Private pools

The point has been raised multiple times now in the Pointless Pools thread that there's basically no reason for private pools to exist, and with the advent of active and inactive pools to remove the clutter of finished comics and the like from the pool list, I would tend to agree. A quick scan through the first few pages of the pool listing reveals that active pools are generally divided into three categories:

Subjective pools: Examples are pool #1168, pool #109, pool #544. These are pools meant to cater to a particular fetish or characteristic in art. Regardless of your opinion regarding how good the owners of these pools are at maintaining them, it seems pretty clear that a subjective private pool is little better than a pool of someone's favorites, and that any harm that could come from opening them up would be balanced out by the good that would come of dividing the task of finding new images for the pool among the entire user base.

Non-subjective pools: Examples are pool #1338 and pool #280. For want of a better name, these are similar to subjective pools, but without the subjectivity; they have well-defined criteria for post inclusion. There's even less of a reason to make these private than there is for subjective pools; whether a post belongs in such a pool is not a matter of opinion, so allowing any user to add to such a pool could only be a good thing.

Pools for unfinished comics: Examples are pool #878 and pool #698. There's really no reason for any of these to be private; public pools for unfinished comics work just as well and have the benefit of allowing anyone with a minute of free time to hop on Pixiv and post the latest one (pool #714 being the obvious example).

All the arguments I've seen that have been made in favor of private pools amount, basically, to "I don't trust Danbooru's user base to do a good job with this pool." If you feel that way, that's fine, but that's really a personal problem, one that you can get around by subscribing to someone's favorites or similar measures.

You can technically use private pools as a more structured way of favoriting, although the UI for this is clumsy. I've been thinking about removing this public option for Danbooru2.

Private pools for favorites isn't a bad idea, but we haven't been condoning that use since it clutters the pool list. Most of the pools deleted in the "useless pools" thread have been personal favorite pools.

I think the idea has been floated before to allow each user a limited number of personal private hidden pools for favorites. It might not be a bad idea, though I'm not sure what the overhead of that sort of usage would be.

I think it would be worthwhile to allow people to construct some number (5? 10?) of "personal" pools that can serve as a way of structuring your favorites in a more useful way.

The only reason I can think of for private pools is for a completed series of posts. There's nothing more to contribute, so might as well lock them. Exceptions can be dealt with through PMs.

Like Log was saying, in other words.

Log said:
There is no point in having a pool be public that is just a doujin or something like pool #707 where one person posted the entire series or actively watched for new posts in the series. An active public pool shows up on everyone's dropdown, an active private pool only shows up on the person who created it's dropdown.