No Recommended: "Hide non-joined communities..." also hides community posts on the new comments pages

[slavalamp]

Not sure if it's intended, and it also feels weird that hiding community posts in searches when they include things you've searched for is grouped together with showing them on the "For you" page and part of the "No Recommended" feature. IMO searches are searches, it's not recommendations if you intentionally search for it, and same for comments - you'd probably want to see all of a blog's comments on an "all of this blog's comments" page

[marcustyphoon]

By "the new comments pages" do you mean the "comments" tab when viewing a specific blog, https://www.tumblr.com/blognamegoeshere/comments? Or another location I'm not thinking of?

[marcustyphoon]

Gotcha. I wasn't able to reproduce this yet; if you toggle the feature while looking at that page, are you seeing posts appearing and disappearing?

[slavalamp]

Yes, I've seen it happen in this blog (not mine and not sure if they turned it on intentionally, so it might disappear later) - they have a comment in the community "The Joehills difference" on the first page of comments, the setting hides it

[marcustyphoon]

Ah, there we go, thanks! Yep, seeing it, that's definitely a bug.

[slavalamp]

What about search results - why are community posts hidden there as if they're recommended? Site-wide search is site-wide search, it's reasonable to expect non-subscribed blogs there even if you don't want their posts to get randomly recommended, I don't see why communities are different.

I had turned on every setting for hiding recommended things back when I installed the extension, and I had no idea that this one got updated to mess with search results until now. I just turned it off because I don't use the "for you" page anyway, so I technically don't need it to be fixed myself, but it's still really uncool that it does that

[marcustyphoon]

Hm, I would say I definitely have a more nuanced opinion about search than you, but I see your point. I would guess—not with high confidence—that more than half of site users think of the Communities feature as a separate part of Tumblr, one they would prefer to be opt-in rather than opt-out, and so they would view the natural way to come across a community post about x topic "search for a community about x topic, join it, then find that post" rather than "search for a post about x topic, find a post; you must now join the community in question if you want to engage with it." If you're coming at it from that angle, posts from communities you're not part of showing up in search results do read somewhat as a recommendation.

Or—no, correction: what I should say is that I don't have any idea if a majority of users think this way, but I figured that I could with reasonably high confidence guess that a majority of users who turned on the feature called (at the time) "Hide posts from non-joined communities in For You" would think that way. If a user did want to have communities proactively surfaced as part of their regular use of the site, I thought, they would not have that option enabled in the first place. It would thus best serve the users who don't want to (who would have that option enabled) to add this piece of functionality to the option they'd already enabled as a reflection of that preference.

On the other hand, I do see your point: there could certainly be a set of users who do want to engage with communities when they're relevant, but just find that the ones that pop up in For You are poor recommendations, and thus want only half of this feature enabled. (As you pointed out, it turns out that you're not technically an example of this, but you're right, there must be some). That's a fair argument that the preference should actually be split. There is indeed a material difference between the types of posts.