match. Any string. You can also use regular expressions. Few do, but it’s there for the geeks who want to fine tune it. The third option is to add an author qualifier such as “bob::img” (markdown might require something like “bob::/!(.?*)” - which will collapse any posts with images but only from from bob - (somebody who often posts nude girlie pics and there’s a sensitive girl sitting behind me at work that can see my screen).

I didn’t post this to debate implementations or projects - I’m just trying to give you some ideas to work with; that you may accept or reject as you wish. We’ve had zero complaints about the implementation. I use it to commonly filter certain video providers and certain polarised debates which re-occur often; as well as the occasional nudity that folks feel empowered to post; so that my colleagues and family don’t see it. I might peek at some of these on my own time - or not.

We also provide a way to tag things #nsfw after the fact which others have posted. This also turns out to be an important tool - but takes a lot more implementation/development work. This feature has been known to ignite cross-project flame wars but again I’m not here to debate but just to present different ideas and implementations for working with non-censoring personalised filtering in an otherwise free network.

20

@augier - I see the use of filtering being in things like:

I want to be contacts with my friend. However, they’ve just had a new baby called James, and I really don’t want to see endless posts about how wonderful their new baby is. So I can keep in contact with them but filter out any posts of theirs which contain the word ‘baby’, ‘James’ ‘poo’ (yes, I really did have a friend posting endlessly about their baby’s poo…) and so on. That way I don’t have to break the connection with them, I can still see posts they make on other subjects, which I might be interested in, but I don’t have to get annoyed by their posts about this baby, which they are fascinated by but I have no interest whatever in seeing in my stream.

That’s just one among a hundred examples. Sean raises another type of example. Porn and obscenities are other examples, although mentioning them can be a bit of a red herring because people’s minds instantly go to censorship or protecting children and the vulnerable. This is not really anything to do with that - it’s about having greater choice over what you see in your stream. And Diaspora is all about choice.

Diaspora’s tag system is a type of post filter. It enables you to filter in posts by people who may not be among your contacts but which contain tags you’re interested in. All this proposal is for is to extend the flexibility of Diaspora’s filtering to enable you to filter out content that you don’t see. It should be easy to do this for tags.

Doing it for ordinary text is a slightly different concept, but one I’d like to add, as it enables you much greater control over what you choose to read about. There’s so much content in Diaspora even now, which will only increase as the network gets bigger, so it can only be a good thing to provide users with greater means of controlling the content they get to see, for whatever reasons they might want to include or exclude certain types of content.

There’s actually a really nifty Javascript browser extension called SocialFixer, which gives users all sorts of controls over how Facebook appears and what content they see in their streams. Post filtering is very advanced in this extension, and there are lots of good ideas (although probably not code) that Diaspora can use from this.

Yes, of course there are greater priorities to do with the performance of the network (improving federation, database control and so on), but that doesn’t mean that other ideas like this one aren’t really important for the future development of this social network.