Let's Improve Minds

Been a while since I wrote one of these, but I had some new ideas that, hopefully, would be easy for the devs to implement. Let’s just jump right into it.

New feature ideas:

1. Share comments between reminds

Shoutout to @Saquedon for helping me think of this.

Currently, reminds are an isolating experience. If you comment on an original post, it won’t be carried over in a remind. Also, if you comment on a reminded version of a post, the user who made the original post does NOT get any sort of notification, like they would if it had been made on the original post. Furthermore, the notification for the remind does NOT take you the actual reminded post, only the original. This can make it burdensome to even find the version of your post that was reminded.

These problems can be fixed with two relatively simple changes, or at least simple from a conceptual perspective, since I am not familiar with the actual Minds code. A post should have a single comments section, owned by the one who originally made the post for comment moderation purposes, with the remind still being available for deletion by the one who reminded it, for what I assume are obvious reasons. Less necessary, but still useful, would be to have the post’s original owner to auto follow any and all reminds, both so they can always see when new comments are made in response to them, as well as being able to actual navigate to the place where that commenter interacted with their post.

This is actually less a new feature, and an adjustment of existing features. I believe likes already persist equally across reminds, so we just want to apply that behavior to comments. I’m really hoping we can get this functionality, because it will make reminds far more useful.

2. Give remaining upvote indicator

At one point, a upvote throttle threshold was added. Basically, this means if you upvote too many times, you will be prevented from making more upvotes. I believe there was also a deranking applied to channels that made too many upvotes while receiving very little, but my uncertainty on that demonstrates the problem I’m looking to fix here.

Nebulous rules have a chilling effect on speech.

You see, I used to get a lot more upvotes than I do now. We can speculate all day why, but I think at least a part of the problem is that previously active upvoters are no longer active, and even moderately active people self limit their activity to avoid a nebulous penalty, similar to how punishing extreme views has a chilling effect for everyone.

If there is going to be some limit to upvotes, reminds, comments, or whatever, we should be informed what that is. A very simple widget that shows number of remaining upvotes would resolve this, letting people upvote in confidence.

Personally, I’m not a fan of upvote throttling in any form. But I understand it is an attempt to deal with bots, so I at least understand the rationale. But it should be at least implemented in a way that hampers real users as little as possible.

3. Add auto tag button

The reply functionality had promise, and it has been improved greatly. However, there is the feature it replaced that I still miss.

You see, it’s not always clear if a comment will trigger a notification to whoever it is addressed to. So when in doubt, you tag a person. Another useful thing that has been added to further this is an autocomplete dialog, once you start typing a name. Which is really neat, and definitely appreciated.

The annoying thing is many people change their display name, and you need to use their actual account name to tag them properly. So I find myself constantly hovering over a person’s avatar image to get their real name.

It would be nice if we reincluded the preexisting functionality of having a button to click to get their reply tag. It could just be copied to the clipboard, similar to the option you have for sharing urls. It could be something labeled “tag”, since I believe reply was the original, and has since been repurposed for a nested reply system.

Well, that’s all I have for now. Definitely interested in anyone else leaving their own takes on these ideas.