onlyknownothing: A painting of a man in a bowler hat and suit.  A green apple obscures the man's face. (Default)
onlyknownothing ([personal profile] onlyknownothing) wrote in [community profile] newcomers2024-10-09 03:28 pm

"Leave a Like!" Prompt Banner

One of the major differences I've seen between dreamwidth and cohost is that the barrier to entry for interaction is much higher here. On cohost there was the option to "like" a post with a single click; some people turned notifications for those off, but even so it was very common to like something that you resonated with or appreciated if you didn't have anything to say about it.

That system doesn't exist here - there are comments, but that's it. And from what I've seen other former cohost users post, people feel awkward about leaving comments which they don't feel add anything constructive or make for conversation. At the same time, however, it feels far quieter and (for lack of a better word) "lonelier" on dreamwidth without the little pings letting you know that people saw and enjoyed what you posted. So, elaborating on a suggestion from [personal profile] kossai, here is a way to actively invite people to post "low content" comments to express their approval:

👍 Leave a Like! ❤️

Don't have much to say, but want to show appreciation? Feel free to leave a single-emoji comment (🙂, 👍, ❤️, or whatever!) to let me know you like what you see!

I left the base colors as black and white for text and background, but you can absolutely customize them (as well as the border color) if you so desire. The base code is as follows:

≪div style="color: black; text-align: center; width: 75%; border: 10px ridge; border-radius: 5px; padding: 10px; background: white;"≫≪p style="font-size: 1.5em; font-weight: bold; margin: 0;"≫👍 Leave a Like! ❤️≪/p≫Don't have much to say, but want to show appreciation? Feel free to leave a single-emoji comment (🙂, 👍, ❤️, or whatever!) to let me know you like what you see!≪/div≫

(Of course, you'll need to replace the "≪" and "≫" symbols with the appropriate "<" and ">" versions - but this way you can see what the code is.)

kossai: masculine kossai hold up yellow magic heart (Default)

[personal profile] kossai 2024-10-10 01:41 am (UTC)(link)
have some bias for this idea of course , but this is cute !

like say in journal over here , lack of like button is design choice on purpose and not actually flaw - but still can be adjustment pain for people who use this kind of thing often .
so this might be something of middle ground for people , and maybe with time , will lead to people use comments feature in more depth , because of build habit to use in small ways first . :)
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)

Yes ...

[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith 2024-10-10 01:57 am (UTC)(link)
Exactly. Dreamwidth is very flexible. Some folks use it for long-form blogging, others for short-form or microblogging. We got a lot of folks from the Twitter exodus. It's totally okay to make short comments too. For some bloggers, that's useful information if they're counting how many people respond to which stories or pictures.