Keeping track of new comments in posts
One thing that still seems missing is the ability to easily see what's new in my communities since the last time I was on the My Communities page.
When a user goes to the My Communities page, they see a list of posts from communities they have joined. If I am not mistaken, I think how it works is that if there is a new comment on a given post, then that post gets bumped to the top of the My Communities page. However, the problem is: how does a user know whether there are any new comments on any given post since the last time they checked out that post?
It seems that the issue is somewhat more complicated on Steem than on other social media or forum platforms because the posts on Steem frontends are usually ordered by their upvote rewards, so there isn't a sequence of posts neatly ordered by timeline.
So what do you think? What could be done to help a user easily see what new comments were added since the last time the user was on Steem?
RE: ORDERING
The community could make a json metadata setting telling front ends (like steempeak) what they'd like the default order of posts to be in a community and then what they'd prefer the default order of comments inside posts to be.
Obviously a user can make a decision to change or make their own default decision if that is a requested feature.
Would you guys be on board for that? @imwatsi @borislavzlatanov
RE: Notifications
Reading your conversations below (a bit late to the conversation)
Do you really want notifications when there are new comments in a community?
I'd be annoyed by that... i'm more about new POSTS in a community.
If i like the particular post I'd maybe be willing to get notifications on that but this seems technically way more complicated. Also when the comment is in response directly to your own comment then we already have a good notification system for that.
cc @asgarth
Thanks for chiming in. Yeah, what you said about ordering sounds pretty good to me.
Regarding new comments, maybe it wasn't clear from the exchange I had with @imwatsi. I was suggesting that we NOT have notifications for new comments, except if a user subscribes to the post. I was further suggesting that it would be very helpful if the user's feed somehow shows that there has been new activity in a given post. An example use case is: I open a post, read it, find it interesting (but don't want to subscribe to it as it's a hassle to click to subscribe on each post I'm interested in, and I don't want a lot of irrelevant notifications), then on the next day there have been more comments on it and I have a way to visually tell, as I'm scrolling through my feed, that there have been X new comments on this post since last time I opened it.
This is similar to scrolling through my feed in Facebook and being shown new comments under posts in a group that I'm subscribed to.
Does this make sense to you?
I think the idea of having a way to keep track of new comments is good. It's a cool way to keep track of active discussions. It's also on the same line of thought as keeping track of new posts in a community, so the two can share an implementation base.
I'll definitely consider this when I get to work on these features.
Another factor that will need to considered is avoiding noise from this feature, by making the feature "optional." I mean, you won't get notified about replies to posts unless you check a button that says "Follow this conversation" to follow that particular post.
Thanks for the feedback, I've added it to my notes :)
Great, thanks!
About notifications, yes, certainly it makes sense for a notification about new comments to be shown under your Notifications only for posts that you explicitly follow. If notifications are shown for new comments on all posts that you have simply opened (but not followed), then the notifications become quite noisy.
For posts not explicitly followed: I think there would be a lot of posts (ongoing discussions) that a person is interested in. It won't be just a few. So it becomes a hassle and cumbersome to have to click "Follow this conversation" on every post I'm interested in. Much easier would be if I have a visual way of knowing how many comments are new since the last time I opened the post. Then it's not creating noise for me (this info is not in my notifications). I can decide whether I am still interested and whether I want to go inside the post and see the new comments.
So I guess that gives me more choice because there is two different levels of interest: posts that are explicitly followed and posts that are only opened. For the first, I get a notification under my Notifications. For the latter, I only get a simple visual indication of how many new comments there are since the last time I opened the post.
Or something along those lines. Let me know what you think. Maybe there are even better ways of handling this. Would be cool to get more perspective from more people before any work is started.
One approach I was thinking of is if the post on the My Communities page has some way of showing how many new comments there are since you last viewed the post. And when you click on that thing that shows the new comments, it takes you to the first new comment on the post. The comment is somehow highlighted as new. And all the other new comments are highlighted as new (wherever they happen to be at the time you are viewing the post).
Thoughts?
Yes, and it could be as simple as a blue dot, on posts you "follow" that have new comments. Hivemind will keep track of the last time you viewed that post and if new comments have been made, and then serve this info to the front-end.
This also means that whenever you view a post that you "follow", a
custom_jsonop will need to be broadcast to the blockchain recording what time you did, and that has implications worth thinking about as well.The highlighting part, automatic scrolling, etc, are up to the front-end devs to get creative with and implement.