damn i wish i could like comments on here, i liked being able to do that little bit of "i acknowledge i saw this :)" on twitter
It's the meta that if you want heart shaped endorphin boosts you have to increase readership actively by participating in the conversation visibly. Which kind of has me wondering what the point of the comments are, except for keeping it scoped to a specific subset of conversers?
comment = i am talking to the post-maker directly
repost w/ addition = i am contributing to the idea of the post and sharing it with my friends
either way, the lack of a heart on comments is a good thing. social media has been changing not just the way we communicate, but the way we think about human interaction in general. by not allowing simple shortcuts (like pressing a heart), we get the opportunity to make slightly more meaningful connections to the person who posted it. i know even a comment with only a ❤ and nothing more in it is more meaningful to me than someone pressing the like button. cohost is actually very cool this way, it encourages people to talk with each other
People have different levels of interaction they're comfortable with. It's fine to prefer receiving a comment reply to a like, but a lot of people are just not going to interact even with stuff they genuinely like because they don't have a level of interaction available that they're comfortable with. That's inherently a trade-off you make, and I don't think it's strictly good or bad, but something with pros and cons.
I am, however, extremely glad that we cannot "ratio" people on this webbed site.
When someone comments on something you’ve written, it feels good / “is good manners” to respond in such a way that acknowledges you’ve seen and appreciated the person’s contribution. “Liking” takes care of this — Person A posts something, Person B makes a thoughtful response, Person A can like that response.
Without the ability to acknowledge good contributions without comments, Person A has to reply to Person B’s comment — which then puts the social pressure onto Person B to reply. It becomes incredibly easy to get stuck in a conversational loop one has no interest in. This has very much happened to me, because I am that kind of person.
I guess my big question is: yeah, I agree that a lot of things about social media have fucked the ways in which we all communicate. But why did we decide making it easy for people to show appreciation to one another in low effort and easy ways one of them? Shouldn’t appreciation be low-friction to incentivize more positive interaction? It’s not like anybody’s asking for a “dislike” button here.
IMO the trouble is that comment-likes so easily go from "low-friction way to show appreciation" to "politeness-mandated way to show a lack of active snubbing". I've reached the point on Twitter where I like replies, at least by people I know, as a matter of course, almost like a read receipt. It barely conveys meaning, and what meaning it does isn't necessarily something I want to send.
From the other direction, if I don't receive a like on one of my replies, I start to worry that I've put my foot in my mouth accidentally (as I have been known to do more than never). The time between replying to a tweet and receiving the "I saw this" like is a regular source of microanxiety, even if 99% of the time the like does come.
I will say: I've also been in the position you describe, where I see someone reply to a copost and I feel like I should do something to acknowledge that but I don't really have anything to say. I think this is an artifact of spending so much time on Twitter and similar sites, and I hope that Cohost's explicit rejection of comment-likes will help me at least break out of the thought pattern that makes me feel obligated to acknowledge every interaction. I would like to live in a social media world that's a little bit lower-bandwidth like that.
As an aside, I think the fact that Cohost so noticeably does not support comment-likes might actually help establish a culture where people are okay with being on both ends of replies that aren't explicitly acknowledged. Since most of us come from Twitter, we all know that in a Twitter context we'd be liking one another's replies. But we also all know that's not possible here, so maybe that just lets us assume every reply is implicitly liked in a way that wouldn't make sense if we arrived without that prior shared experience.
