fakir

Right, they are not meant to show posts in equal manner - freshness & hotness do matter in engagement and are indeed shown higher compared to other posts and comments. But still, a few posts from last night might have only a couple of comments, but since it’s already a few hours old, we don’t reply or engage with it. We judge engagement by these timestamps and so removing timestamps will lift engagement on all posts & comments.

I’d like to suggest removing timestamps on all comments, like you could still toggle a button to see the timestamp of a comment if you wanted to, but the timestamp shown on default doesn’t serve any purpose other than tell the users how fresh or how stale the conversation is. When the conversation is say only a few hours old, many users will choose not to engage because we assume the conversation is over and there isn’t any point in engaging further, so we skip altogether and move on. I can tell from my own experience I’ve done this more than a few times, I’m sure others have as well. When you only have a few thousand users across the world, unlike Reddit, we must preserve the freshness of the few conversations we do have so as to increase engagement from all.

A goalkeeper in soccer or similar. It’s a thankless job, you save 10 shots, nobody notices. But you miss one and you’ll be called a bum by your own fans. As opposed to a forward striker, who might miss 10 shots, nobody notices. But you make one and you’ll be a hero being paraded on shoulders.