Agreed. As far as user interface is required, it would only take making the Reply button consistently appear.
Allowing comments more intuitively would build the Newsblur community discussion. For now, it’s just kind of awkward with sharing being the only way to start a comment thread.
Thanks for resurrecting this. I just launched this feature (and will be blogging it tomorrow morning). It’s on the web and will hit iOS and Android in due time. Thanks everybody!
It’s really important to be able to comment on the shares of your friends. Please please implement this feature.
It’s really important to be able to comment on the shares of your friends. This is what Google Reader allowed and if you can’t do it, it is exactly the sort of thing that will stop us from migrating to you.
Having to add a // to everything you share is, quite frankly, stupid.
Still disappointed to see no progress on this issue. It seems like something that plenty of users want to see, so I can’t understand why it hasn’t gained more traction. Maybe if I show some pictures of what we want, something will happen?
First, here is an unaltered screenshot of one of my friend’s shared items:
I see this sort of single-character comment on a lot of public stories too, solely for the purpose of getting a “Reply” button to appear so friends can add comments if they want. So Newsblur users are obviously figuring out ways to sort of make this work, but it’s not at all ideal (and it only works if you remember to type a dummy character in the comment field when sharing something).
Next, here’s my suggestion for how this ought to work:
Alice123 has shared an item privately, but hasn’t typed a comment. Newsblur should show the name of the friend who shared the item, plus a “Reply” button to enable replies. Behind the scenes, I imagine you’d treat this more or less the same as an item that was shared with a single-character “dummy comment”. The mechanism for replying would work exactly the same as it does now:
The only difference is that we get a “Reply” button in all cases.
Seriously, this could be so simple that I cannot understand why it doesn’t exist already. I hope the other users watching this thread will chime in on this.
@samuelclay I’ve been thinking about what has lowered engagement on Newsblur for me over the last decade, and it’s mostly this bug and the more recent bug causing comments not to display on the blurblog pages at all. I don’t always remember to add a comment or have something short and pithy to say, and this creates the cycle where I share something, someone replies, and I can’t see or reply to them. That has the effect of moving conversation elsewhere, which I think is a long-term problem for Newsblur.
These days, it especially feels like there should be some thought to ActivityPub. I’ve seen a few people who have implemented comments based on Mastodon on their blogs and that’s really need for having a shared public blog where people can follow and reply on Mastodon but the thread is visible with the source item. It feels like there could be an interesting angle around that for Newsblur, turning blurblogs into ActivityPub streams and adding a privacy toggle so you could choose the public/private settings at the time of sharing with the idea that you might want to have a semi-public blurblog where some shares are restricted to your approved followers but others are public.
The one thing which I don’t know if that standard supports, however, is the references to other people sharing the same links. That is really neat for sharing conversations across different blurblogs and I think preserving it is pretty key.
That’s a fascinating idea (and should probably be split out into its own thread, feel free to re-post with the appropriate ActivityPub Support title). I’m not sure there’s much interest in activity pub which is why it would be good to post this idea in a way that gets others interested and pushes me to invest time to investigate the benefits and then possibly build it.