Card comment threads

everytime i have a space that needs comments, the comment cards in the thread, take on a very visually noisey life of themselves. Do you also have this issue in your own spaces?

miro and figjam both do the 1 icon = 1 comment thing like kinopio. But while it’s a decent bareminimum it doesn’t seem like this is sufficient/inviting to have an actual conversation that’s more nuanced that

personA: do this
personB: ok done

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for reference here’s the original comment card design spec Beta: Card Comments

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miro and figjam


ben

I find the comments implémentions in those apps to work pretty well. I’ve had substantive conversations there, and I like how they are separate from the design and can be easily hidden

but in those apps you also need to make a separate comment to reply? so a convo with many replies = many face icons

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Every comment can be replied to directly, and it creates a thread. So the conversation remains centered on the original topic/comment.

In kinopio I find it tedious to keep conversations because there is very little structure and only convention.

My preference would be for comments not to be “cards” but something semantically distinct. Very open to discuss though. :slight_smile:

what i think could solve that is if the CardDetails for comment cards had a space for writing and reading a thread of comment messages under the current card editing buttons

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oh weird guess they dont show any ui for replying in those vids

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would you consider this feature a deal-breaker or deal-maker for you? i.e. would it stop or start you using kinopio to collab with others?

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Not a deal breaker for me. The fact that you can hide comments mitigates things.

The thing that would increase collaboration through comments is having a commenting mode, and making it more obvious that a space is open for comments, and how to make comments. Kinda like now Word and Docs has a review mode.

I don’t want to make things too complicated though.

what if this comment mode merely makes it so that when active new cards you create default to being comments. But if you really wanted, you could change that comment card into a regular card (eg there no reinforcement). does this cover your use case?

Yes, this is essentially the ability to create threads, which seems common when it comes to commenting.

Perhaps. I don’t feel too strongly about this. If it’s based on convention, it might make a small difference.

new cards you create default to being comments

maybe in that case, you can elaborate by what you meant earlier by ‘comment mode’ if it’s different than that.

My understanding from word and google docs is there’s a control in the top right where you’d switch between editing mode and ‘suggest changes’ mode, but maybe this isn’t what you’re referencing?

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Yes I was referencing this. I don’t want to be prescriptive. More abstractly, what I want is, when I share a space with someone to elicit feedback, I want it to be clear to them how to do that in the space.

Right now it’s ambiguous. They could create a regular card and make it less opaque or color code it. They could make a comment card.

As an example in Docs, it is clear when I’m commenting because I can’t change the document. I can add comments on the side and I am confident I’m not adding noise or disrupting the doc.

The general use case is, I see a cool space and want to make a comment on it. I don’t want to have to be invited as a collaborator to do that. But content moderation, so not sure.

Again not saying to add a commenter role or enforce it.

:slight_smile:

trying to get to the lowest-fi version of this:

  • in the share panel, you can choose to invite someone to a space as a commenter. it’ll be the same invite url but maybe with a ?commenter=true tacked on.
  • users using that invite get added as a collaborator, but the cards that they add on this space will be comment cards (they can override this though)
  • when they join there’ll be a (ephemeral or dismiss-able) notification at the bottom of the screen telling them that they’ve been invited to comment on this space and that the new cards they add will be comments

how does that sound?

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the core assumption here is that ppl you’re explicitly inviting to your space are not malicious so moderation isn’t a big deal here

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This seems reasonable

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my idea was to show comments that are connected together as replies in the sidebar

but this does have issues, since everything can be connected with everything, and what if there’s a fork later down the line?

figma prototype here

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