The MVP described here doesn’t seem functionally any different from an open thread.
The future features clearly go beyond that, and the current MVP seems a reasonable stepping stone towards those. But … is it worth considering just adding those features to comments generally, or comments in threads with some special flag set (which would then need to be set on the open threads), rather than introducing a whole new thing?
(I’ll hazard a guess that that’s actually roughly how the current implementation works.)
I’m thinking, e.g., that “convert a comment into a full post” might be something people sometimes want to do to comments anywhere, not just ones they called shortform posts. And that it’s not entirely impossible that someone might want to be able to subscribe to a feed of all of some other user’s comments, though that seems a bit extreme.
I think the most important thing to change, in terms of creating a different vibe than open threads did, is the /shortform page working the way it does, where it feels more like facebook or tumblr than an open thread.
This was actually closer to how I thought about the issue – I mostly wanted a bunch of features that happened to be useful generally, while also enabling a particular paradigm. Open Threads and Shortform Feed posts are basically the same mechanics with different vibes, where an important part of the shortform vibe (from my perspective) is that a shortform feed* post communicates a greater sense of author ownership (both of the overall Shortform Feed post, and off individual comments within it)
[and yes, under-the-hood, the new shortform features are identical to what they’ve been for the past year – the difference is mostly that shortform comments and posts get a boolean “shortform” flag that can be referenced by search operations]
Jimrandomh’s perspective was more oriented around making shortform a fully fledged featureset, and he can probably do a better job than I articulating why that made more sense to him.
The MVP described here doesn’t seem functionally any different from an open thread.
The future features clearly go beyond that, and the current MVP seems a reasonable stepping stone towards those. But … is it worth considering just adding those features to comments generally, or comments in threads with some special flag set (which would then need to be set on the open threads), rather than introducing a whole new thing?
(I’ll hazard a guess that that’s actually roughly how the current implementation works.)
I’m thinking, e.g., that “convert a comment into a full post” might be something people sometimes want to do to comments anywhere, not just ones they called shortform posts. And that it’s not entirely impossible that someone might want to be able to subscribe to a feed of all of some other user’s comments, though that seems a bit extreme.
I think the most important thing to change, in terms of creating a different vibe than open threads did, is the /shortform page working the way it does, where it feels more like facebook or tumblr than an open thread.
This was actually closer to how I thought about the issue – I mostly wanted a bunch of features that happened to be useful generally, while also enabling a particular paradigm. Open Threads and Shortform Feed posts are basically the same mechanics with different vibes, where an important part of the shortform vibe (from my perspective) is that a shortform feed* post communicates a greater sense of author ownership (both of the overall Shortform Feed post, and off individual comments within it)
[and yes, under-the-hood, the new shortform features are identical to what they’ve been for the past year – the difference is mostly that shortform comments and posts get a boolean “shortform” flag that can be referenced by search operations]
Jimrandomh’s perspective was more oriented around making shortform a fully fledged featureset, and he can probably do a better job than I articulating why that made more sense to him.