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Discussions Cohost Cohost Feature Requests

"Lock replies" to control unwelcome replies

Currently, one can hide comments that are unwanted, but there's no ability to do this for unwanted shares or replies. Blocking a user who makes an unwelcome reply prevents further interaction, but doesn't hide the reply; this is somewhat expected, due to a reply's characteristic of being a freestanding post instead of being subordinate to someone else's post.  


Unfortunately, this means that there's no ability to control unwanted replies without restricting shares entirely. It would be nice to be able to nip them in the bud; a potential application here would be sharing art of one's characters without the risk of people replying to that art with weird shit about the characters that makes you uncomfortable, in a way you can't control.

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I'm definitely behind some finer-grained ability to moderate reblog-replies, though one point I want to bring up is how this would affect reblog-replies to that reblog-reply. If I remove a reblog-reply that already has other reblog-replies to it, would that...

  • ...remove all those other reblog-replies that have been made in response to that specific reblog-reply, and all the reblog-replies that have been made in response to the reblog-replies made in response to that reblog-reply, and so on and so forth down the chain? 
  • ...or would it leave those reblog-replies intact (along with copies of the specific reblog-reply)?
I can see pros and cons to both - on one hand, it can help a lot with keeping things from getting out of hand to have all chained reblog-replies removed as well, and save you from having to hunt up and down the chain for any stragglers. On the other hand, it poses the risk of removing context/tangential conversations that might have sprung up on the same thread.

Some other possibilities:
  • some kind of toggle that allows people to reblog your posts, but not reblog them with replies (I think I've brought this up in a standalone feature request before?)
  • some way to approve individual reblog-replies before they go live? but this could be wrangled into a pseudo-DM system, which staff have been trying to avoid, and also suffers from the chaining issue - if someone wants to reblog-reply to a reblog-reply that has been approved, do you also have to approve that one? or does the person who did the original reblog-reply approve it? what if there's multiple people in that chain? it very quickly scales out of control in practice
  • some kind of whitelist you can add people to, which will allow them to reblog otherwise reblog-locked posts - but this would make permission management for posts a tangle

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It would not allow reblog-replies from the point it's enabled. Ideally this would be selectable on the post creation page, along with the other lock options.
Ah! I think I misunderstood, then - what you're describing isn't the ability to nuke individual reblog-replies, but to turn off the ability to reblog-reply without turning off regular reblogs? I'm very in favor of that!
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How would this handle tagging? If I'm understanding your suggestion right, this would create a toggle that would let other users share the post, but not add anything to it. Would this also disable tags? If it did, it would prevent people from organizing their own pages as they see fit, but if you did not, you may run into issues where people just add their unwanted commentary directly in the tags.

Good question; I hadn't considered tags. worth figuring out!

I do want to say that it might not even be necessary to moderate tags - I feel like there's substantial enough friction to writing extensive thoughts in tags that it'd deter most people from doing it, and it also prevents people from like... being able to make their thoughts about your post into a Standalone Post that others can then pick up and pass around? So it goes a long way towards curtailing wildfire-like spread of unwanted comments. You also don't see people's tags on reblogs in your notifications, so it's significantly less in-your-face, and you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of being notified of people liking someone's Weird Reblog With Reply of your post. It doesn't stop smaller annoyances like people reblogging your platonic art and tagging it with a romantic ship, but I think that's something that can be offset by other means, like attaching a "this is platonic, please don't tag it with a romantic relationship" note in the post body.

voicing support for this feature! occasionally someone will share one of my art posts with something goofy or jokey in the caption field, and whenever this happens it feels like it takes focus away from the post as a showcase of art and turns it into someone else's funny post. being able to disable replies/captions on post shares would eliminate this issue entirely for me.

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