Lemmy

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Add "mark as read" option for posts and comments (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On Hexbear, moderators may factor upvote activity into moderation decisions.

Some users treat upvotes as a “mark as read” function, which weakens score reliability and therefore negatively impacts The Algorithm.

Please provide a separate mechanism for users to identify posts that they have already read, which will persist on later visits.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Yes, but you don't see new comments, plus this would be for posts and comments. If you just hide a comment, you don't see new replies. Marking as read is useful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, I've turned on that feature as a test (after the question was posted) and I saw your reply just fine. That's no difference from how it's been before I turned on the feature.

What has never worked for me (I'm not sure if it's a bug or by design) is a notification for a reply to your reply. I only ever see notifications of direct replies, not indirect ones.

In other words, if someone replies directly to me, I know about it, but if someone replies to that reply, I don't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I only ever see notifications of direct replies, not indirect ones.

Definitely by design. I do not want to receive a geometrically increasing number of notifications as a comment chain expands underneath my comment.

On reddit (maybe it was the Enhancement Suite) IIRC is an option to Watch a thread, which basically does what you want

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

As it is, you only see new comments if you scroll past the post again (and your client has refreshed it) or if you open it directly. If your client hasn’t updated the comment count or if you refresh your feed and the post falls off, you’ll never see it anyway.

A “Watch” feature would solve this better. If you watch a post, you get aggregated notifications for edits and comments on the post. If you watch a comment, you get aggregated notifications for replies to it or any of its children.

By aggregated notifications, I mean that you’d get one notification that said “The post you watched has been edited; 5 new comments” rather than a notification for each new comment.

Then, in addition to exposing a “Watch” action on posts and comments, clients could also enable users to automatically hide posts that are watched, either by marking them as hidden or by hiding watched posts without updates.

If the latter approach were taken, notifications might not even be necessary - the post could just get added back into the user’s feed when changes were made. It would result in a similar experience to forums, where new activity in a topic would bump it to the front, but it would only impact the people who were watching it.

You can kinda get that behavior by sorting your feed by Active, but this could be used with other sorting methods.