Removal of Community Notes support in 30.0.0 (6)
The beta release notes have:
Improved: Removed Community Notes visual filter and from the More menu.
I recognise the current (stable) community notes support doesn’t work well at all but I’m not sure how simply removing it is classed as an improvement.
What is the intention here? Is it not possible to fix the current implementation?
Comments
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Graham Criddle said:
I recognise the current (stable) community notes support doesn’t work well at all but I’m not sure how simply removing it is classed as an improvement.
It's not an improvement if you're using Community Notes. But if you're not using it, removing the feature removes clutter and makes it slightly simpler to find things that are important to you. And that means it is an improvement for most people, because most people don't use Community Notes.
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I don't know how I would have categorized it if I were writing the release notes, but I can speak to the intent:
- Choice confusion. The presence of the choice has caused confusion for users since the feature's inception. Which notes system do I use, and when? (And then follow-on questions: What is a Faithlife group? How do I make one? Why would I want to? etc.) To the extent that eliminating the choice eliminates all that potential confusion in a single stroke, you could say it's a UX improvement.
- Bug fixes. One way to "fix" bugs in a feature (this one had more than its fair share) is by simply by making it go away.
It was certainly possible to fix the current implementation because "anywhere is walking distance if you have the time" (Steven Wright), but our analytics showed virtually no usage of the feature in the trailing two years. (The most common community notes are 'text' and 'asdf'.)
So we're removing the UI from the user-facing applications, one by one, but the historical data remains accessible at faithlife.com, for now.
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Jinx, but Mark used fewer words.
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Personally, I have never used, nor do I wish to use, Community Notes.
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Thanks all - really useful insights.
And I am totally on board with removing community notes - particularly if the level of usage is so low - but I guess I was struggling with removing functionality being classed as an improvement.
It seems more like a choice to remove functionality that is no longer used in any significant way.
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