Often I'm looking over a post and feel that I have what to add as a comment. But as soon as I look at the comments, I find that someone's already written exactly what I would have said. At that point, it would just be adding noise to write my own comment saying essentially the same thing, as it would be to write my own comment saying that "I agree with @NumericallyUnchallenged." Somewhere Else I might have upvoted the comment, but that's not an option here.

For contrast to the proposals below, here's an example of a user saying a comment (actual comment of mine), with two (fictitious) users responding — one in agreement, one in dissent:^[1]

Proposal One: "Me Too!"

In lieu of having someone post a new comment just to say "me too," let's give them a button to click. In this example, SomeRandomUser no longer has to agree with me; he can instead click "me too!":

And if multiple people all give their agreement, let the system show simply "X other users," and clicking on that will expand out the user list:^[2]

Proposal Two: Vote on Comments

We could always implement Somewhere Else's system of upvoting comments, but it's only right that if you can upvote a comment to indicate assent, you should be able to downvote to indicate displeasure. Sample mockup:

Notice that these options are not mutually exclusive. We can always implement the upvote/downvote system and add "me too!" votes; we can always add the proposed reactions feature to comments as well.

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

10mo ago by trichoplax‭

DonielF‭

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