New on Remark.as: likes

Announcements
1

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.

2 Likes
2

Getting a 502 for the cafe at remark.as. And things here are majorly slow. Hopefully that’s stuff you’re working on still.

3

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.

4

The cafe looks good this morning, and I can see the likes on stuff. It all seemed pretty snappy, too.

1 Like