# What makes you visit a topic?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-makes-you-visit-a-topic/332639>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Tags:** ai, ai-summarize\
**Created:** [October 24, 2024, 5:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-makes-you-visit-a-topic/332639 "2024-10-24T17:44:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![simon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/simon/32/339122_2.png) [@simon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/simon)\
**Post date:** [October 24, 2024, 7:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-makes-you-visit-a-topic/332639/3 "2024-10-24T19:41:48Z")

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Possibly stating the obvious, but I’m _not_ looking through the topic list when I’m looking for the answer to a question. In that case, I’m either using Discourse search, or my browser’s search.

Apparently a question mark in the title will get me to click on a topic 🙂

In general, I’m looking for either questions I can answer, or topics I’m interested in reading about. Essentially, I’m trying to summarize the topic based on its title.

On Meta, there’s usually enough information in the title for me to make a decision about what to click on. That’s because the titles are clear, and I’ve got a fairly deep knowledge of the subject.

Taking another forum as an example, titles like “Issue with assignment 2” don’t give a lot to go by. AI generated summaries would be useful for cases like that. I’m actually on a forum now where I’m interested in the subject, but find the latest topics page completely uninteresting. There’s not enough information to grab onto.

On forums that I visit regularly, I rarely skim past the “last visit”. On forums that I don’t visit regularly, I rarely skim past the first page of results.

I always use the latest view, either for the forum as a whole, or category latest views for forums where I’m only interested in specific categories. Hot/top feel a bit like hype to me. Unseen feels overly complicated. I think that’s a separate topic though.

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