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Alex (nytpu) recently wrote a post in favor of commenting systems on Gemini, which is already nicely implemented on his capsule:
I am typically somewhat critical about "gamifications" that stimulate and reinforce impulsive behavior. But I think the case of comment systems on Gemini is a bit different, or at least in the way it is used on capsules like Alex's.
One kind of "speed bump" comment systems have here is that, when you open up your client, you are not notified that so-and-so liked or responded to your comment on someone's gemlog post. Of course, such a thing may be possible, but like Alex suggests in his addendum, that is significantly more involved than appending responses to the bottom of a post. You have to go check to see how the discussion thread progressed since you posted your comment. Well, maybe you could subscribe to every page you comment on...but why???
I share the sentiment that geminispace's slow and quiet atmosphere is part of it's appeal, but I think comments still have a place here. Like Alex mentioned, sometimes reaching out by email or chat can seem too direct or too burdensome just to give your two cents. It can also just be nice to see what other people have said in response to a post. Sure, people may respond publicly, like I am right now, but someone discovering a post long after it was first published is not likely to also discover a response someone else wrote on their own capsule. But like Alex also mentioned, the comment system itself is not an integral function of authoring and publishing a gemlog. If someone invites comments, that's cool. If not, hey we can always do it the old-fashioned way.
But even apart from gemlog responses, commenting systems can be used in many ways. Midnight Pub and Station are good examples. They are designed to be virtual spaces to socialize. There is a lot of fun to be had with that, especially, say, with role-playing. Another great use of comments is in a wiki, like transjovian.org. Maybe oneday someone will build upon that idea to make a very basic git forge for gemini.
And while we're on the topic of commenting/socializing over Gemini, a Gemini frontend to XMPP's pubsub would be so cool :)
m15o wrote a post recently saying that they are mulling over the idea of adding visit counts to smol.pub.
I personally am not a fan of view counts. I kind of like just writing into the void without the expectation of people really reading or caring about what I write. But, other people may find some value in that metric. I would say that making hit counts visible should be optional. It may be nice for some to have, but for others it can be distracting and discouraging. A system like smolpub could make the counts optionally visible to authors themselves within their dashboards with the option of making them visible within their posts somehow.
I guess the only weird thing, like m15o alluded, is that a non-naive implementation would require some kind of tracking, which is not desirable. Maybe there is a *nice* way to do it, I don't know. Anyway, if m15o ends up implementing it, I'm sure it will be well done like the rest of their projects! :)
Okay, back to work!
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CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 mieum(at)rawtext.club
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