Meta-rant
@devRant, instead of telling me you couldn't do something because of a connection error why not cache it and execute the command when there is a network available?

That would be to obvious!

Because we have to devote our tiny resources to high priority items and this isn't one of them.

Plus many developers are very detail-oriented and like me, personally, don't like a system indicating something went through when it really didn't.

If I go on desktop after voting on my mobile device, I expect continuity and for everything I did on mobile to have been saved and this functionality doesn't guarantee that to be the case.

So yeah, if implemented correctly it's a nice-to-have feature, but it's not clear the resources required produce any net-gain when it comes to user experience when you take into account the inherent negatives that come with it.

And just to add - while it would probably work better for some things like voting compared to commenting, there's still some issues that could arise if you close the app with these events queued up but then don't come back for a few hours. Ex. for comments that would be very weird behavior as you would have no idea your comment wasn't posted.

On one of Google developer talked they mention a good way to get around this is do give the user a visual queue indicating the comment is pending and not yet sent to server by doing something like graying out the text on the comment. The inclusion of a cancel button next to the comment would also be handy so if the user changes there mind it can be cancelled before being sent.

@hexc we actually used to have that exact thing. When you pressed a vote button, it became grayed out and then turned red once it was successfully saved.

We felt like a lot of times that seemed slow and it felt annoying (and many users said that). We made it "optimistic" (it switches right away now) because the large majority of votes go through fine so we thought there was no reason to show the saving state.

@dfox Ah fair enough, one thing I've noticed is the reply button is very close to the other buttons on the bottom of the screen, and on my phone at least I always have to be very careful not to press the other buttons like Facebook. I don't know if there's anything you can do to make it a little easier to press reply without accidentally bringing up the Facebook share dialog box.

@dfox it's understandable, thanks for answering anyway :)