OC KES 4.1.0: Improving the signal to noise ratio by blocking unsolicited ads
The blurb below is excerpted verbatim from the release notes. For the full release notes, see here.
Repository: KES
Many of you are aware of the "canned meat" problem on kbin.social, with some magazines being inundanted with garbage posts.
The latest version of KES ships with an experimental new feature you can enable that attemps to filter these posts and block the users who posted them based on certain heuristics.
This feature is experimental, but I see a lot of users voicing frustration at the problem, so now seems like a good time to start collecting feedback. You can start using this feature immediately and it should not have any adverse effects, but its coverage is still being expanded.
You can find it under General > Filter advertisements. For best results, it should be used in conjunction with infinite scrolling enabled in the kbin sidebar, so that new content is loaded in as posts are removed.
As you navigate through a magazine, KES will remove offending posts from the index and then permanently block the user of the post. This feature is also preventive, as variations of posts made under different usernames will continue to be flagged. The goal is to avoid the tedious process of "whack-a-mole" and cull these posts without manual intervention.
Initially, KES will be removing posts from the index, but as it builds your blocklist up for you, such posts will stop appearing in the thread index altogether, and you should see the overall signal to noise ratio improving. Outside of your blocklist, subsequent posts that meet certain criteria will continue to be culled regardless or when or where they appear.
I am currently using /m/science and /m/opensource as a control. If you navigate to those magazines and compare the results before and after enabling this feature, the difference should be clear. After enabling the feature and scrolling all the way back to 2023, there should be few if any unsolicited ads on the page.
Hopefully this improves readability and encourages participation in communities that otherwise seemed impenetrable at first glance. In fact, once you scrub the garbage posts, you'll be surprised to find that there are legitimate posts being made fairly frequently in these seemingly "dead" communities--the posts were just buried in the heap.
However, canned meat comes in a lot of different flavors, and each magazine has slightly different permutations. The coverage in this initial version is not exhaustive, but it attempts to be thorough. This should greatly cut down on the most annoying ads. If there are specific (most likely unmoderated) magazines you are still having a problem with, please leave a comment listing the magazine. You don't need to point to specific posts or users; the magazine name is enough here for me to analyze what kinds of posts are appearing.
Some additional notes:
- For the time being, this feature does not report the post to the magazine's moderator (usually nonexistent). By kbin's design, a post can only be reported at most by a single user, so this seemed like a reduplication of efforts to me. But auto-report can be added if necessary.
- This feature works on any instance, but is chiefly designed for kbin.social and is probably unnecessary elsewhere.
- I have not taken a look at microblogs yet, so I don't know if this problem is happening there, too (please let me know). For now, this works on the thread index of magazines.
- For best results (if you want to quickly bootstrap your blocklist), I suggest enabling the feature and scrolling through an affected magazine for awhile with infinite scroll on to build up the blocklist as new posts load in, then refreshing the page if necessary.
- The "random threads" sidebar is fundamentally flawed because it shows content even if you've already blocked it. So I recommend enabling
General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threadsin conjunction with this feature.
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