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How to hide/unfollow #tags on Dev.to?

l2aelba on March 29, 2019

Does Dev.to is able to hide/follow some tags? Sorry 😢, but I think it's too many questions on #help are so low quality, so I just want to hide the...
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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him) • Edited

In your dashboard (dev.to/dashboard/following) you can add weights to tags you like to see more posts with those tags, or set negative values to tags for posts you want to see less. We currently don't have a way to completely hide tags yet.

More details here:

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mikenakis profile image
Mike Nakis • Edited

So, let me make sure I understand this. There will be posts on my feed tagged with #spanish, and there is nothing I can do about that. Is that right?

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helenanders26 profile image
Helen Anderson

ronsoak this ^

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mikenakis profile image
Mike Nakis • Edited

The word "unfollow" in the title is misleading. The question is not how to unfollow a tag. It only takes a couple of minutes of using this site to figure out that you can very easily unfollow any tag from your dashboard.

The problem starts with the fact that dev.to is intentionally force-feeding you with posts from tags that you are not following. This is probably okay, since it allows you to get a glimpse of what else is going on outside of the little bubble that you have created for yourself with your choice of a specific set of tags that you follow.

Unfortunately, sooner or later you are bound to encounter force-fed posts that you are absolutely sure you do not want to see. You don't want to see posts tagged with #help, I don't want to see posts tagged with #spanish. The problem is, we have not followed these tags, so we cannot unfollow them. So, how can we stop seeing these posts?

There appears to be no solution to this. The best you can do is use an entirely hidden and undocumented feature that dev.to calls anti-follow, which may reduce but not eliminate posts with annoying tags. Here is how to use this feature:

  • Locate post that you'd rather not see.
  • Click on the tag that makes the post problematic. (In your case, #help.)
  • On the tag page, follow the tag. Yes, follow it. I know, that's the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish, but bear with me for a moment.
  • Once you have followed the tag, go to your dashboard, go to tags, and set the weight of the tag to -100.0.
  • Dev.to will display a red mark on that tag, saying 'anti-follow', which means it understands your intention.

After doing this, you will see fewer posts of that annoying tag.

However, despite the fact that dev.to understands your intention and supports this usage scenario, it will keep showing you some posts with this tag, because that's how it rolls.

If dev.to was somehow profiting from this, I would say that this is a sinister marketing practice. But since there is probably no profit involved, I would say it is just retarded.

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murd0c (he/him)

Hi, I know it's a little bit late, but I've found a solution for this, thanks to this comment from jess, and I'll share it here if someone wanders into this post for the same reason (like me :P)

You can enter here dev.to/tags and follow/unfollow desired tags or enter directly to the desired tag dev.to/t/git

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Ingo Steinke

Feature request: option to completely block tags and users, and a list of blocked items in my settings as a user. If I remember correctly, I have successfully blocked people already, but I am unable to find the list either.