Only logged in members can reply and interact with the post.
Join SimilarWorlds for FREE »

Admin Announcements

🗨 Comments in Home Feed ✳

Hello SW Members! We hope you are all having a great weekend. :)

As most of you may have noticed by now, we recently made a major change to this site.

Comments from your Friends and other Relevant users to you may now appear in your Home Feed, amongst the latest posts which you are used to seeing in this feed.

We understand that this change is very new and surprising to many of you, however we hope that you can give it a chance.

We will be listening attentively to your feedback, as we always do.

Our idea with this change is to add more relevance to users on this site.

Previously before this change, the Home feed was filled with mostly random posts, 90% of which are not relevant or interesting to many users.

(Not saying that your posts are uninteresting! 😄 Just that on average, most of what you see in the feed may not be a topic of interest or from a person you are familiar with/interested in.)

We considered (based on feedback) that many times users feel the site to be "empty" (while our stats show the opposite).
Many times users don't see and engage with their friends and acquaintances often enough, as they'd have to get through 100 other posts which may not be relevant to them.

The aim is that users will now be able to interact with their friends/acquaintances much more often, and join them in topics they would otherwise be unable to find (with the old feed layout), while we also still continue to show all the latest posts on the home feed as we always have.

Please do let us know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. We are very interested in hearing from you. :)

Other recent improvements to Similar Worlds:

• Improvements to Header and Navigation.

• Removed the "Relevant" Feed, as we wish to simplify our website and improve the main feed instead.

• Display "Edited: xx ago" on Posts, to prevent abuse of the Edit feature (eg: changing the original post considerably to cause misleading answers).

Privacy Improvements and Bug Fixes:
○ "Online" status not showing anymore on the Blocked People list.
○ Removed showing of User Tags in Notifications of comments, if the user is blocked.
○ Fix that emails were not being sent if the user was being mentioned/tagged.

Thanks again for your attention and support!
- The SW Team

Update:
Regarding Comments of Blocked users appearing in the feed.

This is a major bug which was accidentally released with this change.
It is being reverted right now, and we are working on the fixes.
We apologize for this inconvenience.

Please note that mistakes can happen sometimes when major changes are being made to a site.

We don't intend to make changes that would make users unhappy,
however, we cannot move the site forward without sometimes making changes and receiving feedback.

Please be assured that we are listening to all feedback, and will work to come to a solution which satisfies as many users as possible.
Thank you.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Andrew · Admin

DesiDudeJ04 · 31-35, M

@Andrew you are the man. 🙌

Stark

@Andrew 🙂

Nymnin · 26-30, F

@Andrew so you guys don't plan on putting the new change back? well that disappointing. I was happy for this change as i only wanted to see stories because the crazy amount of question that get posted within 1 minute is too much that i have to click load more to see next story.

People should have that choice to filter out question and just see stories. The fact that people didn't even bother taking the time to learn the new change says a lot about their ability in using the internet.

The new change was simple. Click this if you wanna see just this or click that if you wanna see everything. It took me less then a minute literally to learn the changes it was simple point and click. The fact that most of the people here complain about a simple point a click says a lot about there inability to learn.

My real question here for those that have complained about the new changes. How the hell did you even learn to turn on your pc? or opening a browser to access similar world? or even registering an account, verifying the account and loging in? if you people can do that you can simply learn to just click any of the 3 option to view certain things.

I bet SW Team is probably laughing their asses off right now because something so simple as point and click can't be learned and please don't even tell me "well i am not tech savvy" I've DM people that ask me about the new changes and they are illiterate in tech (no offense you guys) as i explain click this and that if you wanna see just story, just question or both.

but now you people that can't even take the time to learn a simple click option has taken away the changes for people that have already learned it and enjoy how cleaner stories and question.

I guess everyone prefer the clutterfuck. @Andrew if you guys really plan on not putting the new feature back please put a timer on question being asked to 5-10 minutes. I hate seeing question that are being posted by the same person 10 times within 5minutes this clutter the entire feed and forces people just to keep scrolling down till they can see the next story.

Stark

@Nymnin the change back is only temporary due to a bug. It will be changed back to the new update once the bug is fixed.

Andrew · Admin

@Nymnin We will be releasing these new updates again soon.
There were several problems that need to be addressed.

Also, we are working on making this release better based on feedback.

- Improved Navigation (Dropmenus).
- Better design for Comments in Feed.
- Option to disable Comments in Feed feature.

PoetryNEmotion · F

@Andrew Will we, the users of SW, have any say after a trial period of these new features? Will there be a vote or anything? Or are these new changes going to be the way it will stay once they are implemented? That is what I want to know. Others do too. Thank you for answering.

Andrew · Admin

@PoetryNEmotion Hello.
As always, the feedback and opinions from members will continue to be important to us, whereby we will listen to your feedback and make adjustments to satisfy users as much as possible; while at the same time keeping things practical for Similar World's continued growth and success.

So far we believe we have a good understanding of what users didn't like about the recent changes, so we are working on improving that, and we believe that members will be happy or satisfied with our following release.

PoetryNEmotion · F

@Andrew I know change is necessary. Could you please send us an advance warning or message so we aren't just thrown into the changes? I hope you will be fair. Thank you for listening.

Andrew · Admin

@PoetryNEmotion We are definitely looking into how we can better communicate our new ideas/changes to members before releasing them.
Also the possibility of having more Beta Testers before releasing new changes.

However, we have indeed been open to members about many changes/features we have planned since our launch.

We have posted many questions, polls and announcements about new features we are planning, specifically major ones that we think users may want to know about in advance.

Behind the scene, we are constantly releasing many new changes on Similar Worlds almost every week. It is very difficult for development progress to require an opinion poll before releasing any changes, as it would greatly stall development.

Additionally, it may be difficult for users to understand/picture the idea we have planned, until they experience it live (where we can get much stronger feedback by them testing the idea).

Still, we will work towards finding some balance between development speed and user awareness of our plans.