Is it that fucking hard to choose the right category for your fucking post?
My god all you need to do is fucking click on one of the lower buttons. If you are posting a meme don't tag it as rant ffs.

Please, for the sake of this community...

Yeah, seriously.

@AlexDeLarge
I think I'll request a "report wrong category" feature where you can request the proper category and if enough users choose the same alternative category, the category is changed.

Time to train a ML algo that chooses a default category based on what you just wrote?

Or ban images from the rant category altogether.
I know some rants need a pic for reference, to make the rant a proper rant, but I think the majority is fine without it
Also I could imagine a dude or two posting in the rant category intentionally, because they know every sane person has the meme shitposts hidden

<@Kimmax>
I am sure that a lot have the random category deactivated too, but when I'm posting something there, I still get plenty of ++'s (Even if they don't mean a lot to me)
Got more than 60 ++'s twice.

Also I don't think banning images from the rant category is a good idea. There would be a lot of complaints.

"my meme has to do with me being mad at something, so it's a rant."

This. I've been downvoting loads of memes lately. And yes, I've got memes disabled in the filter.

@BitFlipped "My dick has something to do with holes so I'm gonna shove it down your throat since that's a hole too" would be an appropriate reponse there.

<@filthyranter>
wtf

<@AlpineLinnix>
That's awful to read... Really sorry for you...
I wish I could help you somehow, but all I can do is paying attention to what I post by myself.
(I hope you consider my posts as relevant because I feel like I'm posting to much shit. :D)
Anyways I am downvoting a lot recently. Let's see if something changes till the end of 2018...
(That's why I am a supporter)

<@AlpineLinnix>
(You commented a lot more, just noticed)
So you are @ThatDude? Didn't know that...
Not sure what dfox posted but it sounds awful.
He seems so nice to me!

Btw I'm happy that you chose my rant to let it all out. Feel free to do it more often! :D

We take community feedback very seriously, and when I see feedback like some of the notes here, it makes me pretty sad.

But the first thing I always like to do with suggestions/feedback like this is measure it. This is pretty easily measurable. I happen to be behind on going through the last couple of days of rants, so I used those as a sample.

455 posts I counted in the feed. Then I went though those. I counted about 53 jokes/memes, of what I would consider to be those. Then I looked at the types on each of those. I found 47 of them to be tagged as joke/meme and 3 to be tagged as random. 3 were mistagged as rant. And that’s being pretty liberal - at least one of them could be argued as a rant, but I’ll call it miscategorized just to be fair. Also, this does not include rants that were downvotes/hidden from the feed because of low scores/abuse, but those are generally very few and even if those include miscategorizations, I consider that to be community-moderated very effectively already so not going to count those.

So what does that mean? Out of the 455 posts I went through, like a any user would, 5.6% of the memes I saw were miscategorized as rant. That also means if I had joke/meme and random turned off, it would have eliminated 94.4% of jokes/memes from my feed.

Personally, I find that extremely impressive. Maybe I’m reaching here - but to me, eliminating almost 95% of content a user doesn’t want to see in an initial release of a feature that came out like a month ago seems pretty decent.

Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. We want to get that number closer to 100%. But to be completely honest, it’s hard to justify the immediate prioritization of reporting miscategorized rants because statistically, they don’t seem like a huge problem.

Some takeaways for me:
- Our post type classification system, overall, has been a large success. The opinion that "people don't give a fuck" or people miscategorize at any kind of signfiicant rate seems to be completely misguided/based on emotion rather than any kind of actual metric or real data. I also don't think it's that farfetched to believe classifications will improve over time on their own since people will pay even more attention. And that's not including improvements we'll make too. So if anything, post types have proven, with overwhelming data, that the huge majority of devRant community members care about properly classifying their posts, and that’s across every post type. And to be completely honest, Tim and I thought it would be more of a problem. But we were very pleasantly surprised that the large majority of devRant members take the time to properly select a type.

- People who greatly dislike jokes/memes on devRant never provide statistics for any of their claims. I don't want to sound rude, but this is simply an observation I've had for a couple of years now and it's held steady over that entire time. And even now, with many of the claims here. I'm not saying people's observations aren't true to some extent (or that they genuinely believe them), but this stuff is really easy to measure and speak analytically about. We're programmers - I don't think it's unfair to have that expectation for debate. And I bring up this point because, to be honest, almost every time someone says they don't like memes/devRant has too many memes, the "arguments" contain multiple falsehoods, and one of the most common things I've seen is literally fake “emotion” data. "I just went through my feed, it was 80% memes!! wtf" - needless to say, obvious inaccuracies like that are easy to verify/disprove by simply going through the feed and counting content, and usually directly after those claims the highest I ever found was about 20%.

- Proven by a number of comments in this thread, people who dislike jokes/memes tend to express it in a negative way and even go as far as belittling people who enjoy jokes/memes. And that's with us filtering out 95% of that specific content from the feeds. This is worrisome and I think we need to dig deeper into this. This is a case of a vocal minority trying to dictate what other people see/should enjoy. I personally hoped the post type system would take care of this, but it still seems to be an issue. We get it, some people don't want to see specific content, and that's why we developed the type system. But people should know, jokes/memes aren't going anywehere from the community, and no, the people who like them are just as smart as everyone else. Personally jokes/memes aren't my favorite kind of content, but I would say they are probably the content I get the most positve feedback about when I meet a devRant user at a show or tech conference. A lot of really nice/smart devs like them.

- We will continue to come up with ways to improve the post type system. Mark as mis-typed seems like a good idea, and we will probably implement at some point. But beyond that, we have more work to do on the type system because we plan on adding at least one more type soon, so we'll see what happens there.

@AlpineLinnix that’s not what happened I don’t think. If I remember correctly, you posted some “I’m leaving” thing and you got upset when a number of users told you “ok, bye” instead of begging you to stay and called your rant immature because it seemed self-congratulatory and immature just like your comments here.

We have a rule and the rule is clearly written in our community guidelines. I said you’re welcome to propose rule changes on our GitHub issue tracker. The rule is, we don’t allow rants that explicitly tell others not to post certain types of content or make certain users feel unwelcome in general. That’s the rule. You can downvote whatever you want and that’s what downvotes are for. You get way beyond a democratic voting system when certain people become loud and tell others what they need to be posting. We created be rule because many users were tired of people hating on certain kinds of posts that they personally didn’t like.

And that’s why we have our issue tracker - it’s meant for public discussion on actual things people want to see changed on devRant.

Oh and one more thing to add here - in viewing a ton of posts and looking at how the type system works, we’ve definitely identified some more issues.

In those, I’d say, if someone mis-types a post, it’s not always completely their fault. We have some shortcomings in how we explain each type and also don’t have a way to see that explanation again once you close out the description modal. We plan to add a way to see it again. By far the most frequent misclassification I see is real rants tagged as “devrant” instead of “rant,” so that’s something we definitely need to address to, making it easier to learn about the types.

@dfox thanks for the taking the time to post these wall of texts and share your thoughts with us :) First of all - I agree with every single point you posted.
To be fair, I think that the wrong typed rant ratio was far worse when the system first launched and that was to be expected. People would have to realize that the category selection now actually does something and those that didn't get the initial memo probably learned it from the comments. I have to admit that I find myself being an asshole in the comments sometimes and it's probably about being over sensitive about something.
I think the power users of devrant are just happy that the category system works now and want it to be perfect right away, which obviously isn't going to work, but 94% is pretty damn good already.
I think it'll work out just fine
Keep rolling ✌🏻

@Kimmax thanks! And yeah, I agree. The accuracy has definitely increased with time as more people have understood that the types are used now. I think the redesigned type screen we’re going to implement will make that even more apparent and help with better understanding each type.

And also agree about the “perfect” point - we’ll keep increasing accuracy but will never get to 100%, since user generated content will always have some margin of error.

<@DLMousey>
Or how about a minimum amount of ++'s to post images. That way you would have to post something creative first, until you can repost stolen images from @IAmDeveloper on Twitter.

<@dfox>
First things first, thank you so much for taking time to explain your opinion and your thoughts on this topic!
I posted this rant because I just saw like 3 miscategorized rants out of 20 total. (It actually doesn't happen that often that I see miscategorized rants.) Which got me angry. So I decided to let out my anger and post this. I hope it is okay and you don't see it as insult against your new system.
I agree with you in all points! Not sure what happened there with @AlpineLinnix but I'll let you discuss this between you two.

@AlpineLinnix I don’t remember people doing that or who the specific people were. Obviously yelling and abuse would be inappropriate. But I think if you’re going to call them out, and call me out like you did here, it’s kind of silly to if you deleted the rant with the actual comments in question. It’s the kind of thing where people should be able to look for themselves, but that obviously can’t happen now. Not fair at all to start “recalling” it when you’re the one who deleted it so people have no way to see it.

@DLMousey I’m kind of feeling you didn’t actually read what I wrote. Again, numbers please. How many memes is your feed clogged with right now? Is the metric I provided inaccurate? If so, what percentage of mis-typed posts did you find? I’m genuinely asking. “Clogged with blah blah blah” is exactly what I said is useless and tends to historically be overestimated and plain wrong.

I also think your idea is a bit elitist and not really what people what from the community. I’m I really supposed to read what you just wrote and say, “this person deserves more upvote power than a lot of other users?” Sorry, but that’s not the feeling I got reading it.

Again, you made more claims without providing a single statistic or rough estimation of the size of the problem with actual proof or evidence. This is a developer community. For people throwing out ideas for features to make their upvotes worth more, I 100% expect to see metrics and data showing why that’s a good idea, and you’ve yet to provide any of that, just hearsay about how clogged your feed is even though I posted actual data saying I see something completely different. I need to know where the disconnect is if we’re going to be able to make it better for you.

@Skayo no problem - and I mean it’s a fair point, just not the level of occurrence the rant makes it seem IMO. It’s no doubt annoying when stuff is mis-categorized.

@Skayo as for the minimum # of ++ to post images, it’s not a terrible idea and we’ve thought of similar before. But that was before post types. Now, I really think it would get us almost nothing. It would cut less than those 5% of mid-typed posts out (because not everyone who does that is a new user) and I really don’t see the harm. People who want to see that content are now able to, and people who don’t want to don’t have to.

Just to make sure I’m not going crazy, I just went though every rant for the last 12 hours or so and did my calculations again.

I counted 111 of them. There were so few incorrect types that I decided to just write them down:
1 devRant should have been rant
1 random should have been devRant or rant
1 rant could have been devRant or random, but borderline
1 rant should have been joke/meme

That fits perfectly into the metrics I gathered before - about 5% mis-typed. However, in this case, joke/meme mis-types seem to be < 1%...

I don’t see how that stat can be analyzed with the conclusion that we need to take drastic measures like making some people’s upvotes count more or immediately implement a method for fixing mis-types. And the stats I provided both times don’t even include the fact that I fix most of those incorrectly typed rants I see, so some people see them at an even lower rate.

@AlpineLinnix I get it - and that’s my point. Months ago, you deleted it, why bring it up now and start calling people out from it? How can people defend themselves when you’re just saying so and so said this, I remember, but yeah, I also deleted it because it was too dramatic. Sorry, but I stand by the sentiment of that thread and that your comments there and here are immature, even if merely for the fact that you deleted something you considered “too dramatic” then started using it against people here. Either let the past be the past or don’t delete stuff if you want to claim so and so said whatever. I don’t like you claiming that about me (because I think you’re wrong and mis-remembering but I have no way to prove it because you’re using a thread you deleted as “evidence”). It certainly doesn’t do well in trying to refute the comments that you say called you immature.

@AlpineLinnix that’s fine, but in the future please don’t put words in my mouth or use the phrase “dfox said” if you’re going to misquote the nature of what I said after deleting the rant where I said it. That’s not fair and just ridiculous. Thanks.