Books on Micro.blog manton.org
@manton Very cool! Even though I've advocated for hashtag support on occasion, I appreciate the deliberate approach.
@manton Interesting idea. I’m very emoji-resistant (a combination of disliking how platforms can change how/if they’re rendered & wanting to privilage written over pictorial language), but I do see the benefits to organizing this way, too. Appreciate your deliberative approach.
@schuth Thanks for the feedback. Like anything I think emoji can be overused. But I now like sprinkling one in every once in a while.
@manton What a fantastic feature! Love the idea and will be interesting to see if it catches on and what other categories you might expand to.
@manton The thing that confounds me about hashtags is how hard it is to find the original meaning of the hashtag. Something trends, and people I respect are talking about it, and I want to figure out what it's referring to. I want to get back to the originating content.
@liz Good point. Twitter sometimes explains a hashtag in the sidebar when it trends, but it's rare and not always helpful.
@manton Nice idea! I’m very much enjoying the hashtag-less bliss that is micro.blog for now. I appreciate hashtags can be powerful, but I dislike how lot of people use them. Especially when #people #write every #sentence like #this. Here’s hoping to a out-of-text solution.
@manton This is a cool idea, but I'm not sure I get how it can't be gamed compared to hashtags. Or is that not the point of using emojis instead?
@belle It can be gamed too, but I think the simplicity of emoji has some benefits: there are a limited number, so it's easy to get a sense of what people are doing, and the backend design makes it easy for us to exclude anything inappropriate that shows up.
@manton Ah, sure. That makes sense. Was just curious since you pointed that out as a problem of hashtags but didn't seem to address it with your solution. This approach seems to be going well already!
@manton A thoughtful addition (speaking as an emoji-hater!). An issue for me was remembering which to use amongst the several surfaced by emoji-search for 'book’. I had to go back to your article to check which.
@CrispinB I could add a few more book emoji so they all map to the same place. Although the single-book emoji are more similar to the notebook one than the stack of books, so not sure.
@manton Seems a bit ad hoc & doesn't generalize well should you add further topics. Really a minor usability issue but ultimately some sort of quick ref (with emoji-copy) or picker would be ideal perhaps?
@CrispinB Yep, still an experiment. What we learn with books can inform what tweaks will be needed to expand it.
Great idea for the use of emojis @manton - though I had to look up the Control–Command–Space shortcut for the macOS Character Viewer so that I'll be able to make use of it away from iOS!
@TheDimPause I use a little app called Rocket on my Mac that makes this really easy. You can type a colon and start typing the name, just like in some apps (e.g. Slack) to find an emoji. Rocket makes it work in any text field on your Mac.
@manton I love this! I thought I was ironic that you started it almost right after I went through and posted the books I read this last couple years on my microblog. I used 📖 instead of 📚 though. 🤷🏻♂️
@bsn Thanks! I might include a couple of these other book variations to mean the same thing. The open book emoji is nice too.
@manton Thank you for inspiring us to read more books. The emoji as a hashtag idea is really clever, I like it a lot! 📚
@manton I like this feature. Looking forward to more. In the future, I will definitely be using this when I write my quick book reviews.
@manton Out of curiosity, how will this work for subjects that don’t have a standard emoji? The next time Apple announces something big, you’d presumably want to be able to organize those conversations so folks can discover them. But no (Apple logo) emoji exists...
@schuth Good question. Doesn't have to be strictly emoji, so we could support the Apple logo too. (Not sure what will happen for other platforms.)
@manton I realized one of the nifty things about using emoji is that you don't have to worry about localization on the post-collecting end; you can just look for the emoji and every language will start appearing in the topic list as those languages and their posts start appearing on Micro.blog. Well done!
@manton And now I am seriously reconsidering using Goodreads at all. See, this is what happens when you say "Open web is best." and then actually follow through with your actions. Thanks for continuing to set a great example.
@simonmumbles Thank you. I've only recently started using Goodreads and may still use it to track my book list, but ignore the social aspects of it. I think using 📚 on Micro.blog works better than a separate friends list for me.
@manton I've always been on-and-off with Goodreads, much like with every other social network tbh. The way in which Micro.blog stops the depth of features from becoming cruft hits the exact spot for me; the social layer is implemented in such a way that it doesn't comprimise the ownership side of things.
I suppose I might go back to social networks but I doubt it'll ever be more than via cross-posting and just to signal boost, if at all.
Uh... yeah, so I further approve I guess. Heh.