Hey everyone,
This is one of those updates where the feature itself is useful, but the story behind it is slightly ridiculous.
The Post Curation Tool in HiveTools now has a language filter.
That means you can take the existing curation filters, author, tags, title, community, source app, word count, read time, and now narrow the results by detected post language.
Want to find Korean posts from the last week?
Pick Korean from the dropdown.
Want to look for Spanish photography posts, Japanese art posts, or English long-form posts from a specific community?
Same tool. Same search flow. One more filter.
The Funny Part
The funny part is that the backend data for this has been there for months.
The block indexing script that feeds the database has been detecting language since last Halloween.
Last Halloween.
As in, pumpkins, candy, costumes, the whole thing.
And here we are heading into summer before I finally remembered to expose it in the front end.
That is not an architecture problem.
That is just me being a buffoon.
What Changed
The curation sidebar now includes a Language dropdown.
Right now it supports the languages I wanted available directly in the UI:
- English
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Portuguese
- Italian
- Korean
- Japanese
- Chinese
When you choose one, the Post Curation Tool adds that language to the database query and only returns matching posts from the recent indexed set.
The results also show the detected language code on the post cards, so you can see what the system matched.
For example, filtering by Korean gives me a clean list of posts marked KO, instead of making me brute-force it by tag, community, or guesswork.
That is the whole point of this tool: less guessing, more useful discovery.
How The Language Data Gets There
HiveTools is not asking Hive posts to self-identify their language.
The database is fed by my block-processing script, which runs on a schedule and stores useful post metadata locally.
As it processes top-level posts, it pulls the body text, strips out the obvious noise, Markdown, HTML, links, code blocks, mentions, hashtags, and similar clutter, then runs language detection on the remaining plain text.
For that detection step I am using lingua-language-detector.
The script stores:
- the detected language code
- the confidence value when available
- the top confidence candidates when available
The curation tool itself mostly cares about the language code. If the detector says a post is Korean, that post gets stored with lang: "ko", and the front end can now query against it.
Short posts and posts without enough usable text can still end up as unknown or undetected, which is fine. I would rather avoid pretending a tiny bit of text is more certain than it is.
Why This Matters For Curation
Hive is not an English-only chain.
That is obvious if you spend any real time looking around, but a lot of discovery tools still make non-English curation more awkward than it needs to be.
Tags help, but tags are inconsistent.
Communities help, but communities are not always language-specific.
Apps help, but apps do not tell you what language the author wrote in.
Language filtering gives curators another clean dimension to search by.
You can combine it with the rest of the tool:
- Korean posts in the last week
- Spanish posts with photography tags
- Portuguese posts over 500 words
- Japanese posts in a specific community
- English posts excluding a noisy author or tag
That makes the Post Curation Tool better at what I actually built it for: finding posts worth looking at without having to manually dig through the whole firehose.
The Short Version
HiveTools now has language filtering in the Post Curation Tool.
The backend has apparently had the data since Halloween.
I forgot to add the front-end control until now.
So the good news is: the feature works.
The bad news is: I had the ingredients sitting in the fridge for months and only just remembered to cook dinner.
EDIT: I have a really, really bad habit of forgetting to share the tool: https://tools.crypto-dreamr.com/pct
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM