Fraidy Importance

Reply: Fraidy Importance

Addressing (great) comments from sphygmus and fogknife.

Some recent comments on Fraidycat’s importances.

Fogknife:
This leads to my one significant critique with Fraidycat’s current design: I don’t think that sources set to have less frequent check-ins should necessarily get relegated to separate views. Currently, each tag-based Fraidycat tab has sub-views for “Daily”, “Weekly”, and so on, as well as the default “Real-time” view. When you set a source to anything other than “Real-time”, Fraidycat banishes its display to that sub-view.

I think this plays a little too much into the program’s shyness about mixing too many sources into one list. As it stands, I tend to forget that any of the “rate-limited” views even exist, within a given tag-view. I don’t mind clicking around in between the category-tags according to my mood, but further clicking around between checking-rates doesn’t feel the same. These rates don’t denote any difference in content or quality from its neighboring sources, after all; I just want to see them presented a little less prominently.

(There is more discussion between the two of us on issue #63 on Github.)

I first want to clear up the idea of ‘rate-limited’ views, in case there is any confusion.

These importances do play a subtle role in how frequently an item is fetched. However, a ‘yearly’ follow isn’t checked once a year. It’s checked about once or twice a day. I don’t actually want these follows to go stale. (I have some plans to remove these limits entirely down the road.)

The more vital role of ‘importances’ is to move things out of view that are less… important to me. I wonder: how many follows do you have? Because I am keeping hundreds around. To have each tag on a single page would be death-defying!

Sphygmus:
About having the real-time/daily/weekly/etc all in one feed - all of my (12) feeds are set to real-time, not because I care about having them checked very often (some I might set to daily or weekly, theoretically) but because I want them all visible in that view. Given that I can set everything to real-time and not have it impact performance with only twelve feeds, though, I’ve just ignored the whole dealio.

So perhaps this is an issue with how someone uses Fraidycat when they have fewer follows? Perhaps I should make the ‘importances’ links disappear if you only have ‘Real-time’ follows under a given tab?

Perhaps detaching the concepts of “importance” and “how often the program checks the feed” would help? As it is now, importance as a way of sub-sectioning tags seems to be mixed in with the idea of “how often do I care about the feed for this being checked” and those seem like two different things to me.

I want to avoid making things more complex - and I am curious if the problem here is a terminology problem. I’m considering changing the names of the importances to something less time-concrete.

Like this:

Choose an importance.

This way the focus isn’t so much on time - but on actual ‘importance’. Do I need this thing close at hand, on my front page? Or do I just need it tucked away, saved for another time?

On the front page:

Choose an importance.

My point is that I want some things hidden. And behind a single-click has been useful for me. I struggle to think of a better way.

Perhaps the issue is that I am eager to read a lot of people. So I take on stuff of all kinds of quality. Maybe you both already have a high bar for what you will follow? Part of the point of Fraidycat was to allow me to lower my bar. I can now follow more things because they don’t create noise for me. I need them out of view until I’m sure that they are really important to me.

I will probably do a livestream soon so that I can chat and work some of these things out in conversation. Think about it - I would love to try to understand where you’re coming from more clearly.

Thank you to both of you for your suggestions and for even trying this tool out! I’m also going to tag Eli’s post, as one who has also been offering suggestions as well.

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