People have occasionally asked about comments and replies in ThoughtStreams. I'm still wrestling with how best to do that.
I don't really want to just do comments. It seems more appropriate that someone's thoughts on your thoughts are first-class streams.
Just like you can take a card on one of your streams and kick off a new stream with that card (although I still want to make that less clunky) my current thinking is to just expand that across users.
So if you had thoughts on what I just wrote above, you'd click a button to start your own stream on it, with my card copied (with attribution and a link both ways).
Easier quotation might be another complementary approach (rather than a wholesale copying of a card)
An open question is whether the source author can opt-out of the link going from their card(s) to yours, although the problems of spam, etc are unlikely given the current high-quality, small, paying community.
What we'll likely implement first is just allowing "reposting" of other people's cards.
Then we'll look into either providing opt-out or maybe even opt-in display of the link from the original to the repost.
At some point we may even introduce the explicit inviting of people to add their thoughts.
Turns out as we implement this, that just allowing people to repost other people's cards to their own streams is both simple and (potentially) effective (although we'll have to see how people like it in practice).
The initial step is implemented and deployed.
One nice feature of the approach that's been taken is you can reply to multiple cards at once: e.g. https://thoughtstreams.io/jtauber/reordering-cards-in-a-stream/
One thing confuses me: There doesn't really seem to be a way to have a conversation here.
I saw James Tauber re-posting someone elses thought on his own streams and then posting and answer right after that. That feels like a very weird concept.
I feel that we need something like Twitter's mentions or a commenting system here.
On the other hand: Maybe this is more like a blogging platform and we are supposed to all have our own monologues here, no conversations expected?
I have no idea.
Reposting was just the beginning. Much like Twitter with their @-replies @-mentions and #-hashtags we wanted to see what sort of usage pattern would emerge organically.
We're now working on a pretty big new feature called "branching" which I'm excited about because it actually solves quite a few issues (including comments, conversations, tangents and a bunch of other stuff) in an elegant way that mostly follows the existing conceptual basis of TS (which we're trying to keep simple).
When I started blogging, I liked people replying on their own blogs rather than just in comments. We want to capture that concept in ThoughtStreams although we know we're not there with just re-posting.
The "branching" feature will, I think, get us there.