Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
What about threads like “Open & Welcome Thread”? I had a bit trouble finding it today.
A way to make these would be to make a second version of the Personal Blog, which shows on the main page.
Or entirely different tag, “Community Post”? Available for trusted members. Though it would probably be the same as “Open Threads” tag.