Improving Refind’s comments

Markdown, highlights, mentions, sharing, and more.

Stowe Boyd pioneered comments on Refind. When commenting was hard, he did it anyway — but asked for more. We finally listened and improved. Stowe likes it, and he promised us you’ll like it too…

In summary, here’s what we improved:

• Markdown: You can now format your comments using Markdown.

• Comments in feeds: We’ll show a comment below links in feeds (and emails). On a profile page, it’s the first comment by that user. Everywhere else, it’s the first comment ever.

• Sharing on the web: After you’ve written a nice comment, you might want to share it on Twitter or Facebook. This use case is now supported nicely: there’s a comment URL which shows your comment on first position, highlights it, and shows a nice preview text.

• Highlights: When you select text on a web page in Chrome, you can save it as a highlight using the Chrome extension. Highlights can now also be edited.

• Notifications: You’ll get notifications for certain comments, e.g., when a good friend comments on a link you saved (a neural network learns how close you are with all of your friends — the more interactions and the more links you have in common, the closer.)
• Mentions: You can mention people in comments and replies (e.g., “Check this out, @twitter_name”). If you mention people who follow you, they’ll get a notification.
• Replies: You can respond to comments.
• Private/public: You can make your comments private or public.
• Search: You‘ll find your own comments when searching in your links.
• Summaries: When you start your comment with “summary” or “tl;dr”, it’s considered a summary and treated differently (e.g., different preview text) and we have some ideas on how to make them more useful.

Have fun commenting. And write summaries — people love them!