On the other side I don’t want to engage in discussions that are over. The Threadiverse is organized in a wayz where new content is favored in your feed. Of course there are discussions that stretch over a couple of days, but after, they die. And I think this is just the way it works, it is not meant to show all posts ever made in an equal way.
fakir@piefed.social 3 days ago
I’d like to suggest removing timestamps on all comments, like you could still toggle a button to see the timestamp of a comment if you wanted to, but the timestamp shown on default doesn’t serve any purpose other than tell the users how fresh or how stale the conversation is. When the conversation is say only a few hours old, many users will choose not to engage because we assume the conversation is over and there isn’t any point in engaging further, so we skip altogether and move on. I can tell from my own experience I’ve done this more than a few times, I’m sure others have as well. When you only have a few thousand users across the world, unlike Reddit, we must preserve the freshness of the few conversations we do have so as to increase engagement from all.
gigachad@piefed.social 3 days ago
Microw@piefed.zip 3 days ago
With the “active” sort, I regularly get posts on top of my feed that were originally made days or weeks ago, but still have discussions going on in the comments. I dont think thats a negative thing at all.
fakir@piefed.social 3 days ago
Right, they are not meant to show posts in equal manner - freshness & hotness do matter in engagement and are indeed shown higher compared to other posts and comments. But still, a few posts from last night might have only a couple of comments, but since it’s already a few hours old, we don’t reply or engage with it. We judge engagement by these timestamps and so removing timestamps will lift engagement on all posts & comments.
gigachad@piefed.social 3 days ago
I guess this also has to do with user amount in general. The more users are active in the Threadiverse, the more users would engage with these posts.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 3 days ago
This is an interesting idea, or maybe we just need people to be more willing to comment in old posts. Reddit is actively hostile to old posts, but they should work fine in Lemmy/PieFed since we have sort options like Active and New Comments. On old forums people used to continue talking in old posts forever, we could do that here no problem, the software supports it.
wjs018@piefed.social 3 days ago
You are on PieFed, so you can always use a bit of custom css to make them go away. Pop this snippet into the custom css field of your user settings: