dragonlady7

 I was just looking through my old access filters on here. I had to delete them all, because none of them contained anyone who still follows me, but one of them was called "no comms" and IIRC, I used it to load my subscription page without any communities in it. I can't think why I would have made such a filter, otherwise. But those filters didn't show up when I went to load my reading page anymore, so it seems reasonable to me that they used to conflate subscription and access filters, back in '09 when I set up here, and that functionality has since been split. 
(When you are loading your reading page, up at the top, in the center of the top bar, it says, "You're viewing your Reading page." Then under that it has a link to Manage Circle, and then there's a drop-down menu. If you haven't made any filters, the menu's empty. I have a filter called "Everybody" from which I haven't excluded anyone, but I went in and picked out a few tags from some frequent posters who talk a lot about shows I don't watch, including a community that's running a fic challenge in a pairing I'm not interested in, and so I selected that and clicked "view" and there it is, my reading page has less stuff I don't care about on it.)

But I was thinking about this as I lay in bed, and I remember from LJ, really the way people used to handle it on here is that you just put things behind a cut. And so it was no big deal, if you had a person you subscribed to who talked a lot about a topic you didn't like much, to leave them a comment and be like "hey, if it's no trouble, can you put your updates about your distressing medical condition behind a cut tag?" And then the person would be like, "Oh, I'll try to remember to do that!" and you'd be like "cool!" and then-- I'm not an expert on triggers but I'm definitely an expert in being mildly distressed by things on the Internet-- a lot of times, you'd see the cut tag and be like, you know what, I can handle this today, for my friend who cares about me, and on good days you'd click the little expand button and read it and on bad days you wouldn't, and that was that. 
Here's an example:
( cut for discussion of cat hair )And then you can end the cut and come back to the entry and keep talking. The bit behind the cut can be one sentence, two words, a thousand words, whatever. Sometimes a whole entry can be behind the cut. I have sorely, sorely missed that ability. It's just so easy to use it like a parenthetical aside that you know only the motivated will read. as a frequent chatterbox, I wish I could do it out loud sometimes.
Oh I've just discovered how to use the rich text entry field to do this. I am so ridiculously whatever I am that in LJ days I refused their glitchy rich text editor and hand-coded all of it, but it turns out it's pretty great now. The cut tag is the one that has three little black lines with a wavy gray line underneath. I don't know about free users but for me it's the twelfth icon in from the right. 
(Did you ever wonder why Fandom Olds sometimes typed out angle brackets around things? It's because we learned to do it in LJ and in bulletin boards. Many of them didn't support rich text editors, or if they did they came out funny most of the time. Some of my very early fic drafts, I typed <i>i in angle brackets</i> every time I wanted to emphasize a word (and in the midst of this, they came out with the new spec and it was supposed to be <em> and i never updated</em>. And some of my early Tolkienfic, I hard-coded special characters into people's names, so I genuinely got in the habit of typing &Eacuteomer as a character name. So like. Anyway. Honestly it's faster if you're in the flow of it, but. We'll see if I can kick the Rich Text habit now that I'm on it.)

My offer still stands, though, if anyone needs paid time. It's just-- you'll have to ask people to use a tag, and then hope they're consistent with the tag, and Tumblr vets probably will be, but some of us really old LJers might not because listen, they didn't invent tags until some of us had been on there six or seven or more years, and some of us clearly never got the hang of them. But boy were we fluent in please cut for TMI thanks.