cohost support

hell yes please, id love to be able to easily go back to the comments i've posted before

eghh, i really don't like the idea of comments being visible out of context. one of the things i like about cohost is that unlike a ton of other sites (such as bird site) it isn't prone to people 1) jumping into conversations without actually reading them or 2) people taking things people say wildly out of context and this feature would pretty directly encourage both of those things. which are annoying at best

it would also create a feed chock full of things like "cool!" "nice photo!" "haha same" which is not especially interesting or useful (which is why twitter does not typically show you 100% of the replies people are making on your feed, because it just isn't interesting)

It also gives greater visibility and potentially recognition to users who are really contributing to the sites culture by engaging with the posts of others, even if they aren’t making a lot of posts themselves- at the moment, their profile alone may make it look like they aren’t using the site much, when that may be far from the case.

as someone who comments more than they post: i do not want "greater visibility" and i definitely don't want a website making "visibility" mandatory for every single interaction! the site has a feature that lets you post comments on your page publicly already, reblogging. if i had a comment on a post that i want Everybody who looks at my blog to be able to see, i'd rebug it with that comment

 > i want to be able to check people’s comments for a vibe check

this seems needlessly invasive in a way that does not appear, to me, justified by the desire to preemptively block users prior to interacting with them.

Honestly just scroll through a person's blog. If you don't like their posts or the people they reblog from, well. You know what to do.

As for the main, original topic. Eh I'd rather not have people cyber-eavesdropping on my conversations with others. You really don't need to see the stupid inane shit I posted a number of months ago. That gives me vague Helldump SA forums vibes.

If someone REALLY wants to know my opinion on something, there's the ask box function. Or hell, if you want to test someone's 'vibe' just strike up a polite conversation.

"A positive use case is that several users make really great, detailed comments… which can then be hard if not impossible to find if all you remember is who made the comment, rather than who made the original post. If someone regularly makes comments about a specific topic, being able to more easily see all of those comments would be convenient - eg. being able to see all comments by someone who gives detailed keyboard advice. "

So copy paste it to a text file with citation on who made it. Or reblog it. Or like the post. Or reblog it to a secret passworded blog with personal tags. Or simply ask the person to repeat themselves. Or ask around if anyone remembers Person talking about X topic, in the cohost global feed or in relevant tags. The tools are there for you.
 

So, in the positive use case, I think the way to solve that is for people who have useful contributions to add to a post to just share the post and add onto it. If people are giving helpful advice or info in comments, they should be encouraged by other commenters to repost their comment as a share. I think this would only happen in extraordinary contexts–like, someone posts such a banger comment that it drives multiple people to reply with praise or thanks.

In the negative use case, I [i]do[/i] see how this would be useful to some degree, but it also make it easier to write scrapers to track people's comments and build dossiers on them. It would also make it quite easy to use some variant of Bidoof's law on them as a rhetorical cudgel if you're arguing with someone in bad faith. Finally, it would essentially retroactively elevate the publicity of previous messages people have made as comments, and generally speaking, I think people don't like it when something suddenly becomes more public than it was before. The worst case scenario I can think of is someone saying something in a comment that kind of outs themselves as gay or trans, but their main profile never talks about being gay or trans because their family monitors all their social media, but the 99% case is just gonna be stuff that the user just didn't want to elevate to the same level as a full post, things like banter or criticism or, well, like you said, arguments. If it was a thing that you could either opt in to, or would only apply to comments going forward from the implementation date, or both, then I could kinda get on board with this. (I feel this way about likes too, fwiw; I think being able to opt in to letting people see your likes would be a good feature for similar reasons as letting people opt in to making their comments visible at a profile level.)

All in all, it'd be good to find ways to figure out if someone is acting in bad faith when you begin to have an unpleasant encounter with them, and, if implemented properly, this could help. Though, to respect users' privacy up until this point, it wouldn't be fair to apply it to comments until after it became a feature, and even then, it should probably be opt-in (or at least opt-out) since users have so far come to expect that comments are only visible in-context, and they might miss the memo if that changes. At that point, I am not sure it would help with OP's negative use case that much, but I can't imagine it would be utterly useless towards that end, so... I guess what I'm saying is, I support this request somewhat, it just needs to be balanced against user privacy concerns. If comments had always been like how OP is describing from their inception, it wouldn't be such a hassle, since you wouldn't have to consider the privacy afforded to people until now.