I almost exclusively use the “latest posts” list when I come to CC. Having a wall of the list of ED schools made it really, really hard to search for threads this morning. Having 60+ new posts, almost exclusively of those type, also made that impossible to sort through quickly.
Is it possible that when mods do those type of posts that they not appear on the “latest” list?
We want to create the EA/ED threads for a number of the most popular schools so that’s why you saw this flux of new threads. I personally don’t know how to have them not appear in the Latest Posts, but maybe @CC_Jon know.
I see how this may be inconvenient, but this should be fixed soon. This is a temporary problem as there’s only a few more to come (as I’ve done most of them already).
I use “latest threads” infrequently. It’s typically “unread” and “new” for me.
What I’d really like though, is a “recently read” option so I can go back to threads I read in the past couple of days that I may not necessarily have bookmarked.
I look at UNREAD (bookmarked) threads first, then NEW threads and then LATEST. My new threads are what are being bombarded with all of Sorin’s work. Since he is posting them all at once, it is pretty easy to read the true new threads and dismiss the rest.
You are not! Here are the top ten pages by pageviews:
It’s not unusual for the root page (http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/) to be the most visited page on a site. That’s the page new visitors land on. Latest is a very close second. Most returning visitors sit on the Latest to see what’s new. Then there are many visitors who come just for the Parent Cafe. I won’t go through the list, but it’s interesting to see how other people use the site.
It’s understandable that a bunch of new posts will get in your way when we are preparing for Early Decision season. I mentioned in another topic that you can preemptively mute threads by tag. Something else that I do is track or even watch every new thread in a category I am interested in. I have the Community & Forum Issues category set to watch every thread in the category. When people post there, I get a notification. (Yes, it can be a lot!) So I spend most of my time looking at my own notifications and less time watching Latest.
Philosophical aside
Many (all?) of the most popular social media platforms use algorithms to predict what users are most interested in. The algorithms are fairly effective at guessing what you might click on next. But the algorithms are designed to drive more views and more engagement at the cost of your time. For instance, I watched a video about poker once on YouTube and the algorithm now thinks I want to see all the poker content. I’m tempted to watch suggested poker videos, but I know I don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole.
As a more traditional forum, CC gives members control over what they see. It’s a better model because I can decide whether I want to see certain types of content rather than being tempted by the algorithm. The cost is that it doesn’t happen automatically. So there are situations, like this one, where we know a lot of people will see a wall of topics they probably aren’t interested in.
@CC_Sorin and I will put our heads together to see if we can post these threads in a way that doesn’t disrupt Latest too much. It might be that just doing them as quickly as possible will be best since it reduces the number of days people will see the flood. In the meantime. please mute tags, categories and topics that you don’t want to see. And thank you for your patience.
This is all interesting to me. I never thought of just looking at “Latest.” I just come to the forum home page - talk. collegeconfidential. com. I’m not sure if that’s represented in Jon’s list or not. I look down the left side for new posts in the topics I’m interested in, and sometimes look down the right side to see “hot” topics I may not have been aware of.
Very interesting! For a specific section there are more page views for the Parent Cafe than anywhere else! So that is the most lucrative area for CC, right? Parents and our viewpoints re CC are the most important!
SO GLAD you don’t use algorithm to decide what we see. I so wish Facebook would allow me to see everything under “Latest.” Most recent there hardly even helps. So I miss most people that I know posting.
Only if we served up lots of advertising. Since CC became an independent entity, we’ve focused on school partnerships, so we are reducing the number of ads on the site.
My bookmark is to latest. On the rare occasion I find myself elsewhere, I usually bookmark back instead of finding it in navigation.
There should be a way for moderators to post threads without spamming up the boards and forcing conversations down…but I can’t imagine it happens enough to really impact too much.