Changelog: Take control of your feed with hidden tags

#changelog #meta

Hey DEV Community!

DEV is an excellent place for encountering great content of all kinds: lively discussion posts, in-depth tutorials, engaging personal blogs, library updates, career advice, and a whole lot more.

It's this variety of content that makes DEV great, but it also poses a challenge in how our members can find the content that they want to see. That's why one of our focuses at DEV is to give community members more tools to help them find the content that interests them and help them connect with their community.

One key request from the community was a means of hiding content from their feed that they didn't want to see. Are you a backend developer who doesn't want to see any CSS posts? Well, now you can with our recently shipped hidden tags feature!

You can now set your hidden tags in two places: the tags page and over on your dashboard.

Screenshot of the tags page showing the tag buttons — You can hide tags over on the tags page - use the search to find a specific tag you want to hide

Screenshot of the following tags page on the user dashboard showing the hide option — You can also hide tags over on the "Following tags" section of your dashboard - press the three dots to access the hide option

Articles with tags you've hidden will no longer show up in your Relevant feed, and we're working on rolling out more areas of DEV where we'll hide the articles, too. We'll also be adding the hide button to the individual tag page, making it even easier to hide content you're not interested in.

Hidden tags are now shown on your dashboard, too, and you can access them at any time to unhide them to return articles with those tags to your feed.

A screenshot of the "Hidden tags" section of the dashboard, showing the unhide button on a hidden tag — You can see which tags you've hidden on your dashboard and unhide them

We want DEV (and Forem, the open-source community platform that powers DEV) to be as straightforward as possible for members to configure their profiles to optimize their experience - and that's why we've decided to retire our tag weightings feature to make room for hidden tags. We see hidden tags as a more helpful feature for users to tailor their feed experience, and we will review adding more powerful options to this area in the future.

As always, I'd love to hear any ideas, requests, or feedback you have on hidden tags or anything part of the DEV user experience. Feel free to comment below or email me at philip@forem.com.

A special thanks to @ridhwana and @jaw6 who implemented this feature!