Hi I'm Dana, I mostly just tool around with friends, play RPGs, and listen to podcasts, but I've also been known to make podcasts at SuperIdols! RPG and I've written a couple of short rpgs at my itch page and on twitter.
i need a like button just to indicate "cool i read your last response, thank you". i need the closure. i don't care if it shows a number or if anyone else can press it i just need to be able to give a thumbs up and walk away. help
normalize 
ing at the end of a conversation
it's fine to leave things at the last thing someone said imo. in a way it's sort of a relief to not need to do that final fave because that way when you reply back it is more meaningful
that cohost doesn’t try to algorithmically drown out anyone’s voices helps a lot with feeling like you’ll have been seen even without being given a direct response. i guess recent issues with comment notification collapsing could cause this by accident though, oops? i have also been running into this exact same phenomenon here though. there was that one post proposing Discord‐style reactions for coposts, perhaps in jest, but for comments specifically it would be nice for only the person being replied to (including the OP) to be able to leave some kind of minimized response. i think allowing a single emoji choice per comment is the most flexible and expressive option, and it’s what instant messengers often do now. it’s also handy for letting the OP show they appreciate people commenting! particularly because the OP already made the dang copost and often doesn’t need or want to add even more of their own thoughts on top of other people’s thoughts. there’s something of an expectation that if your reply doesn’t have around as much substance as what it’s replying to, then you’re not like, i dunno, giving it due respect? or something? it feels like undervaluing the person’s contribution. but if you use the mechanism where you can’t give anything of substance beyond a single emoji, it kind of works around this problem? god internet etiquette is weird although it’s not like irl etiquette doesn’t have its own dumb rules and nuances either. why can’t i type short comments this is like 20 times longer than the post god
i honestly really miss the numbers on this site. i don't need the numbers to be big numbers, i just need to know that someone actually read what i posted and felt any way at all about it. chosting feels weirdly lonely to me most of the time.
yeah i know what you mean. having an exact measurement of what people preferred me to do was eventually draining in a high-level way, but knowing people liked it at all was nice. i hope there's some helpful middle ground
an additional reason to want likes on comments: I had a sensible chuckle at this, but it's a conversation between two people who aren't me! it feels so rude to be butting in like this just to say "i lold"! and yet surely it's nicer for everyone, a more "social" medium, if I am able to communicate that I did, something you would just see peripherally if we were standing around chatting.
you can see in the notifications page that people liked your post (without a number), but there's no indicator on the post itself, so it's easy to overlook. it took me a while to figure out they were shown anywhere at all.
I had this same struggle when I commented on your doom post and you commented back, I was like "hm there's not really a graceful way to... end this"
sorry it's like i made eye contact and now whoever breaks it first is rude. oh god i did it again
It's insane how important the semantics of the ❤️or ⭐or florp or whatever have become to internet conversations. It's one of the most interesting buttons out there.
I’m going to massively date myself.
The first Unix chat program was “write”. It simply sent what you typed to the tty device of the person you were chatting too…which made your chats show up in the middle of what they were doing. And to reply they would run the same app to do the same thing to you.
Needless to say, knowing when the conversation was over was important. And not just the conversation. But also you didn’t want to interrupt while they were still typing, since your text would get intermingled with theirs.
So someone stole a protocol from radio communications. When you were done saying what you wanted to send. You’d send “o” on a line by itself. (over). When you were done talking completely, you’d send “oo” on a line by itself (over and out).
Eventually “talk” showed up, which actually had a split screen so you could see what the other person was typing and it wasn’t on top of what you were typing.
I’m not sure there’s really any point to this in relation to your problem (which I 100% agree with). But you could try sending “oo” as a comment and completely confuse them.
I feel like ✔ hits a good balance of definitiveness and desperation. Good "middle-school nerd hoping beyond hope that they've fulfilled all the requirements of this social interaction" energy, from someone who knows what they're talking about (i.e. me).
