Notifications can very quickly become unreadable when Likes roll in on a post. I'd love to be able to just hide Likes outright, and save notifications for everything else - I'm way more interested in seeing comments and checking out new followers.
i think reading other people's responses here may be changing my stance lol. i think if you did implement comment likes... the best middle-groundy way to do it would probably be to have them be the same as post likes, which i like a lot. no public facing counts or record of who likes the thing, just a private notif. but it definitely does still kind of add another venue for potential passive aggressiveness/anxiety/etc. and idk what the solution is for that. there's only so many ways you can mechanically work around something that is essentially kind of a cultural issue, haha.
Lots of good responses here, and I think that overall I'm against likes on comments, (especially public-facing ones, which I suspect was never on the table to begin with considering how likes work on posts) but if anything like this is ever implemented, I just wanted to throw out an idea: What if only the OP or people you're replying to could like your comments?
There was a part of me that wanted likes on comments too, at first, but only because I missed being able to quietly acknowledge replies to my posts without having to think of a reply. That, to me, is the only real benefit of likes on comments. So if this was ever implemented, I think it would be best if you could only like comments directed at you specifically, both to avoid facilitating all kinds of unhealthy behavior and also to just avoid notification spam -- I don't really care if anyone likes my comments other than whoever I was talking to, and an inbox full of "random user liked your comment!" sounds annoying.
At the same time though, I also share the concern that adding an ability to like comments might make people feel like they're expected or obligated to like comments on their posts, or that adding likes might make commenters feel worse if their comment goes unacknowledged, so I can't help but wonder whether likes on comments in any form would introduce more problems than it solves. I guess I only ask that if this is ever implemented that it's implemented thoughtfully. Opt-in might be the way to go.
Coming into this thread with a desire for comment likes and reading through the concerns, something I realized is that comment likes being invisible to everybody but the comment poster might prevent the courtesy like compulsion - from the outside, you as a commenter have no idea whether the OP is the type of person who likes comments liberally, sparingly, or not at all. You can't be in the situation where you see OP liked two other people's comments but not yours.
I generally don't mind courtesy likes as a practice, but I have been in stressful situations before where I've liked several friends' comments on some social media post, and then a stranger comes in and I feel obligated to extend the same courtesy, which feels over-familiar. If comment like visibility is the same as post like visibility, that stranger has no way to know that I've been liking my friends' comments, and I don't have to worry about making them feel left out by failing to like their comment.
I strongly oppose this. It would quickly become a societal obligation to click it for every comment on your posts, and would discourage actual communication.
I just struggle to see it the way everyone here does, but considering how controversial the idea is I imagine it won't be implemented. For me, the absence of comment likes are sorely felt, and it doesn't make much sense to me to have these concerns about comment likes but not post likes. They're one in the same for me.
I just want a nice, convenient button to show my appreciation for a comment that doesn't require unnecessary spam/fluff to do so. When I reply to every comment it feels like I'm "needing to have the last word" and idk, it feels kind of weird to me. But just clicking the little heart, that's nice and easy and shows I enjoyed their comment.
I've never had any feelings of stress regarding liking someone's comment, feeling like I'm obligated to do so out of courtesy or something. So I guess I just don't understand that criticism because I just don't have that mindset about likes.
I do agree with everyone though that like counts shouldn't be public, but yeah I don't think that was ever on the table. Ideally it'd work identically to post likes. Regarding notifications, post likes are already condensed down to one line. I don't know if that wasn't the case 7 - 8 months ago but that issue seems more or less solved now.
Just would like to pop in here and say that I'm with @caro on this one. honestly one of my biggest peeves of using cohost so far is the complete absence of like counts on both posts and comments. It feels like I'm the only loser interacting with anything on here.
I understand that some people may find the idea of giving "courtesy likes" or receiving notifications for likes stressful (?) but just because that's the case doesn't mean we should do away with the concept of public like counts entirely.
A toggle would be very much appreciated. I think that'd be best.
I'm coming back to this idea to say that I really really would love to have the most basic idea of this implemented where like counts absolutely do not matter. I just want the like button so I can leave a conversation with my friends with some positive interaction rather than leaving them hanging thinking they've said something into a void.
Like, I dunno, I get where folks are coming from that they don't want it because it increases a social obligation or whatever, but honestly, the more I've been going on this website without some ability to acknowledge that I appreciated what my friends said in reply to my posts (without really having anything to add to it myself) the more I feel like it's actually stifling the social interaction aspect of this site in a negative way. I wanna be able to use this site to be social!
As much as I'd use a "read and acknowledged" feature, I agree with others in that it could descend into attention-seeking territory if not implemented carefully. So I'll have to say "nay" as well.
I would really like this feature, and it's something that feels really missing to me. I want to be able to show people appreciation for the comments they leave, and to be able to do things like that without feeling the pressure that I have to come up with something new and novel to say for each and every comment. I want to be able to show appreciation, say thanks, and acknowledge that I've seen what people are saying when they interact with me, just because that's something that I want to do, not out of any sort of obligation. And I don't think having an invisible like feature on comments would inherently cause any kind of obligation like that in people, that depends entirely on how people choose to interact with it themselves, and if someone feels like they have an unhealthy relationship with likes, they can choose not to interact with the system. Considering we have the ability to turn off notifications for likes, if someone feels that the system isn't healthy for them or that they just don't enjoy it, they can already turn it off.
But without it, I feel like I'm left without an avenue for actually interacting with people. I'm a pretty nonverbal person a lot of the time, and I have difficulty coming up with things to say, on top of feeling a pressure that everything I say has to be meaningful. So most of the time I end up leaving comments in the void, no way for the person who sent it to know if it was ever read, or if I enjoyed it, or anything else. I just want to give people a little nod, smile, thumbs-up, rather than leaving every conversation feeling cut off or stunted. And having it be a completely opt-in feature would be a really nice way to offer that option to people who want to be able to communicate that way.
Coming back here a bit late, I wouldn't be against Chris Stapley's idea as a middle-ground, which was:
> What if only the OP or people you're replying to could like your comments?
I do feel this still kinda falls into potential "courtesy like" territory, BUT restricting them to reply recipients and the owner of the original post might frame them as a lower-cost, private-facing interaction? Or maybe it just enforces this even harder, since now the only likes you could expect now are from whoever you're replying to.
Like... I don't know, I'm generally on the side of "We don't need likes on comments." I've felt better about leaving and receiving comments on Cohost by not even having to think about this sort of interaction. But I understand why people want it, I still do it myself on other platforms. Very mixed feelings about this tiny and specific type of interaction.
I really don't want this feature to be implemented at all. I think the need people feel to give and receive likes on comments is a bad pattern that's been trained into us by worse social media, and it's something we should just stop expecting. I think there's no way of doing this where it wouldn't create a feeling of obligation/expectation. It means that when someone leaves a comment, the *default* path if no action is taken is for the commenter to feel a little disliked/snubbed. I'd like the default assumption to just be, maybe the OP liked it and maybe they didn't, and it's fine either way.
Sometimes I've replied to comments with just a single emoji, when it's something that i'd especially like to actively respond to but I don't really have much further to say. I think that's a better norm, precisely *because* it requires more effort and takes up more space, so people don't expect to receive it on every single comment; it also carries more nuance, but doesn't require formulating words at all.
To frame this from another angle: if this feature got implemented, I wouldn't engage with it *at all*. I'd turn off my ability to see when my comments got likes, and I'd hide the button for me to like other people's comments. And that would inevitably lead to at least a few people commenting on my posts or replying to my comments, and then feeling snubbed or upset that I "didn't like" whatever they had to say. I really just think this is a fundamentally bad idea.
@jgs
I'd like the ability to "like" comments, in order to let someone know that I appreciate their comment without having to make a comment of my own. I envision this as behaving similarly to likes on posts, in that it would be invisible to everyone but the liker and the commenter.
I could also see some sort of public-facing +1 or upvote system, which would have the added benefit of reducing the number of replies that are just "+1" or otherwise just expressions of agreement. However, I would not want this to become a full Reddit-style voting/ranking system.
77 people like this idea