GhostedIC

Use it if you want! Grabbed it from wayback machine.

Crazy to think that this stuff can potentially end up tied to your identity and used for advertising, or even (in theory) other purposes like credit worthiness or a job suitability assessment.

"For example, a recently patented profiling method uses play traces to de- termine whether a user is frugal (e.g., indicated by saving in-game money even in the face of attractive spending options), fiscally responsible (e.g., indicated by investing carefully and focusing on strategically important purchases), or wasteful (e.g., indicated by taking financial risks, spending money quickly, and buying items not relevant to the goals of the game) [19]. The method also aims to evaluate whether a player is “trading-conscious”, i.e., fit for certain finan- cial trading products, and to detect an “eagerness to go after new products or services” based on how players develop their in-game character. Even non-financial aspects of a game can allow insights into a user’s money- management style. The above patent, for instance, proposes to assesses a user’s level of frugality based on ammunition expenditure patterns in first-person shooter games (e.g., rate at which bullets are fired, percentage of hits, pre- cision shots and controlled bursts vs. wasteful use of ammunition) or based on the user’s performance in driving games and flight simulators (e.g., aggressive driving, overspeed, crash frequency) [19]. Such links between gameplay and real-world spending behavior have also been reported in the scientific literature. Correlating the results of an online survey with log data from the popular sandbox video game Minecraft, for ex- ample, Canossa et al. [37] found that money-conscious players tend to build fewer sleeping accommodations for themselves and prefer to use cheap in-game materials, such as stone, sand, and iron instead of precious materials, such as diamond"

Disclaimer: I cannot into code and I don't even have a test environment set up.

How would people feel about a feature which hides communities from the front page for users who are not subscribed to them? I think it would work something like this:

-Instance admins have a "hidden community" list

-Instances can be flagged hidden as well

-Communities can flag themselves to he hidden on local, or all external instances (which would only work for instances which respect these flags)

This would give instance admins a little power to curate what new users are seeing without having to defederate. It would also allow communities to be a little more insular and avoid traffic from the front page if they wish to do so. I think it would be good for circumstances where:

-Instance operators want maximum comparability without actively promoting stuff they dont like (EG lemmygrad, right or left politics, weird porn)

-New users who turn on NSFW aren't shocked by gore, weird porn, or other things on the front page. (See for example, the post asking to defed from burggit)

-The site can just more easily host communities which don't get along with each other

The downside would be that some admins might not like "hidden" communities growing under their nose, or communities might feel like they're "soft banned". But overall I think it is worthwhile. A lot of sites which host both normal and weird porn force users to opt in manually to see the weird stuff, for example, and this keeps criticism away from front page users. I think being required to see stuff you don't want to see, and then manually opt out of it, is too much for some users. It could also help keep down stuff that will be used to criticize lemmy in general.

In effect, it should be similar to the ability to hide NSFW, but more granular without demanding a complicated tag system.

I do not think this would be difficult to implement. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow, I might even start from zero and try to learn enough to add features. But, how do people feel about this feature? Would you want to be available, and use it if it was?