Re-design of following collections

[Thilo Planz]

Hi,

I think we should take this chance to re-think the following
collections feature.

Right now, you can follow a collection, which automatically adds all
new programmes in that collection (or feed) to your collection.

This leads to huge collections.
It dilutes the quality of collections, and the meaning of the
collection count, because hand-picked collections are lumped in with
these auto-collections. (Huge collections also seem to have become a
performance head-ache)

I propose that we remove the feature to add whole collections
automatically.

There are two other important uses for following collections:

1) Create an aggregated feed out of all the source feeds.

2) The social aspect: Following a feed registers as a vote, you can
see who also follows a collection, and so on

We should have a mechanism for 2. I am thinking that you can follow a
collection, and it would just count that.
It would not add anything to any collection, in fact you do not need
to select a target collection when following.
This works just like "digg"ing a story.
We would need to work out how it differs from the rating feature,
though. Maybe we could combine these two;
no following at all, use the rating data for this : "these users like
this feed (3 stars or more)"

We could also offer a solution for 1, but this is just RSS aggregation
and can be done by other tools,
so I think that is low priority.