TL;DR
In a rush? This article two sentences: Set a higher value on your tags weighting so they appear higher up your home feed.
Add a negative value to a tag weighting to suppress that tag and make it appear lower down your home feed.
Intro
Maybe you are new to dev.to, maybe you have been here a while, but one thing is for sure you will probably spend most of your time looking at your home feed for new and interesting articles to read.
But do you find yourself getting loads of random things that aren't relevant to your interests on your dev.to feed? We can fix this with tag weightings and in-particular "anti-follow" weightings.
Tag weightings
If you are on a PC viewing dev.to you will see the main navigation on the left.
Below that are the tags you follow.
You will notice next to the title "My Tags" there is an icon that looks a little bit like a nut (as in nut and bolt).
Clicking on that will take you to the "Following Tags" page.
Adjusting your weightings
Now this is really straight forward.
If you want a particular subject to appear more often in your feed just increase the number in the input under that tag.
Obviously if you give a tag a higher number than another tag it has a higher priority.
I am sure you are already aware of this, but there is something most people aren't aware of.
Anti-follow
Yet again really straight forward but maybe not immediately obvious.
Lets say you are like me and want to have accessibility (a11y) have a high priority. But you have been in the accessibility game for years so the last thing you need are a load of "beginner" posts cluttering up your feed and telling you the same information you have seen before.
You can set an "anti-follow" on the "beginner" tag in this instance. That way anything with the "beginner" tag will get less priority in your feed.
To set this all you need to do is set a negative number of the weighting for a tag.
Step 1
So although it seems a little counter intuitive you first head to the tags page and follow a tag you want to suppress ("beginner")
Step 2
Now just head to your followed tags via the URL or using the nut icon discussed earlier.
Locate your newly followed tag (which will have a weighting of 1 initially) and then simply set a negative number.
Finally click "Update Weights" button below all of your tags.
All Done!
Once you press "Update Weights" you will see the page reload and the tag(s) you gave a negative value to will now have the "anti-follow" badge attached.
Now go back to your home page and notice that items you aren't interested in are lower down your feed!
Conclusion
Just a super simple trick to help you get the articles you want to see in your feed (or more accurately supress topics you don't want to see).
Using tag weightings and "anti-follow" weightings for tags on dev.to helps make your home feed even better, start using them today!
Let me know if you find this useful or if you already knew this and have managed to fine tune your home feed to perfection!
Top comments (17)
Go on, be honest, how many of you actually knew about the "anti-follow" bit. Maybe it is obvious (maybe it is even explained when you sign up....I am terrible at following onboarding stuff!) but I only stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago!
Now if they just introduced an "anti-listicles" feature, I would have the perfect home feed! π
I knew - ish.
Last I'd heard, you couldn't set a negative value because the search query didn't work that way, but you could set a low (0.001) value and follow pretty much every other tag.
This seems like a good change, though making it controlled by a "see less of this tag" or even a "mute" button would be good progress.
Not a bad idea of βsee lessβ, although being developers weightings work, perhaps as forem evolves they will change it to a scale of 1-5 and introduce your "see less" idea to make things less techy as different communities start using FOREM!
I knew π
Hehe I did wonder if anyone heavily involved in DEV would not know about it π, kind of wanted Ben to turn up and go "when the hell did we add this?" π€£
If I remember correctly it was Ben that added the feature π .
That doesn't necessarily mean he remembers doing it!
I have loads of older projects where I go "this would be a good idea", go look at implementing it and I already added it 3 years ago π€£
I did not know this. Thank you :)
Not a problem at all, glad it isn't just me! :-)
wait, there is a home feed?? since when? π¨
I thought the home page was: dev.to/t/css/. Now I see strange articles about strange things. What the hell people are doing!!π±
Oh I am so thoughtless, I always forget to protect you from the scary world of "not CSS" and warn you!
To ensure you don't accidentally see something that isn't CSS I would suggest you follow every tag on the site, set CSS to +50 and set everything else to -50.
Then even if you accidentally hit the home feed you will be safe. ππ€£
There are only 1 or 2 tags that aren't CSS anyway, right?
1 or 2? TWO?? Don't scare Temani with such exaggerations!
There is only one tag that isn't CSS and it can't hurt you, it's ok! π€£
There is the HTML that is supposed to work with CSS (even if I don't see why .. CSS is enough) I am ok with it but I am discovering the others ... I will sugget to DEV to make all of them synonym of "other" or "non-css".
haha I can just see that, tags are "CSS" or "not CSS" - those are the only tags that matter. Perhaps we could add a third "evil" tag for SVG just to make sure you don't accidentally stumble across an article on SVG π
I knew about it for having reading it here
Changelog: Adjust the weights of tags you follow
Ben Halpern for The DEV Team γ» Nov 30 '18 γ» 2 min read
But even then it was really worth repeating because I didn't act on this article at that time. My timeline was ok-ish, now it's flooded with annoying articles on "42 THINGS EVERY REAL DEVELOPER MUST DO" and I hope my feed willl contain less of those now that I've unfollowed tags like #productivity
What you don't like listicles? they are awesome ππ€£π€£
Great job tracking the announcement down! I would imagine most people aren't aware as it was 2018 and DEV has grown an awful lot since then!
Plus it doesn't mention "anti follow" so I am guessing that is newer?