Ah, I just realized this is the norm with curated posts. FWIW I feel a bit awkward to have the curation comments displayed so prominently, since it alters the author’s intended reading experience in a way I find a bit weird / offputting.
If it was up to me, I would remove the curator’s words at the top of a post in favor of comments like this one, where the reasons for curation are explained but its not the first thing that readers see when reading the post.
Yes I also find the curation tagline to be awkward. The first few times I saw it I assumed that the original author had edited their post to include the curation comment at the start. I only discovered this was not the case by reading the comments here. Seems that editing another user’s post is bad form. Adding your own comment to the start of their post is especially obtrusive, but in this case obtrusive is way better than non-obtrusive so that’s a plus . The current curated tag should be enough for the website itself. Maybe the subscription e-mail can retain the curation notice while the original post remains unedited.
Unless the original authors are contacted and agreed to the curation notice being included at the top of their posts. Then everything is fine as it is.
I contacted the authors the first couple of times while trying this new thing and neither objected, nor had anyone else yet, so I didn’t check with Kaj (sorry Kaj).
It’s good now that people have spoken about and we’ll think about how to get the good without the bad. As Habryka mentioned, the thing we’re trying to achieve is giving people context on the curation. I’ve wanted to avoid putting something prominently in front of people’s faces without them knowing why. Not all curated posts require this, but sometimes we curated weird ones, or ones where it’s being curated for the comments rather than the post itself, or ones that are irregular (e.g. important Covid updates). In all those cases, it feels important to provide an explanation that gets seen.
As Habryka mentioned, if we keep doing this, we’ll build a way to do that doesn’t involve editing. This was just the quick test version.
You’re doing good work with the curation and it’s very effective at bringing important posts back into the reader’s eye so thanks for that! I would probably have never seen this post otherwise. I’m glad you’re working on the system to iron out the kinks.
One of the reasons for this is that curated posts get emailed out to a few thousand people and that email doesn’t include any comments, and frequently others have asked us for context on why we curated something when they get the email. So this way the curation notice gets to be included in the email.
A minor change might make this more perspicuous (although this suggestion should be viewed in the light of the OP and the thread from Said Achmiz’s comment on UX design): Begin the curation notice at the top of the OP with “Curated by (username)”.
How hard is it to make the Curation admin tooling include a text field for curation reason, that both gets posted as a comment, and included in the email? This really seems like a nice-to-have software feature request, rather than something that merits the grotesque violence of editing the OP!
As mentioned elsethread, I checked with authors the first couple of times. Having met no objections, I applied induction and tested whether maybe the overhead wasn’t necessary.
Shouldn’t be too hard, but seemed worth testing whether it was working in a low-tech solution before we build a thing. My guess is we will add this more properly relatively soon, if we keep doing it.
I have been unsure how long it could persist for. There’s an argument for it being present all the time it’s at the top of the curated list, and if you imagine author’s being proud of it, for even longer than that. But perhaps (while we’re doing the low-tech thing), it should only be for sending out the email.
I have done so but it was not an accident! Top of the post version makes it so it’s easy to see the notice when you view the post and on email, the comment lets it show up in recent discussion, also discussion of the notice if people are inclined. So a bit of redundancy on purpose.
(Separately from the violence issue, it looks like “the community” has an initials collision: I initially read “RB” as “Rob Bensinger” rather than “Ruby Bloom.”)
Meta: it seems like you have accidentally added this comment also at the beginning of the post besides commenting?
Ah, I just realized this is the norm with curated posts. FWIW I feel a bit awkward to have the curation comments displayed so prominently, since it alters the author’s intended reading experience in a way I find a bit weird / offputting.
If it was up to me, I would remove the curator’s words at the top of a post in favor of comments like this one, where the reasons for curation are explained but its not the first thing that readers see when reading the post.
Yes I also find the curation tagline to be awkward. The first few times I saw it I assumed that the original author had edited their post to include the curation comment at the start. I only discovered this was not the case by reading the comments here. Seems that editing another user’s post is bad form. Adding your own comment to the start of their post is especially obtrusive, but in this case obtrusive is way better than non-obtrusive so that’s a plus . The current curated tag should be enough for the website itself. Maybe the subscription e-mail can retain the curation notice while the original post remains unedited.
Unless the original authors are contacted and agreed to the curation notice being included at the top of their posts. Then everything is fine as it is.
I contacted the authors the first couple of times while trying this new thing and neither objected, nor had anyone else yet, so I didn’t check with Kaj (sorry Kaj).
It’s good now that people have spoken about and we’ll think about how to get the good without the bad. As Habryka mentioned, the thing we’re trying to achieve is giving people context on the curation. I’ve wanted to avoid putting something prominently in front of people’s faces without them knowing why. Not all curated posts require this, but sometimes we curated weird ones, or ones where it’s being curated for the comments rather than the post itself, or ones that are irregular (e.g. important Covid updates). In all those cases, it feels important to provide an explanation that gets seen.
As Habryka mentioned, if we keep doing this, we’ll build a way to do that doesn’t involve editing. This was just the quick test version.
Thanks again though for the feedback!
No worries. :) Getting it into the curation e-mail was probably good.
You’re doing good work with the curation and it’s very effective at bringing important posts back into the reader’s eye so thanks for that! I would probably have never seen this post otherwise. I’m glad you’re working on the system to iron out the kinks.
One of the reasons for this is that curated posts get emailed out to a few thousand people and that email doesn’t include any comments, and frequently others have asked us for context on why we curated something when they get the email. So this way the curation notice gets to be included in the email.
A minor change might make this more perspicuous (although this suggestion should be viewed in the light of the OP and the thread from Said Achmiz’s comment on UX design): Begin the curation notice at the top of the OP with “Curated by (username)”.
Could definitely do that. I felt more weird about putting my own name right at the top.
How hard is it to make the Curation admin tooling include a text field for curation reason, that both gets posted as a comment, and included in the email? This really seems like a nice-to-have software feature request, rather than something that merits the grotesque violence of editing the OP!
As mentioned elsethread, I checked with authors the first couple of times. Having met no objections, I applied induction and tested whether maybe the overhead wasn’t necessary.
Shouldn’t be too hard, but seemed worth testing whether it was working in a low-tech solution before we build a thing. My guess is we will add this more properly relatively soon, if we keep doing it.
(I now edited out the curation notice, since the e-mail was already sent a while back.)
+1
I have been unsure how long it could persist for. There’s an argument for it being present all the time it’s at the top of the curated list, and if you imagine author’s being proud of it, for even longer than that. But perhaps (while we’re doing the low-tech thing), it should only be for sending out the email.
I have done so but it was not an accident! Top of the post version makes it so it’s easy to see the notice when you view the post and on email, the comment lets it show up in recent discussion, also discussion of the notice if people are inclined. So a bit of redundancy on purpose.
(Separately from the violence issue, it looks like “the community” has an initials collision: I initially read “RB” as “Rob Bensinger” rather than “Ruby Bloom.”)