... but in fact I start liking it! All the people I can see are pleasant, nice, kind and polite men I've communicated with in the past. It's almost like a photo album. Virtually no women but why would I want to see women? 😏
@helenS Yeah, I mean this site houses an unbelievable amount of people who suffer from PTSD and other psychological ailments, ofc some of its members aren't gonna want their profile pictures flashed all across the site's front page anytime they're online. Especially given how many stalkers & other creeps like to frequent this site and harass those same people.
I mostly interact with SW on a laptop, so the waste of screen space doesn't bother me much. But I want to address what I'm guessing is the purpose of the user stripe. I think the admins want to get us finding other conversations to involve ourselves in. I think the admins are looking for higher engagement with the site.
And that, if true, tells me the feed isn't working the way they would like; the feed isn't finding interesting new conversations for us. So maybe that's another way to boost engagement.
Recently the admins actually removed my favorite method for finding other conversations. I used to go to https://similarworlds.com/new-posts/ and that would show me all new posts. Some I couldn't read because the person had blocked me, but it was my favorite way to find a random conversation. How about it andrew & nuno? Bring back https://similarworlds.com/new-posts/ maybe??
I don't hate it. If SW was the kind of place where the people who show as online were actually people I interact with a lot, I'd be happy to see certain people and I'd probably pounce on them. But SW has never really developed for me that way. In fact, I'm not even sure it's designed that way.
It's just another feature for me that I'll mostly ignore. 🤷♂️
I wouldn't oppose it, if I could actually select the people I want to see there. Sort of like the "Top Friends" section on EP back in the day. It doesn't seem to work that way unfortunately though.
@Montanaman When you open the SW homepage you can see near the top of the page a stripe (or bar, or whatever) of user profile pictures. It's only on the homepage; if you click on the notifications bell then it will no longer be there. The "profile bar" (maybe that's a better term, instead of "user stripe") is highly customized and will predominantly show SW members you interacted with in the past. To me it was very interesting to see who I communicated with: almost exclusively [i]men[/i], and almost all of them are aged 50+.
Mine shows about an even split sex wise and I do recognize the names as those whose threads I’ve read and commented in or those who’ve commented on my threads and I my or my not have responses so them. I read and write threads on a variety of topics and I don’t see a theme among the users in the pics. @helenS
@jackjjackson Go to the top of your main feed - you can't miss it... it's the great big line up under the page banner and above the top of your newsfeed.
It's really not a bad feature per se. Concept is decent enough, although I do feel it should have been an optional thing. The one thing I don't like is the inability to opt out from showing in other people's profile pic carousel. As it stands it kinda renders the whole "don't show me as online"/no-green-dot option moot.
It's also an unnecessary thing to build when there are so much broken stuff on this site.
I still don't know what it is meant for or how it determines who to show. Its different for everyone. My guess is that it shows people who have been recently active. If this is the case I can understand why people are upset because not everybody wants others to know that. It is why they choose to hide their online status, but that options becomes less useful in this way.
@Darksideinthenight2 It took me some time before I realized I almost exclusively see interesting men. Even the age range is perfect. So I thought I'd better stop complaining and I should see the funny side of it.