Loomio

Bring back likeable comments

DS Dennis Schubert Public Seen by 120

Some time ago, it was possible to like comments. That feature is now removed due to some reasons. What do you think about bringing it back?

-> Decision has been made: YES, bring back likeable comments.
GitHub Issue: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/2999

FS

Florian Staudacher Sun 21 Oct 2012 6:42PM

just for reference: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/2999
... where we also brought up the problem, that the 'likes' table is one of the biggest in the database - which will not become any better if we add stuff that can be liked.

JR

Jason Robinson Sun 21 Oct 2012 6:43PM

Btw, Maxwell or someone who remembers why it was removed - was it due to technical issues in the code at the time, federation or just purely a design decision?

ST

Sean Tilley Sun 21 Oct 2012 6:43PM

I seem to remember that this feature was originally taken out because it filled up the likes table in the database much faster. On a larger pod, this might cause a disproportionately large likes table, which might add some significant overhead.

While I always enjoyed comment likes as a feature, I guess what it boils down to is: "Can bigger pods handle it?", and "How can we make them federate again?"

JR

Jason Robinson Sun 21 Oct 2012 6:47PM

Well it is clear this feature should probably not be just activated as before - if in principle people want it, maybe some fresh ideas would be necessary.

It does make me wonder though how it can make the DB so big? After all, it really only needs 4 columns - id, commentid, user, timestamp .. Or am I oversimplifying :P

JH

Jonne Haß Sun 21 Oct 2012 8:59PM

Hm, wouldn't like that I think, I can already feel the confusion this would cause to users never looked at the config files. Like "Hey, Joe liked your comment too!" "He did what?"

G

goob Sun 21 Oct 2012 11:10PM

OK, so my vote would be 'implement it if someone can come up with a way to implement it which wouldn't put a load on the database of each pod'.

RF

Rasmus Fuhse Tue 23 Oct 2012 12:02PM

Sean, what is the problem of the size of the table? The only problem I can imagine is that this data might be joined for the "my activities" stream to see what the user liked. But was that stream killing the performance on jd? And even if: you could insert the comment-likes in a different table than the thread-likes; and for the "my activities" stream you only need to count the likes on the threads.

ST

Sean Tilley Tue 30 Oct 2012 9:29AM

From what I understand, the problem with the size is that it can cause a significant performance overhead on larger pods. Imagine people start liking lots and lots of comments, and for the sake of the argument, let's say that they're liking these comments every single day.

Facebook and Google+ can get away with this because they have lots of servers that they're already running on top of. Libertree gets away with this because it has a comparatively smaller userbase. Friendica, similarly, is focused on smaller hubs with more people working across the network.

While this would be fine on smaller pods, the problem is that we have a lot of bigger pods up right now, and it's going to take more than elbow grease to get proper profile exporting/importing going to mitigate the huge size of pods like joindiaspora.com.

RF

Rasmus Fuhse Tue 30 Oct 2012 11:05AM

I still think, that this is a technical problem of the implementation - not of the feature itself. Even if you have trillions of likes in your database-table, a

SELECT 1 FROM like_table WHERE comment_id = ''1234'

should still be fast enough, if you have defined an index over the primary key.

JR

Jason Robinson Tue 30 Oct 2012 1:22PM

So, is this proposal actually about returning the old implementation or making a new one?

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