New feature!

You can now adjust tags you follow to make certain topics more likely to show up in your feed.

You can adjust your tags at /dashboard/following.

Here is an example of mine right now:

I decided to follow meta the strongest, while also keeping up more closely with ruby and rails. smarthome and management also seemed like tags I don't want to miss content from.

How this affects the feed may vary as the global algorithm is modified over time, but it should help folks get the experience they're looking for out of the platform.

As we evolve the purpose and features of tags over time, this should be a central point in how folks organize themselves on platform. If you want to stay up to date more with a certain topic for a period of time, crank up its weight.

At the moment you can crank down tags you want to see less of, but the full desired behavior is not yet implemented. The signal that you follow a tag might act as both a positive and negative signal. It should generally help you see less of something, but the full behavior will be ironed out soon.

Many users probably won't bother touching these nobs, which is fine. We don't want to create an overly complicated experience.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible
— Alan Kay

I think this change helps make the complex things possible while keeping the same basic default simple.

What's possible

This change should make certain kinds of behavior possible, like publishing to more "niche" tags. Currently if you want to have your JavaScript post seen, you should really publish to the javascript tag. This change should help facilitate the idea of publishing to tags like advancedjs or functionaljs etc. Smaller communities can pop up around certain tags and ensure they are collectively more likely to see the action on that tag. You may not want to publish to some of the more "mainstream" tags.

How this manifests over time will remain to be seen, but I hope we can add some features to support this kind of behavior.

Happy coding ❤️