Micro.blog can be thought of as a mashup of a Twitter-like social timeline and a WordPress-like blog posts admin interface. Some parts of the interface are designed for interacting with the community, some parts are designed for managing your blog, and some parts are kind of in limbo between both sides of the platform.
One example of this is on the Posts screen, where there hasn’t been a link from one of your blog posts to any of its replies. Today I added that:
I have mixed feelings about this interface. We try to avoid “counts of things” across the platform. There are no follower counts and no like counts. We want to discourage the popularity contest mentality that can come from comparing statistics across users.
In this case, these are just links to replies on your own view of your posts. If a post has no replies, there is no indicator. I decided to roll this out so we can live with it for a little while and see if we like it. I consider if somewhat experimental and based on feedback, we may change it to be less prominent, or deemphasize the count. It could also fade away if there are no new replies recently.
Still thinking about this, but wanted to share it now. We update the platform on a near-daily basis, usually small fixes and tweaks. Check out news.micro.blog for a log of recent changes.
Justin Miller What about just 'Replies'?
Jarrod Blundy Good thinking here. I like it.
Jamie Thingelstad I think this is a nice addition — especially now that I’m not showing any replies in the timeline.
Jamie Thingelstad it would be great to see this in the micro.blog app too.
Pratik @jthingelstad I think @vincent who codes the app has mentioned its on his list to implement
Patrick Rhone I'm thinking just "Replies" or "Read replies" would work without the count.
Vincent @pratik @jthingelstad I'll check if it's available in the API this week, if so, I'll ask .
Phil Bowell maybe view replies might be nicer? I like the concept of a link but not the number count.
Manton Reece @philbowell Thanks, that's good feedback.
Manton Reece @patrickrhone @incanus That makes sense. Or maybe just "Conversation" like we have in the timeline.
Patrick Rhone Yes, I like that even better. Not only more consistent but also more friendly/engaging. Just like the current test, you can show it only when there is "conversation" around a post. Still achieves the same goal without focus on the numbers.
Manton Reece Manton Reece @vincent Nothing in the API yet. There's a little extra overhead getting the replies count, so maybe it shouldn't be in the JSON by default. We can talk about it.
Vincent maybe we could add a conversation id to it. Coming from the Micropub endpoint though, so perhaps if it includes a conversation id we just show a “Replies” button without the count? That way we can just launch the convo screen (or a version of it).
Simon Woods Manton Reece @vincent Yeah, including the conversation ID can't hurt. It would be more efficient than currently where you essentially have to hit another endpoint like Conversation.js to get the ID for a published URL.
Manton Reece @SimonWoods To me, your description leans toward using "Conversation", because this feature essentially bridges the blog world with the timeline world. But both could work.
Simon Woods I love the idea of bridging the two, for sure. I guess I'm overly concerned with other people struggling to understand it, or to be specific actually hitting a wall in the experience when they do come across it. I know these problems are inevitable but still...
Manton Reece @gr36 I think the only way right now would be via JavaScript, by calling into the webmentions JSON. See the docs here (this link won't work inside the apps currently). We should be able to make it available to Hugo also.
Pratik @gr36 I would be interested in this. I'm thinking some indicator next to the post title (on this page, for example) or even as a superscripted indicator on the posts that have mentions. I don't want the count of mentions but just an indicator that this post has at least one mention.