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StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

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Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#21

Post by Androsynth »

stch2 wrote: post #20
jacoblyles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find…

The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.

I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new.

local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#22

Post by dmazin »

discourse's design entirely misses the charm and feeling of community that "ugly" forums like phpbb offer. This just looks bland. Maybe it can work for technical or support forums but not real communities.

In general it seems like a lot of design fails to understand the difference between a clean bathroom and a charming but messy living room. You do not want the former.

It makes me think of Spolsky on what a singles bar designed by Nielsen would look like: clean and the menus would have 16pt Arial type. But it would be empty because everyone would be at the gross dive bar across the street having fun.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#23

Post by wahnfrieden »

libria wrote: post #18

Atwood has previously been a big proponent of OpenID[1]. Why no implementation here? After signing up for try.discourse.org I now have to re-register to post on meta.discourse.org as well. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...

Probably because OpenID has largely been recognized as a misstep.

Separate logins for try and meta is just silly though.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#24

Post by runn1ng »

jacoblyles wrote: post #7

No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.

Nesting is both good and bad.

For hacker news it's good, because those are more "asocial" conversations - I don't know who I am replying to, I don't personally know any of you folks and I don't really remember to who I replied.

However, a lot of forums (phpbb and the like) are more "social" - you get to know the people, you want to read what they have to write even if it's not a reply to you.

You just want to follow the whole conversation. Usually it's doable, because the forums are rather small in audience, people know each other and so on.

Yes, it wouldn't work for reddit or digg or slashdot because there are tons of people there and you just can't read everything. But for a smaller forum? Yes, I want PhpBB style conversation rather than nested one.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#25

Post by robryan »

jacoblyles wrote: post #7

No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.

Back in the early 2000's I much preferred a flat forum. As I remember VBulletin had flat/ nested or a hybrid of both. When I was designing my own forum software I went with flat.

I think it really depends on the topics and the audience though. For something like Hacker News, flat would be a nightmare as it is such a large loosely connected community and each submission usually generates comments that are only loosely connected.

A smaller online community, maybe a few thousand where all the regular contributors know each other can have flat work fine depending on the topics discussed.

What is the answer? Probably the ability to configure. One thing I can say I do hate is nesting to one level, this confuses people more as the first reply will be nested then subsequent replies to the first nested level will be awkwardly placed at that first level also. (Guess I am mainly thinking of Disqus here)

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#26

Post by troymc »

themgt wrote: post #5

We got a basic demo online (w/o API keys for 3rd party auth, and there's some broken stuff): http://discourse.a.pogoapp.com/ We'd like to ultimately contribute back some 12factor-esque code (e.g. ENV vars instead of YAML for config, Procfile to define processes). It was interesting reading the comments on the Metafilter thread about how the app seems promising but difficult to host compared to shared hosting+PHP: htt…

The relative difficulty of getting hosting for a Ruby app vs. getting hosting for a PHP app may work in their favour: they intend to offer managed hosting akin to Wordpress.com. (WordPress.com can be used for free, but there are all sorts of paid extras.)

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#27

Post by cpsales »

Androsynth wrote: post #21
stch2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.

I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new. local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.

There is the hckrnews [1] browser extension that does exactly this for news.ycombinator.com. I believe the reddit enhancement suite also does this, but I've only heard about it since I don't use it. I do know, however, that reddit gold members get this functionality via the more-inefficient server-side magic. The coolest thing about the reddit gold implementation is that it allows you to select highlighting of comments from different times of past views so if you happened to visit but not read the new comments they're not wiped out on you.

About the original topic of conversion, discourse, I think I really need to see the site without all the cruft before deciding much about it. As it is, it's far too busy for me. I really hate this trend of "modern" web development, but the developers have stated that it should be themeable by those who deploy it.

Funny thing is, a couple ideas I've had myself about possible features of discussion forms appear to be present there but I dislike them already. Prime among this is the ability to spawn off a discussion thread from a main post to its own subpost. I always though that subthreads tend to get derailed to the point of needing to be a separate discussion. I think that what really matters is how the surrounding communities use such features. It being a playpen that is wiped every day, with users coming in to test features over and over might be painting my experience a bit.

[1] http://hckrnews.com/about.html

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#28

Post by runn1ng »

themgt wrote: post #5

We got a basic demo online (w/o API keys for 3rd party auth, and there's some broken stuff): http://discourse.a.pogoapp.com/ We'd like to ultimately contribute back some 12factor-esque code (e.g. ENV vars instead of YAML for config, Procfile to define processes). It was interesting reading the comments on the Metafilter thread about how the app seems promising but difficult to host compared to shared hosting+PHP: htt…

I tried to register and login into your demo site, it worked, but I can't post anything.

Also the metafilter post doesn't open for me.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#29

Post by moe »

stch2 wrote: post #20
jacoblyles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find…

The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.

nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off

We have the technology, we can do both!

The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets.

The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me.

The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years...

What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#30

Post by gabipurcaru »

I really like the StackExchange family. But this is weak, IMO, for some reasons:

1. A typical forum looks simpler to me than this. If they're going to reinvent forums, it should be intuitive

2. AJAX? Yea, fine, but only as means to an end

3. "Discourse is designed from the beginning for high resolution touch devices." -- Tried on my nexus 7 and it looked bad, I had to turn on the laptop. Not all mobile devices can be described as "high resolution touch devices".

4. Their key features: "Conversations, not pages", "Get notifications when mentioned", "Simple, but with context", "Remembers your place", "Reply while you read", "Reply as a linked topic", "Real time updates", "Links automatically expand", "Bring your friends", "Paste to share images", "Log in with … anything", "Moderation that scales with the community", "Categories that grow with you", "Search that actually works", "Simple metrics", "Your stuff belongs to you", "Comprehensive API", "No app required". -- These are all welcome features, but they don't reinvent anything IMO, more like an incremental improvement. Most of them could just as well be implemented as plugins to traditional forums.

That being said, forums need to be reinvented, but Discourse doesn't do that.

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