Experience Project Blues

This post has received a Note or Correction by the SimilarWorlds staff.

Staff Note:
We understand, and can agree with your sentiment.

Experience Project displayed only (or mostly) content from Groups / Interests the user joined, in its main feed, which caused it to be a more relevant and useful community, for finding others with similar interests and experiences.

It is our wish to provide such an experience on SimilarWorlds as well, however, we receive tremendous amounts of backlash and complaints, unceasingly, for not displaying "More / All posts" made by any and every user of this site.
Basically, many here seem to demand a more Random, Irrelevant feed (at least the more vocal users).

This is non-ideal in our view, as it only perpetuates discontent by most users in the end, being often shown content that is non-interesting, non-relevant, and even offensive or inappropriate (from their perspective).

We suggest that you considering trying out the "Customize Feed" preset of "Most Relevant", to see if the feed's results and sorting become more preferable to you.
Otherwise, you can experiment with different Customize Feed settings, to tailor the content being delivered to your feed.

When I was on EP, I felt as though I was constantly surrounded by people who have had either interesting experiences or looking for similar experiences.

99% of what I have seen here makes me think that the users absolutely aren’t in a similar world to me. What on earth is going on? I’ve been blocking and muting way too much for my… what? Third day here?

😂

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ServantOfTheGoddess · 61-69, M

This comment has received a Note or Correction by the SimilarWorlds staff.

1) We understand and agree with the OP's sentiment (updated the note to better reflect this).

Our note doesn't contradict the OP's views, it simply explains the reason why content in SW's feeds are the way they are, at this time (by default, little relevance/similar interests).

2) Most users tend to interpret SW Staff's actions and intentions from a negative point of view (similar to this, and other comments), so there is little benefit in constantly attempting to have direct dialog with users (which we have courteously tried to do for the past 6 years).
We eventually came to understand why most companies/platforms avoid the same.

3) There were hundreds of thousands of groups imported from EP, most of which were redundant/duplicated topics. This fragmented mutual interests, and the concept serving content based on group interests would be meaningless.

It wasn't feasible to allow the creation of additional new groups, before we consolidated the excess abundance of old ones, which we eventually did.
We have explained this already, numerous times.

Similarly related Forums and User-created Groups now have associations between them, which helps to connect interests/relevance, so that we can serve content that may be interesting to users, even if they haven't subscribed to that particular group.

4) We don't have any opposition to having Closed Groups, however, we are unsure of the demand for this feature at this time, and it unlikely solves the most common complaint, about their not being enough new posts in feeds.
If anything, it likely makes this situation worse, with more users spending their posting and commenting activities in private, which leads other users to complain further about the site being "dead" or slow.

5) We are constantly tackling new and past development requests by users, and have so far accomplished the majority of feature requests that have been made over the past 6 years. Yet with each new release/completion of past requests, we continue to get the same amount, if not more, complaints from users, that we are doing nothing for the site.

(Some features like "SW Games" we still have planned, but are immensely large projects, with new game development staff involved).

Replying to the "edit" from SW staff:

First of all, SW staff, if you have a comment, put it as a comment; don't invade someone's post like this!

On the substance of the comment: I appreciate your efforts but this is a little self-serving and takes the approach of "blaming the customer." The groups on EP were meaningful, at least to the people who set them up. SW early on removed the capacity to create groups, and has changed the way we post so that you cannot simply post in a group anymore. As a result the remnant of the "groups" system is practically meaningless now. So how is one supposed to connect with likeminded people or those who share similar experiences? Only by looking at all the posts, randomly, and finding the right people by chance.

I've suggested before that there should be "closed" groups like on Facebook, which a person would have to ask to join. That would give joining the group some meaning and bring together people who really care about whatever the purpose of the group is. I understand that this may be technically complicated, but SW has added various bells and whistles; why not put the effort into this?

This message was deleted by its author.

RedBaron · M

@ServantOfTheGoddess Don’t be so sensitive. None of our posts are sacrosanct.

helenS · 36-40, F

@ServantOfTheGoddess This is a comment on the green text box written by the admins. I've been a member since April 2016, I appreciate your efforts, and I like the site very much. In fact it's the only "social" site which I'm active on.
The [u]only[/u] thing I would like to see re-appear would be a feed of [u]all incoming posts[/u], just sorted by time (most recent post on top of feed). You know that many hard-core users want exactly the same. And I do not understand why you don't make it an option for us. Thank you. 🌷

ServantOfTheGoddess · 61-69, M

@RedBaron they're not?? 😲

RedBaron · M

@ServantOfTheGoddess Mine most certainly aren’t.

bookerdana · M

@helenS same

SW-User

@helenS Do you remember all the complaining about EP when there was an EP? I don't think we would ever be satisfied regardless of how closely or not we got to EP.