Some authors would prefer that the default comment sorting be Newest instead of Best (or Most Liked). Please allow the default to be customizable.
I think there is room for nuance here. For example, Newest might be the preferred default sorting until the post has reached a certain age.
Are you saying that you do not want a Reddit-style discussion everywhere, with upvotes, hiveminds, silo-ing, etc.? To do this you must allow infinite sub-threading and upvotes—and if you have upvotes, you want those upvotes to do something by default, either to hide comments (as with Slashdot and Ars Technica) or to sort (as with Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads, Reddit, and YouTube).
I think that this sad state of conversation is the goal. Ghost has no option to set comments to be flat and chronological, never did and probably never will. The team has worked hard to implement infinite threading and upvotes before allowing anyone to adjust the levels of sub-threading. The perspective is perhaps that Best is the . . . best way to sort things.
The steering team is making a bad-faith argument when I see a post that says that the hiding of downvotes makes it so that people are not self-censoring.
Did someone have a job as a lawyer/attorney/barrister (?) for organized crime?
Recorded dialogue:
TONY: We would never do anything illegal or violent if you refuse our services. We just worry about an unfortunate accident befalling your establishment. It would be a shame if someone mysterious burned down your shop later this night while you had no one to look out for your business.
“As you can hear from the excerpt, ladies and gentlemen, my clients never broke any laws. They are honest entrepreneurs who were organizing a community watch program while raising funds to pay for security guards, good men with kids to feed. Everyone had the freedom to turn down the offer of protection.”
I’m not saying anything except that we would like to be able to choose the initial comment sorting and not have it always start as Best.
My opening sentence there was sarcastic because I wanted to feign indignation at your desire to have something other than the “Best” sorting. Certainly, if you want the option for something else to exist, then you are not convinced that “Best” is actually the best for everyone everywhere—no exceptions. (Yes, an individual site visitor can change to Newest, but 80% of people will just use whatever default exists in 80% of their activities.)
Your idea, no matter how much I agree with it, will probably not fly. I mocked not you but the perspective of someone who does not know any better or outright prefers Reddit / new YouTube and so forth.
The history of Ghost’s development indicated to me that your request for other sorting options will likely fall on deaf eras. The developers of Ghost will probably not support other modes. They worked too hard on a workflow that is fundamentally incompatible with your desires, and they are stubborn enough to stick to their position. (The strong will is a double-edged sword as we can see.)
The sequence of events:
The system of upvotes, infinite threading, and preferential views (as some replies will get buried) taken together clashes with anything that is not the Reddit/YouTube/Threads style.
Far from seeing “Best” as something alongside Oldest and Newest, the announcements beam with pride for the implementation of upvotes. Reddit does evince even a tiny fraction of that enthusiasm and still defaults to the sorting of replies on the basis of upvotes.
The best use of your time, @thriveghost, may be to jettison Ghost commenting for the foreseeable future. Replace it with something else.
I lack the know-how to tell you a specific software to use and how to write the code injection code, but I do know this: Jeff Atwood (https://blog.codinghorror.com) uses Ghost but replaced the Ghost commenting system with an integration to discussion forums. Specifically, he uses Discourse. This requires you to manage your own Ghost (?) and be good with coding, which many of us (like me) are not.
To date, the only places I have ever seen that do threading to infinite levels and have upvoting but do not sort by upvotes are two, Slashdot and Bluesky. Notably though, Bluesky only does this after you go out of your way to change from the default, but these changes only affect your own view and never the view for others. You have to reveal the sub-threaded underlying reality of Bluesky by setting replies to Tree mode and sorting to Oldest first or Newest first.
Your idea has only three votes as of this moment. I see two explanations:
During my time in product teams working on the biggest brands and sites in the world, I always heard it was 90%. Only users on either end of the spectrum ever changes the default settings. Which is why the default is fundamentally important to get right. Every single time.
And here is where you are falling into a trap you just setup yourself. The developers of Ghost is the core team, you, me and everyone else. All of us can produce the necessary code and submit it as a PR to the code base of Ghost itself. If it passes all quality checks and aligns with the mission of the software itself, it will surely be part of the final product.
I will add a third explanation. The population and activity on this forum is pretty low. Finding a specific idea and then giving it a vote is a very rare user journey around these parts of the internet.
Going back to the original idea: To me this does not sound like a complicated implementation. The question I have are what value it will bring to Ghost itself. How many instances of Ghost have comments enabled? How many of those have enough comments regularly to warrant more options in the sorting of the comments? If there are 5 comments on a post, there is no upside in having multiple options of displaying them in a preset order. If there are say 100 comments or more, then there is a much bigger upside in adding additional ways of sorting the comments.
With all that said. If you want it done, code it up and submit it as a PR in GitHub. Take it from there.
[Erm, actually] 90%
Whatever it is. I meant the vast majority in all walks of life. It was a ballpark.
And here is where you are falling into a trap you just setup yourself. The developers of Ghost is the core team, you, me and everyone else. All of us can produce the necessary code and submit it as a PR to the code base of Ghost itself. If it passes all quality checks and aligns with the mission of the software itself, it will surely be part of the final product.
Ghost has rejected strong patches for features that the core, very understandably, does not want to maintain.
I cannot remember the exact thread in GitHub, but a reply to a pull request for something got the rejection for this reason. The Ghost Foundation manages/supervises Ghost (the software). If people buy Ghost(Pro) hosting, then they are paying money, which then means that the core team (which is not me or just anyone else) has to support its software and stand by it. Even if a nice feature gets added in, if it is an extra feature, then that raises problems. If no guarantee exists for the original contributor to keep on maintaining that feature in perpetuity, then the managers of the project feel obliged to reject it.
This may all change one day, but because Ghost still depends on the hosting service sales from a Singapore-based company, it limits itself to Stripe and Sinch’s Mailgun, for example.
Ghost, the project, has been careful to take things outside its narrows scope and use an abstraction layer and/or custom code edits. The project, for example, lets you replace comments with Discourse, but only under a specific workflow that one particular person advocated and wrote for, and the end user must manually add the code in the theme.
In other words, Ghost itself does not maintain this.
If Discourse, the software, got abandoned and stopped working because of bitrot, then no customers could blame Ghost (the company) when things do not work. Let’s say that Discourse does begin to “die.” The Ghost company can head off the problems by removing the webpage that details how to set this up.
Even if somebody is willing to contribute code and the patch looks good, the core team is not obliged to accept it.