Remove a follower

Feature Requests
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71

Perhaps to keep track of where everyone stands on this issue how about we take a vote.

  • For Removing Followers
  • Against Removing Followers
  • Indifferent About Removing Followers

0 voters

72

Option 4 - it should be a personal setting.

1 Like
73

Right! Thanks for the reminder!

2 Likes
74
  • Should Be A Personal Setting

0 voters

1 Like
75

Followers or following can be a useful way to find a pool of taxon specialists. Marine life for example, when the same names come up.

76

I agree. I follow people for a chance to learn.

77

I’ve been thinking about closing the polls. The reasoning being is that I don’t want the poll to get lost in all the comments. However, I’m going to create a new topic that will be linked to this topic. Before I do I need to know if I need to include any other choices aside from what I’ve added already.

78

@BlueDragonSlug I’m afraid the brief phrases used for your poll (above) are a little too brief. Because of the complex nuances added in this array of comments, I’m not sure what I would be voting on. Would it be possible to rewrite those choices in longer phrases or complete sentences?

2 Likes
79

Sure! What would you have in mind?

80

I’ll leave it to your discretion.

81

Perhaps have the choices include a brief description as to the reasoning behind the different choices?

82

I brought this request up with our team yesterday. Some sort of follow request functionality (ie a setting that means someone has make a request to follow you) is off the table, but functionality to remove a follower is a possibility.

First I want to clear up what “following” means, as there seems to be some confusion.

If I follow user X, here’s what that does:

  • user X’s new observations and new journal posts show up on my website dashboard and in my daily email updates.
  • my username appears on user X’s list of followers.
  • user X’s username appears on the list of accounts I follow.

Following does not affect whether I can search for user X’s observations, and it does not affect my ability to interact with user X.

If user X blocks me, that removes me as one of their followers and negates everything in the list above, in addition to preventing me from interacting with them on iNat.

So far, the arguments I see for follower removal functionality (outside of blocking) are:

  • I want some control over my followers list, for either my own sense of order or because I don’t want to be associated with certain accounts.
  • someone I don’t like or who makes me feel uncomfortable is following me. I don’t want my observation activity sent to them, and blocking may escalate the situation.
  • similar functionality exists on other sites, such as Twitter and Instagram.
  • Following is fairly meaningless so why should I have a list of followers displayed somewhere

Did I miss anything? Does anyone else have anything to add?

9 Likes
83

OP noted that they’d like the option to prevent followers entirely;

This could be functionally accomplished by removing any followers individually, but it is a little bit different. I think there’s a benefit to this in that it would be clear to any person trying to follow that the user’s choice to block that person following them isn’t anything personal, just a wish to not be followed at all.

1 Like
84

If person A can’t be a follower of person B, person A can still make a collection project to collect person B’s observations, so wouldn’t the way projects work also need to be modified? (I have done this myself at times in the past for the purpose of having the equivalent of following someone without having to receive all the notifications.)

2 Likes