EDIT: This post is no longer valid, as we've replaced the concept of follow weights with a simplified feature for muting unwanted tags called hidden tags. You can learn more about this feature in the following changelog post.
It's quite common for folks on DEV to ask how they can ignore or see less of a certain tag. Well, I'm happy to say that there is a solution available that can help you!
To ignore a tag you must:
- Follow the tag! (Yes, I realize this is a bit unintuitive.)
- Navigate to you Dashboard and click Following Tags.
- Find the tag you want to see less of and adjust the follow weight of the tag so that it's in the negative.
- Click the button "Update Weights".
- Look for the tag and see the "Anti-follow" signifier that sits beside the tags name.
For example, here's a picture of what it looks like when I'm anti-following #codeequality:
If you'd like to see me walk through these steps via video, then watch this embedded Loom:
If you have any feedback or questions, don't hesitate to comment below!
Top comments (21)
Year and a half later... this feature seems to be switched off/removed....?
I'd like to cut out quite a bit of the noise from topic streams I'm not interested in... went to check my tag weightings.... no more weightings... 🙃
Hey Tai!
Thanks for chiming in here! I'll update this post with a notice shortly.
This recent post by our Senior Project Manager, @philiphow, gets into an update that we made to allow folks to more easily hide tags, but it doesn't really talk about the tag weighting method it replaced.
Changelog: Take control of your feed with hidden tags
Philip How for The DEV Team ・ Sep 8
We received a lot of feedback from folks who were confused by the tricky pattern of needing to follow a tag in order to ignore it, and in the process of revamping this feature, we decided to ditch tag weightings in favor of a simpler system that allows people to hide tags they aren't interested in seeing. So, you should still have the ability to cut out the noise from certain topics that you're not interested in by hiding unwanted tags, but you just don't have the granular ability to fine tune weightings like you used to.
I hope this is helpful and still satisfies your desire to see less of certain tags. Feedback is def welcome... we're always looking for ways to improve the system! 🙂
That does help and do what I am looking for though, so thanks :-)
I'm not sure If It si me who is doing something wrong, but It doesnt work for me. For months I've had JavaScript and react with -999 weight and I still have posts about react in muy feed... It light be something I didn't get 😅
Hey, I'm one of those members meeting. A quck question, are you ever seeing posts that only have JavaScript tags.
The fact that there are four possible tags means we may be eliminating a tag from being considered, but other tags are still considered.
I think that might be the reason. It's true that I don't see those tags alone.
In this very moment, for example, I've browsed my feed looking for examples and I've found in the first posts one about React. However, the post also had open-source and webdev tags. Those tags don't have a weight in my configuration, I'm not following nor anti-following them... but maybe they bring the post again to considered posts.
Thanks for your feedback, Michael and Jeremy! I hope the meeting bring some good new ideas ^^
PD: I have a quick idea in a similar line: Some mechanism to mark a post as "bad tagged" could help to bring the attention of tag mods (specially in popular tags that now are used only to improve the position of your content)
This is a pretty cool idea and definitely worth considering! Thanks for bringing this up. Any chance you'd like to start up a GitHub discussion on this in our repo? Alternatively, I could start the discussion and reference your statement here. 😀
On it! Thanks for the suggestion ;)
I’ll add to this experience report that I have #blockchain and #web3 anti-followed but I still see plenty of posts with either or both of those tags.
Good to know! Appreciate that feedback, Luke. 👍
Hmmmm... it sounds like you're doing things right, but it is strange that these posts would still be showing up in your feed.
Now, this can be a bit trickier to solve for than it seems!
For instance, if you're following one tag, but anti-following another, I'm not entirely sure whether or not we'd show you a post that has both of these tags. 🤔
I do know that some members of our team (including myself) plan to meet next week and discuss feed mechanics, so I will most definitely bring this up and see if I can get a firm answer here.
web3 and crypto will now have a negative infinite weight on my account. Thanks for the tip!!
Happy to help out! 🙌
For anyone else curious, entering
-Infinityor-1e1000for web3 and crypto doesn't work 😢You need to set web3 and crypto to the minimum finite floating-point value,
-179769313486231570000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000Edit: After entering
-179769313486231570000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000for web3, why am I still seeing that ugly-ass metapunks ad on my homepage?You need to disable the hero banner, but it means that you will miss all the others that aren't crypto related 99% of the time. It's just forem putting out an ad for another space.
ahahhahahhah its realy unintuitive
REALY THANK U DUDE!!
Interesting usage.
Although, tags are text inputs in the end, so it could be a bit tedious to set. For example, you might exclude "#javascript" (not suggesting you should) and still get "#js" 😈.
I guess it works best with top tags listed here
This is very true!
However, us admin also have a cool feature available called tag aliasing. The way this works, is it allows us to connect two tags together, so if we alias "#js" to "#javascript" then posting under #js actually moves the post under #javascript. Another cool effect this has is that trying to navigate to the landing page of dev.to/t/js will actually bring you to dev.to/t/javascript.
All this to say, I believe that if you anti-follow #js you are also anti-following #javascript. I'll make sure a dev on the team double checks this logic though for us! To be clear, I'm not a developer, but a community manager. 🙂
Hahaha, well we do have posts other than JS out there too, 🤣 but I wouldn't blame ya for thinking otherwise. After all, #javascript does have the most posts under its belt (92,291 according to dev.to/tags).
I'm the engineer referenced by @michaeltharrington and am just here to wave, listen, and maybe respond if asked.
Thank ya so much, Jeremy! 🙌