More interests without slowing the system.

[dangelos_song]

Title
More interests without slowing the system.

Short, concise description of the idea
Get rid of the 150 interests limit without straining the system.

Full description of the ideaMy suggestion is to allow all users as many interests as they want under the following condition: after 150 interests all interests would automatically become unclickable

Comments

[lady_angelina]

No. This sounds impractical, and anonymity through obscurity doesn't usually work very well. Besides, making the interests unclickable will just make it only slightly less convenient for someone to search for people via interests. All they'd have to do is use the Directory Search and plug in the interest there, and it will still display a list of people sharing that interest. And that's not even counting the possibility of doing a Google search (if the users in question haven't selected the option to minimize inclusion in search engine results).

And just because one person's interests aren't clickable due to having more than 150 of them, it wouldn't keep it from being clickable on someone else's interest list if they have 150 or fewer, and the person with the > 150 interests who did so because they wanted to be unsearchable that way, would still show up on the interests results.

I also don't agree with removing the limit entirely, but I do think it would be nice to be able to list more interests... say 200 instead of 150 as a

[charliemc]

This.

I don't think an increase to 200 is unreasonable (I've wanted it for years). And as many people don't use it at all...

But as others have said, if we want a mere list of other interests, we can add that ourselves without it being 'clickable.'

[lady_angelina]

Ahhh, yes, that's right, I'd forgotten about just listing them in the Bio, which would definitely render them unclickable, AND there'd be no limit (except for the overall 65,535 character limit on the Bio). ;)

[silverflight8]

You could just put the interest in your bio, if searching/linking doesn't matter.

ETA: also with regards to the privacy concern, I really don't think that the unlinkable thing would work; even having the text on your profile is sufficient to bring the account up on a search engine like Google.

[azurelunatic]

I could see the use-case for un-indexed interests. I would probably use them myself

[boredinsomniac]

You can get the same result - communicate more of your interests, without search - by putting your interests in your bio. I don't think it's the best use of developer time to create a new way of doing the same thing.

[andy]

I can see this idea working, but we'll have to deal with user confusion about it, the demand for having more than 150 interests is low, and there is an easy workaround, so probably it's just not worth the development effort.