• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    Comments: that thing where you upvote what you like and downvote what you dislike, and if you feel strongly, say the same thing 10 other people said in different words. Very important. Very necessary.

    Honestly a sidebar with a chat like IRC, but every message being tagged by which specific article its author is viewing right now, would help the social part more.

    I mean, Telegram’s convenience is a weapon. If you want a good UI for article feeds with comments, it should just copy Telegram. Except for the Russian intelligence services part.

    • other_cat@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      You’re not wrong, but I agree with the person above you. I have an RSS feed but whenever something really stirs my interest I generally want to share it with someone and get their takes on it. Genuine discussion, even if it’s vanishingly rare, is still something I crave.

      • a1studmuffin@aussie.zone
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        2 days ago

        Exactly - comments are what you make of them. In high traffic communities they do indeed degrade into echo chambers as the poster above you suggested, but IMHO that attitude is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I find comments useful to gauge public opinion on current events, or have more nuanced discussion about special interests.

        It’s more an issue of communities than it is comments.

        • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 day ago

          As the poster above, I should clarify that the reason I mentioned Telegram is that there a channel (like a blog) has a representation as a group chat where channel posts, comments to them and simple group chat messages appear.

          And about communities and issues - the problem with comments is that they are local to post. Separation by posts first, then separation by threads, separation by score ranks, separation by depth. That may seem like a nice idea to not see everything. That’s the very problem.

          OK, so the data model wouldn’t have to be changed to make it in good sense like Telegram.

          What you need is ability to have a linear representation, where every message is additionally marked as a comment to some post or as a reply or as a post itself, and might have scores.

          Like old forums usually were, tree representation wasn’t very popular.