Wouldn't it be great to have feature to mark a rant as "read" and then a settings filter which says hide read rants on refresh?

One doesnt really want to unwillingly upvote/downvote rants to keep a track of read ones.

We already have that if you're using algo feed.

Algo doesn't show you rants you've already seen, and no need to manually mark them as read either!

@dfox, my point was if I could mark them manually and filter out read ones on other filters like top rants, that would be great too.
Also with algo one, sometimes I may just miss out rants without even actually reading them (just because they were loaded and a refresh happened)

Today I was just scrolling down top rants and kept stumbling on stuff I have read in different filters and that's where I felt a need for this

@MohitC yeah, I see what you're saying, it could be a nice feature to include (though I think it would be used fairly infrequently.)

Also, if there's ever something you really don't want to see anymore, you can just downvote it with reason "not for me." The author is never penalized for that vote reason and that's pretty much what it's for - marking content you don't really like.

As for algo, it's more complicated than just marking them as read when they show up. For a rant to be marked as read, it either has to be opened explicitly, scrolled past (meaning you scroll past it to next batch), or refreshed a number of times.

@dfox,
Oh, thank God for you for mentioning these bunch of things. When I realized this is going to be new home, I tried hard to find a FAQ which will tell me if author is actually penalized a -1 rep for downvote, but we clearly don't have a FAQ. (Might be going out of my way to say this but I can volunteer to write one :D, but you might be best person to do so)

Also if author is not penalized then why do I see a reduced count on total reps on post after marking as not for me? That's indirectly a penalty to author for total display count.

Also thank you for detailed explanation on algo filter.

@MohitC good point on the faq, we should add some info about that.

The -1 is only UI and shown when you hit the button. If you exit out of the rant you'll see that the score is the same when you come back, but the -- is still recorded.

@dfox,

Then you probably want to re-think about changing this thing where momentarily a count-1 is shown to user downvoting. You can just keep display count same and user can be sure that nothing bad happened.

Think from a new user's perspective. I (as a nice person I am) didn't use "not for me" downvoting so far only because I didn't want them to have -1 rep.
But now all that you've cleared up, it suffices my needs for marking read thing. This discussion calls for a need of Faq, absolutely :)