QUESTION 2) Do people who don't follow me, but filter spam, see the post? QUESTION 3) Is there (or should there be) a mechanism such that filtering people who share "spammed" content erase the "spam" label? This is a tough nut. As it stands, filters trump follows. The reasoning is that if you don't want to see something or someone, you really mean it. I don't want a filtered user showing up in my feed due to a tag they use, and I don't want #thebeatles showing up in my feed because someone I follow happens to have poor taste in music (ducks). The real issue here is the community tag. The upside of the community tag is to put posts where they ought to be, whether it is #writebetterdammit or #spam. The downside is that people can disagree on where things ought to be. I've been thinking a bit on this. Perhaps giving #spam special treatment was not the best approach. It pushes the balance towards the notion that we need people tagging things that are bad more than we need people tagging things as good. I am thinking that a different approach to the community tag, and/or a better display of global might produce better results.QUESTION 1) Do people who follow me, but filter spam, see the post?
So I'm not particularly interested in beating you about the head and shoulders on this, but as it's one of the few splendid examples where you're actually exploring the utility of tags, I feel I oughtta make an effort. I think filters should trump follows, but I think that the fact that they're binary always means you end up with boolean bad acting. I think "spam" has to get special treatment because it's the most divisive trivial issue faced by people on the Internet. Some people freak out about one bad message; some people get 400 spam messages a day, buy software to deal with it and move on. Considering I've been pushing a more refined taxonomy for years and you've been resistant, let's try spam as a special case. Let me set my spam "tolerance" and let spam messages get wiped away when more than one person tags them as spam. So for example, if I have my spam tolerance set at 3, it would take 3 people tagging something as spam before I stop seeing it. Likewise, since I have given 3x the strength to spam than anything else, that filter no longer trumps the follow... unless something has been tagged 3 times. Set everybody's spam tolerance at more than 1 - maybe it's 2, maybe it's more - and let's see what happens. That gives you one tag with an affinity fader, like I've been hammering on about for like three years now, without you having to completely reorganize the site hierarchy. What do you think?