Started here: Add ability to share a private space as read only - #18 by bentsai
Goal
I’d like to be able to publish and work using Kinopio and illicit feedback and comments. Currently, comments are essentially like any other card, so in order to enable them, I need to provide others with a collaborator key, or make the space Open to All.
- I’d like a mechanism for users to make comments, annotations, feedback that is inline with my content. I could see this done by allowing comment cards anywhere in the space. Another approach is to have comments contained in a box/list of some sort, but allow making connections from comments to core content.
- I’d like a way to completely hide comments so that the core content can be viewed in its original form. This is kinda like a “published” view. I feel like this should be the primary view.
I can see how the line between comments and core content could be blurry. Sometimes you might want to “promote” a comment to be part of the core content. But that’s kinda secondary to the main feature.
Example use cases
- Kinopio – Thinking Canvas
- Kinopio – Thinking Canvas
- Those are some of mine, but honestly, the majority of Explore spaces…Some folks make their spaces Open to All to accomplish this, but I bet more people would welcome comments if they could hide them/not have them muck up their space.
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if ‘groups’ existed and you could make a group with the title or top card called: “leave your comments in here”, could you use that?
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I could use that, but it’d still be missing the aspects that are important to me. I think being able to completely hide comments/annotations is important to having users feel comfortable and want to share their spaces, opening up to feedback. Also, being able to enforce users to only put cards in that list is another important aspect.
Setting aside the current Kinopio implementation, does the general use case make sense to you? That is, being able to invite feedback in a space that doesn’t interfere with the core content. Do you agree that a lot of people who current share their spaces in Explore would use that?
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yes it does
Do you agree that a lot of people who current share their spaces in Explore would use that?
I’m less sure about how common that is, and I’m not sure that most ppl add spaces to explore with the primary intent or desire of having ppl leave comments on it.
e.g. the number of closed spaces is way more than open spaces. And possibly that’s because the comments aren’t cleanly separated – but I also haven’t heard as much feedback about that if as I’d expect if that were the case
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toxicity
that’s why I haven’t implemented likes or whatever yet, I think it’s a great idea but I’m not sure if suddenly people will be put in a place where they aren’t getting enough likes on a space and feeling bad. Or comparing themselves to others
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Maybe reactions isn’t the way to go in order to avoid vanity metrics. The way I’m thinking about it is, you already have a way to illicit feedback—Open to All. But this level is super liberal and not for the faint of heart.
What I’m proposing is refining the levels so there is a medium that I believe will appeal to the majority of your users. Two important pieces of this are:
- Ability to distinguish and hide annotations
- Ability to define who can add annotations.
Personally one reason I want this is to have an area for visitors, new-comers to talk about how we’re using a space in the hopes of inspiring each other. And I feel like this would make spaces more friendly and accessible. Someone could pop in and ask, how does this work? Or cool, can I use this image? etc.
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thinking through this again, do you see ‘comment-only’ more as an optional feature for open spaces, or as a collaboration mode that you can invite people into in any space privacy type (eg ‘comment only’ as a parallel to the current ‘read only’ invite)?
alternatively, should comment-only be a thing that’s not strictly enforced and that ppl can opt out or into (kinda like google docs editing modes)?
if this is the case that massively simplifies things, in theory if you added a query string like ?commentonly=true then when the space loads it’ll be in comment-only mode. in this mode, new cards you add will default to comments. But users will be able to untoggle the mode to make regular cards, so there’s an element of trust required here.
In the original use cases, and other team use cases, I think that trust is fine because the assumption is that invited collaborators have good intent. And even open spaces have been pretty decent so far.
I agree with both of Ben’s points in the OP, and in my head I see it more as an optional toggle for read-only public spaces. I’d love people be able to drop comments in my game log boards for example, without them being able to add full cards / whatever they wanted anywhere on the board. But I also don’t want to make a segregated “comments here!” section – since part of the appeal of kinopio is the visual thinking, having comments dropped near what they’re commenting on would be nicer.
if this option existed I’d very likely enable it for all my public read-only boards! and it could be a nice stepping stone to making fully public boards (which is intimidating rn)
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I also would prefer it to be a mode that doesn’t require inviting any specific user - because for my use case, there’s no one to invite, and I’m only interested in letting the community at large comment.
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let me know if i’m on the right track so far…
when copying a url (and when copying an invite link) you have the option to make share in comment mode. so ppl who use that link will default to viewing that space in comment mode.
there’s also a new button in the header that’ll let you toggle on/off comment mode at any time. When comment mode is engaged ‘comment mode’ badge will be visible to avoid confusion
When someone clicks on a comment mode link, will they be able to edit the space (add non-comment cards)? Are they essentially still collaborators? Or Is commenting a new permission?
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Ya they’re still collaborators. The mode when clicking the link will just default to commenting mode instead of the normal editing mode.
Because of these assumptions the mode is not a new permission and softly enforced:
- you trust invitees to not have malicious intent
- invitees will prefer to leave comments when appropriate (re the earlier observation that collaborators may not want to mess up a space by leaving regular cards in it)
Also doing it this way makes a 1-2 week project into a potentially 1 day thing that’s a lot easier to maintain
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I appreciate the engineering trade offs you have to make. One big use case this misses IMO is:
which is also the main thrust of my first post.
I want others to be able to comment without giving them “edit” access to my space. It’s like having to give the ability for someone to add a paragraph on my blog post if I only want to have blog comments enabled.
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in this scenario we’re exclusively talking about open spaces, and where you’re sharing the regular url (not an invite) with the world?
Are there Any cases where you’d use an open space and want anonymous ppl to be able to add non-comments? If there are not, then one approach we could do is change the behaviour/description of open spaces globally. This wouldn’t be too hard to implement , but the big advantage is it really simplifies the sharing options
the more i think about it and reflect on the open spaces i’ve seen , the more i think it makes sense to make it so that non-members in open spaces can only leave comments
gonna consolidate all comments related features next to the header button
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just another place to access the comments filter btn
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or 
would be pretty popular. That’s where my mind is when I was thinking of Explore spaces. These are spaces that people are excited to share with the world. For most of those, people probably aren’t looking for constructive feedback to make changes, but I think getting some feedback/response from the audience would be welcome. Kinda like blog comments, if you ignore the spam and toxicity 
