A new feature you’ll see deployed today is the replacement of the hide button with a new mark as drop down. By clicking this, you can not only hide the story (by selecting not interesting), but get rid of stories you see that are spam, duplicates, and more.

This works with our editing functionality, so that if more than one user marks a story, we can quickly clean up and fix these posts. All with your help!

I wanted to provide some advice for users submitting stories to Thoof. Following these tips will help Thoof be more useful to our readers, and help your stories get higher ThoofRanks (and therefore more visitors).

When you choose a story title and summary, in effect you are speaking with the “voice of Thoof”. Our goal is that Thoof’s voice will be impartial and unbiased. This means that even if you are linking to something you have written yourself, you should write your story’s title and summary from the perspective of an impartial third party.

If the story expresses a particular opinion or point of view, then the title and/or summary should make this clear, along with relevant information about the author.

The purpose of the title and story summary should not be to persuade the user to read the story, rather it is to describe the linked story such that the user can make up their own mind. Stories which are excessively promotional in nature may be marked with the “spam” tag, which will remove them from the front page.

Tagging is especially important, as this is one of the ways Thoof uses to decide which stories will be of interest to particular users. More tags is generally better provided that they are relevant. They should range from general tags, such as “science” or “politics”, to very specific tags, such as the names of individual people or companies.

If you follow these guidelines, you will help to make Thoof a better place for all involved.

- Ian

Also new today, you’ll notice that the submitter and source of a post is now a link. Like tags, you can click on them to see other posts by the same submitter or from the same source. Enjoy!

… and how not to.

The web has long been seen as a tool for finding and reading information. As a tool, readers have been asked to learn the tool, and how to best use the tool to get what they want. Search engines like Google are an excellent example, where you learn how to use search terms to get the information you’re looking for.

Thoof turns this on its head. When we designed Thoof, we wanted to make it a tool alright, but a simpler tool that does what you want implicitly. Strangely, this may take some getting use to, as sites like Digg require you to rate stories (digg/bury, +/-, etc) to hopefully get what you want, you may find yourself wanting to do the same on Thoof. You may be looking for the buttons and knobs to affect your experience. This may require some unlearning, but in the end reading Thoof should be a pleasant, leisurely pursuit.

Without further ado, how to read Thoof:

1. Like a newspaper, just read, top to bottom. What Thoof thinks will most likely interest you is at the top, and less interesting at the bottom. Thoof always searches all of its stories for interesting ones. You will never ‘miss out’ on a story like you will on a site where posts change hour by hour. Stories are only taken away from you after you’ve already seen them.
2. If something is interesting, click it! This is the positive reinforcement. Don’t click to try and steer Thoof though, if the story really is interesting, and you really want to read it, read it. Thoof’s statistics are set up to predict what you want to read, not what topics you like necessarily.
3. If you think a story is uninteresting, don’t click it. Merely ignoring the story is negative reinforcement, and matters almost as much as reading stories.
4. If you click a story that turned out to be ‘bad’ in some way… poorly written, about a different topic, etc, use the “Not Interesting” button to tell Thoof this wasn’t worth your time. If you have some time, consider improving the story, adding relevant tags, or improving the summary.
5. As Ian mentioned in the last post, you can Search for more topics that interest you. Click a tag to see more of that tag, or search for key words.
6. Finally, send stuff you like to others. Not only will this let them see cool stuff you just read, but it’s also a hint to Thoof that your friend may like similar things as you.

That’s it! As you read, Thoof will digest more and more about what you like and dislike, and make better and better choices for you in the future. And it’ll do this best if you just read what you enjoy and skip what you don’t.