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GitHub Discussions Beta

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Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#81

Post by bmn__ »

chrisseaton wrote: post #69
kodablah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found trees encourage forked conversations in a good way. While I don't find them hard to follow, I do find revisiting them to be a bit difficult. While it can seem difficult to follow the overarching topic given a set of trees, it's near impossible to have any in-depth discussions about more than one thing in flat threads. I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the succes…

Here's a concrete example where I think it goes wrong. You say something, and two people respond. There's one thing to say in response to both people - maybe they both misunderstood part of your point. Which comment do you respond to? On places like HN people seem to feel the need to respond to both branches, which causes exponential growth if it continues, compared to if you could respond to the two comments as one.…

> Maybe we need a comment DAG instead?

Internet messages (Usenet, email) already work that way. If you want to reply to multiple messages, this is easily possible.

Most users are not familiar with it because the widely implemented threading algorithm prunes the graph into a tree for display purposes. https://ddg.gg/?q=jwz+email+threading

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#82

Post by rolleiflex »

saagarjha wrote: post #77
rolleiflex wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open…

> To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.

Yeah, I know how that goes. Our formatting is pretty neutral — we just offer a good readable text size, make everyone use the same font and colours so no one is writing in hot pink 16pt Comic Sans, allow Markdown, have a mobile design and dark mode in the emails. I've personally spent the midnight hours to make sure this all works nicely with existing email.

It's an ongoing battle but not an intractable one. It's not perfect, but we've gotten it to pretty good already. It definitely survives being quoted and otherwise chomped on by Gmail, Mail.app, Outlook, iOS and Android mail clients, which are our five main test cases.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#83

Post by DangerousPie »

kitd wrote: post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

> One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread.

Uhm... have you ever heard of a little-known site called "Hackernews"?

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#84

Post by nordsieck »

kvark wrote: post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

> Sponsors is about to hit Patreon

At least for Patreon, they have a large enough user base, this won't hit them particularly hard.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#85

Post by asadkn »

It is only natural progression here. Heck, I am surprised it took this long. Considering the fact that in many Github projects, "Issues" were being used for discussions, questions, often tangents.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#86

Post by dtech »

kvark wrote: post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

Replaced is incorrect, they're simply competing. Trello and CircleCI are alive and kicking.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#87

Post by andybak »

animalnewbie wrote: post #79
treve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

Quite the contrary experience, it's specially hostile to knowledgeable people. My last 3-4 questions were all closed because I wrote targeting experts and the mods had trouble understanding what I was asking.

Do you have an example?

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#88

Post by m4rtink »

samatman wrote: post #65
balladeer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering whether Github issues (and now discussions) are exportable? *Just found the answer: https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/

I find it maddening that git hasn't added a standard mechanism for metadata. Commit comments are metadata. Tags are metadata. Why isn't there a general-purpose metadata plumbing so we can attach issues, merge and commit discussions, and wikis, in a portable way? No, being able to export from one centralized repository and import into another isn't good enough.

The Pagure git forge keeps all project metadata (issues, PRs, etc.) on git, so you have it all if your Pagure instance ever goes down & can easily move it to another instance:

https://pagure.io/pagure

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#89

Post by viraptor »

treve wrote: post #35
kvark wrote: post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

That's not what the close button does and it typically requires a few confirmations from other users, so you can't close things randomly yourself. Almost all close votes are reasonable - have a look at the "close vote" moderation queue.

It may seem beginner hostile sometimes, but in practice it's mostly: you can't have a personal approach to everyone when looking through hundreds of messages.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#90

Post by sercand »

kitd wrote: post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

Gitlab or Slack style threading would be better option for discussions instead of tree-view.
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