The Lists section of the site is bloated with many lists that it seems were intended for personal use only (titled things like “TBR” and “wishlist” and “owned”), but that the users making them just didn’t bother changing the default visibility option for when creating them. Making the default visibility option “Private” or “Semi-private” instead of “Public” would require users to consciously choose whether to publish their lists to the main Lists page for the benefit of other users, instead of publically displaying personal lists by accident, which would hopefully reduce noise in and increase the overall quality of the list selection on that page for people browsing.
Maybe this is partly a naming thing? I haven’t created any lists myself, but if I did I would happily mark them “public” in the same way I mark my overall profile “public”. To me that’s different from “this is a neatly curated and well described list that has wide utility and is worth featuring on the Lists page”: it just means I have no issues with other users looking at it if they want to.
I think you might be right.
Probably people confuse the lists with lists for their own, when they can accomplish that with tags from their own library.
Maybe renaming lists to collections or something like that?
Maybe @brandon or someone from the team might want to chip-in.
Anyway, put the request for review.
Maybe instead of the privacy options, it could have a setting to “Publish” the list.
The use of “Public” for both “people can openly see the activity on my account” and “publish to a publically browsable page of curated lists” may be part of the confusion, yeah. But the list privacy options already explain that “Public” lists will be added to “public browse”, so I’m not sure how else to change the options to be clearly different from the account settings 
I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue for people to use the list feature for the same thing they can use library tags for, because lists allow you to add easily-visible descriptions to things and change the order of items unlike a library tag, so I can see why someone would prefer to manage their TBR or whatever that way.
The issue to me is that these kinds of personal lists being published to the public Lists page by default makes that page difficult to navigate and find lists I might be interested in.
I have lists at each privacy level and I really appreciate the option to choose between “Private” & “Semi-Private” in particular, so I wouldn’t want those to be replaced, but “Publish” does make it more clear than “Public” what will happen with the list when it’s saved, and it would be nice if there was some sort of clear delineation in the UI highlighting that your list is going to the public Lists page instead of just being browsable on your profile.
Hmm, these are all reasonable considerations.. making it ‘publish’ might be a bit clearer?
Honestly I’m kind of the opinion that if the issue lies with the user not reading what’s written already, changing the wording to “Publish” isn’t going to help much. I wish we could do an anonymous survey of the owners of low quality lists to hear their reasoning behind things.
I’d wager that vast majority of them haven’t even noticed the different privacy options or bothered to read them even if they did notice, and are just going with the default. I agree that just changing the name into “Publish” wouldn’t change anything, but coupling that with default being private or semi-private could take care of most problems.
Is this already changed? Because when I make a list “semi-private” is pre selected
Edit: Ah, I think it is because my profile is set as semi public?
Some thoughts on the whole design aspect: Besides changing the pre selection I think it would be beneficial for the UX to have this not inside a dropdown (as those are just 3 options) but in a chip (or radio button) so users can realize that there are more options. There is very little incentive to open this dropdown unless you have a clear goal of changing it and I don’t see why a user would even think about this without considering the above problem, for example. If the options are already laid out visually without the hindrance of a click (=opening the dropdown) there is more incentive to read, although it is correct that people read very little on any page.
Ok thanks everyone for your ideas!
I agree with you all that the ‘Publish’ vs ‘Public’ naming probably won’t make much difference. Here’s what I ended up doing.
As you can see, I took @yukitanuki suggestions on radio buttons. I am defaulting to your profile’s privacy but in the case of public profiles, I default you to ‘Profile only’.. what was ‘semi public’ before. I changed to profile only because I thought it was a little more clear. I also added better descriptions underneath the radio options.
Also, if you choose public, I have an additional warning right above the submit button.
Hopefully all these changes make a difference - especially the default to profile only / semi public!
As a side note though, I forgot how sad the create / edit list form is! I will definitely be updating this UI sometime within the next week. That submit button at the bottom of long lists is so sad 
Please let me know your thoughts!
Thanks, I think this refresh looks much clearer in the language it’s using! I think “profile only” especially is a good wording that makes it obvious at a glance where a list will end up and who can see it.
Hopefully it reduces the amount of personal lists inadvertently published to the main list page and the new lists section on item pages!
