One thing I've tried to keep in mind is that I'm basically having to relearn social media as a platform for interacting directly with people, and it is fucking awkward. I leave a lot of comments on stuff because I'm trying to give an early meta thing I saw here a shot--the idea that we need leaving comments to be a normal thing in order for Cohost to work, and that comments should be low stakes for both the person leaving them and the person reading them because it's just a normal conversation. But it is super against my learned instincts from Twitter, which is that replies from strangers are potentially stressful for content creators, especially when there are a ton of them and it's not clear who is genuine or trying to bait a response or self-promoting or whatever.
One of the things I like about Cohost is that interacting with people does feel comparatively low stakes; I don't want to post online under my real name because I tried it and hated it, but it meant that on Twitter I couldn't really participate in game industry discussions because I was just some random Batman slash account. There was a nonzero chance of people I'd actually worked with yelling at me for being presumptuous, and that is a totally understandable reflex when every post you make about your area of expertise is guaranteed to attract 700 weirdos who think they know your job better than you or want something that has nothing to do with you as a person.
But I find myself missing likes on comments here, because those let people acknowledge comments with the equivalent of a nod; they can end the interaction on a friendly note without committing to an ongoing discussion. And that makes total sense to me as I write it, but then if I stop and think about it, it's kind of fucked up? I'm thinking of a situation where creators are de facto influencers even if they don't set out to be, and my interaction with them is sort of like talking to a public figure, even if they're a relatively small account. I default to not commenting on Twitter the same way I default to ignoring celebrities if I recognize them. I don't expect replies to my comments here, but if I post one and get no acknowledgment, it feels like I probably didn't have anything of value to add and should have kept it to myself. In reality, it's just as likely that people are reading it and just not feeling the need to add anything, which isn't bad.
I think Tumblr's tag system was probably the sweet spot for me in feedback, because it's sort of like sitting in the rafters watching people's organic reactions. They know I'm there, but they're commenting for themselves or their friends and occasionally waving in my direction. I used to collect Tumblr tag comments after announcements or game releases and post them for my coworkers because they can be enormously validating--a fan will comment "Nice work!" directly, but the Tumblr tags will be like "#NO YOU DON'T GET HOW MUCH THIS DESTROYED ME #CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW THEY [700-word character analysis] #AAAAAAAAAAANDBDNJDHFBFBBFB"
It's hard to tell what's actually not working because I suspect we're in entirely new territory where the model of "build large audience > get feedback via engagement numbers" is collapsing and nothing is readily taking its place. The impression I get is that the Cohost devs are not trying to establish a new standard so much as actively break the old one, because it's so entrenched and pervasive that it has implications for every part of a design. As someone pointed out the last time likes on comments came up, once you've implemented that, the lack of response to a comment is much more likely to mean it was poorly received, and if you don't like a comment you definitely saw, that's also making a choice to communicate. I don't actually know which version of this is better; I will feel awkward posting this comment and I feel the need to say that I don't expect a response because yeah. But also the site is so small and personal even now that I can just tell you that.
I think it's natural to not want to be pouring your heart out into the void. The feeling that it's calculated to keep you posting is interesting because it's not the first time I've heard it phrased that way--that a site that explicitly does not intend to derange people via numbers feels like it's manipulating posters into providing constant content by withholding the satisfaction. I don't think that's an unreasonable feeling to have because that's how fuckin. everything works now--if a platform is refusing to reveal information that you'd find helpful, it's probably because there's some behavior you would not perform as profitably if you had it. I also believe that right now, eliminating as much as possible any kind of tool adjacent to Profitable Behavior is probably the only way to figure out what a recently built site looks like without them, to find out what people do in their absence, and to see if anything better shakes out.
