tantekI'm trying to figure out what comment posts should look like and if there's anyway to automatically detect that a post being written is a comment instead of a standalone post
tantekcertainly most comments on blog posts don't bother to indicate any context of being a reply/comment, because the presentation/UI for writing those comments already provides such context
tommorristantek: the problem is what you do with such a distinction. if you look at twitter, the desirability of your responses being broadcast out to people who aren't interested is something the developers have gone back and forth on
tommorriswhere I might type "@t whatever" if I want it to go *just* to you, while ".@t whatever" is done to override the behaviour that the reply semantics enforces and gets twitter to treat the reply as an ordinary post
tommorristhen I believe for a while, Twitter made it so replies would only be shown in your stream if the replier was someone you follow, and the person they are replying to is also someone you follow
tantekhah - it looks like Facebook's experiment with the double-sided vertical timeline is over. new profiles are back to a single vertical stream of posts / activities.
tantekFascinating what kind of details you notice when you look at how different sites (and their apps) implementing comment/reply UIs (everything from discoverability, button/link, text field, submitting)
tantekand then there's the even more fascinating variant where the comment box is fixed positioned at the bottom of the screen when view a "post permalink" page. e.g. 4SQ v4 iOS app.
tantekand IG's post comments screen too (which unfortunately doesn't show you the photo itself - making it hard/inconvenient to look again at the image to recall why you were inspired to comment)
tantekFB especially - and I wonder if it has to do with showing a comment field/box underneath posts, even in lists of posts views (like a profile page or your newsfeed page, or on a group page where multiple posts are shown).
tanteknormally I'd expect lots of little text input boxes like that to be distracting, but somehow it doesn't seem to be a problem on FB lists of posts views - they're doing something right (something that is non-obvious)
tantekconsidering what it would it look like and how it would work if I put little comment boxes underneath each of my posts on my home page for example.
tantekas in, can I discern what exactly about the FB design is making it usable and reproduce such usability on my own site (on lists of posts pages as well as post permalink pages)
tantekaaronpk - I think part of the problem with past efforts at doing decentralized comments is that folks (mostly programmers) jumped immediately to first solving the "where do the comments go / get stored" problem instead of figuring out how to make decentralized commenting UX be beautiful and fun.