I’ve just made a little change to Remark.as: now you can see likes across the site! This is an experiment, and I’d love to hear everyone’s feedback. (Fediverse announcement here.)
How it works
We’ve quietly supported “likes” from the fediverse for a few months now. When a user sees your Write.as post from a fediverse platform like Mastodon, they can like it in their feed, and then you (the author) will see the total number of likes on the Write.as post itself and your Stats page.
Previously, this was all private. Now, this makes those numbers more public. But still no one can see who exactly liked a post – only the total number.
Changes
You’ll see posts in the Café that have received replies or have at least 1 like. This is meant to inspire conversation on posts you might’ve missed.
You’ll see likes next to the number of replies in your inbox / Mail page.
You’ll see likes on all profile pages of users who have enabled commenting.
Thoughts?
I know this has implications for how much Remark.as becomes like any other social platform, with all its gamification and social comparison. I also know from the feedback I got on this post that many people prefer to keep these numbers hidden. But I wanted to try this in a small, gradual way, as I’ve come to view “likes” as a helpful morsel of feedback from the internet when people don’t otherwise have something to say.
So what do you think, now seeing it live on Remark.as? I appreciate any and all feedback – it’ll directly influence which way we take this going forward.
Ho ho ho, now the Cafe page is starting to look alive.
Question on the giving of “likes”, can it only be given via a site like Mastodon? I only ask because I barely logon over there. Can I not like the post from the page itself? I suppose that’s the next step forward for this likes feature.
I do worry about the “likes” feature messing with my writing. There’s the tendency to write to get more likes, instead of simply writing what you really wanted to say. However, the tradeoff it seems, is that this allows good writings to bubble up and have more visibility. At the moment, I think that tradeoff is worthwhile if it means it helps me find good posts on Write.as.
I could use some clarification on something… If I write an article, then I manually share it on my mastodon account, and that post where I pasted the URL receives a like… then that like appears somewhere on remark.as?
The problem with this is that articles can still not be filtered, or even paginated. They are listed by view count, and my older articles have way more views, so I can never see if it received likes.
In my experience the reactions to articles manually shared on Mastodon aren’t reflected on Remark.as.
As for checking the likes of recent posts, if you open them by accessing the blog while signed into your Write.as account, the like count is reported along with the other links such as for editing and deleting the post. To get this information visit a post directly via a URL like this:
https://write.as/username/slug
where username is your Write.as username and slug the slug of the post’s URL.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I don’t want “likes” to get in the way of writing, which is why I’m hoping this is a more thoughtful approach – keeping it only to certain areas of the site, instead of plastering it on every page.
Right now, this is the only way to send a like, yes. I definitely plan to add a “like” button on Remark.as and / or blogs themselves (for those who want it), to help more people give their feedback.
That might be out of scope (and potentially not possible) for us… Write.as blog posts and Mastodon posts are separate ActivityPub objects. So a like on a Mastodon post goes to the Mastodon post itself, and the like on a Write.as post goes to Write.as.
To get likes from the fediverse, the best way is to follow your blog from your Mastodon account, then “boost” it from that account. That way any direct reactions will show up on the Write.as post.
I know they don’t show up the best on Mastodon – no introduction or commentary, just a title. But this is something we’re working with the wider fediverse on, and I hope we can see better support for in the future.