tl;dr If you want to skip the wall of text, please just tell me in the comments whether you want to keep the existing functionality of the Hide read action or if you prefer to change it to a toggle or something else entirely.
The Hide read action in the app hides all read posts. Behind the scenes, it also "flips a switch" so that any read posts loaded into the feed are filtered and hidden as well.
It makes the action sort of weird because it is both an action and a toggle built into the same button.
The purpose of the button is it guarantees that the user will only see posts they have not seen before. It's an extremely valuable feature and one that I use in almost every session.
Historically, the action works like this because back when the feature was first added, I asked the community for feedback about what the button should so and this is what we decided on.
In the past year or so, I have gotten more feedback about the button with many users asking if we can change the button to a toggle or something else.
So I decided to survey the users again to see if we can get to a common ground. If we cannot agree on one behavior I can also add a setting.
There are two options that I think would make the most sense:
- Keep the existing behavior and make no changes to Hide read.
- Turn Hide read into a toggle (eg. a switch).
To highlight the difference in behavior between option (1) and (2), with option (1) after you tap Hide read, if you refresh the feed, the app will revert back to showing everything. With option (2), after you flip the switch, your feed will refresh but will continue to only show unread posts.
Of course if you want to propose a completely different behavior from the 2, feel free to do so as well.
This was actually on my list of feature requests! The current functionality is a bit confusing; thanks for the clarifications.
I think I would get the most utility out of option 2 (the toggle), but why not keep both behaviours, and give them different names?
Thunder has a button named "Dismiss Read" which acts like option 1, resetting on feed refresh.
The one thing I DO NOT want this feature to do is hide the posts using the "Hide Post" function in Lemmy's API, as that is tedious to undo. To make it clear that these are independent, could another word such as "suppress", "mask", or "filter" be used for the toggle in place of "hide" for option 2?
I'm thinking of possibly making it a combo button. Eg. The left side is a button but the right side is a switch. That way users can perform either option. Alternative, I can add a setting to change the behavior so it be either a switch or button.
Combo button sounds very good to me.
I'm with you 100%. Personally I think I even have enough use cases for both depending on mood or the day that I could see myself using both the current behaviour and the toggle behaviour.