Not just for bloggers

Well said! I wouldn’t really consider myself a “blogger”, although I do occasionally write a blog post or two. I think the confusion around that can be difficult but I like how you explained it here!

Maybe just having the term 'blog' in micro.blog is affecting how they think about it?

@EddieHinkle Thanks! And to @amit's point, there's a bit of a misleading connotation around "blogger" that maybe throws some people off, too.

Agreed. One thing we can adopt from other social networks is what the textbox placeholder for new posts reads -- "What's on your mind", "What's happening" etc. May be that would nudge people to just share. @EddieHinkle

Following up on @amit suggestion, maybe a la Reddit suggest a post type and help pre-format it: text, link, image. I still don’t think people coming from Twitter etc get two asterisks, underscore, angle brackets.

@pratik Sorry, copy-paste error between posts when I was trying to @-mention you earlier… Yes, I think it's a good point. I'm good with embracing "blog" but we need to demonstrate that Micro.blog can be a better fit for more people.

@ronguest Yeah, could be Markdown scares some people off. I think it's probably time to simplify it a little. (We can still allow full Markdown or HTML for experienced users.)

That’s what I had in mind. A single text box that could provide some ‘aids’ while still allowing the existing approach as well. I’ve known markdown for a long time but Day One was the only app I previously used where I needed it regularly. And rather ironically the latest version of Day One no longer truly supports markdown (it converts it).

@ronguest One thing I keep thinking about is adding a Help article with an overview/explanation of the app screens, which would allow explanation of what the _ ** [] icons are, thereby providing an introduction to most-common-Markdown as well. I keep meaning to file this on GitHub, but I wanted to have a mockup/skeleton put together first, and haven't had time…

@smokey I have thought about trying to write up a one-pager getting started ‘guide’ which would briefly show some key uses: post short text/status, share a link, post a blog (aka long post etc), posting a photo, and posting multiple photos (gets awkward here since this means having to use a different app, Sunlit). I know this is heresy around here but I think markdown is a real barrier to onboarding general users (as opposed to tech and writers). Of all the sharing apps I use MB is the only one that forces this on me.

@smokey heck, even something simple like replacing the square brackets in the UI with the nearly universal icon for inserting a link (chain link) and pre-populating text between the parens and square brackets that are inserted would help (something like ‘description’ between the parens and ‘URL’ between the brackets).

@ronguest Minor quibble: you can post multiple photos with the M.b app; I do it all the time. The presentation is not as fancy or customizable as with Sunlit, but it’s completely serviceable.

I’d never used Markdown before M.b, but I of course use HTML and BBCode and MediaWiki, so the learning curve wasn’t that hard for me, so I wasn’t thinking about that. You make a good point there that those of us who are older or who have more experience with a variety of web-“publishing” platforms have a blindspot there as to what people who have only ever used No-Markup-Allowed™ platforms find accessible.

Of all the sharing apps I use MB is the only one that forces this on me.

I’m not clear what you mean here by “forces”? You can write in plain text, with no Markdown, and get a composing experience equivalent to Twitter and Facebook AIUI.

@ronguest This

I have thought about trying to write up a one-pager getting started ‘guide’ which would briefly show some key uses: post short text/status, share a link, post a blog (aka long post etc), posting a photo, and posting multiple photos

sounds awesome (and helpful, and needed).

@smokey Correct on the quibble of course. Re: markdown, platforms like Reddit, Discourse, the WordPress app etc have standard buttons for adjusting style (B = bold etc). Of course others like Facebook just don’t have it in the UI at all.

@ronguest Good feedback about Markdown, thank you.

@ronguest So “human-readable” button “names” that (still) insert the Markdown markup (since neither the apps nor the web are WYSIWYG for composing)? That seems like a good step.

@smokey What you describe is one way Markdown in Drafts works. The keyboardtray has a B button for boldface, an I button for italicization, and so on.

@schuth Good to see there is precedent for that (even though the people who will most benefit from the redesigned buttons will likely not be familiar with said precedent).