StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse • Hacker News Board

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#61

Post by rplnt » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 11:05 AM UTC

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.

You can only show new comments, highlight them, even view them in flat mode. Threaded forum naturally separates subtopics while flat forum is just a big mess. Also old subthreads naturally die so the new stuff is usually in the new nodes. And you can also just view subtrees to follow certain discussion.

edit: In yesterday's discussion I posted some advantages of a discussion system based on tree structure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175660

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#62

Post by johnpowell » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 11:05 AM UTC

koralatov wrote: post #53

jacoblyles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear forums can't achieve depth of discussion. Discourse only supports one layer of replies with its slight improvement on an archaic quoting mechanism. Flat forums have to worry more about staying on topic because all the conversations happening in a thread are thrown together . There's no "flow". Posts responding to each other and posts responding to the OP are all jarbled up. On reddit you don't worry about conv…

Flat forums are strictly worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion. Being someone who has, in the past, been active on several different `traditional' forums, I'd agree with that. You end up with a complete mess of people quoting posts that can sometimes be several pages back, or -- worse -- replying to posts several pages back without quoting, which just causes confusion.

At least for me I hate nested threads. And even worse is when upvoted stuff gets pushed up to the top. On HN I wait to read the comments until there is about 50 of them. Then I never visit the comments on the article again. Maybe there is a way to just read the new comments without digging through the stuff I have already read and I haven't found it. And this is also why I never respond if I make a comment here. It is simply a pain in the ass to find what I wrote again.

But I have no problems on metafilter that is a single (flat) page with sometimes thousands of comments.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#63

Post by orangethirty » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 11:21 AM UTC

sysop073 wrote: post #37

orangethirty wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot me an email. The useless website is on purpose.

I can see how your empty website will be crushing their fully-functional one any day now

It has not launched.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#64

Post by DigitalSea » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 12:01 PM UTC

I admire Jeff as a person, the whole Stack Exchange network is amazing but Discourse needs some serious thinking applied to it. If Jeff wants to release a decent forum application, he should look to Vanilla for inspiration: http://vanillaforums.org/ — in my opinion, Vanilla is probably the cleanest and best forum application out there today. PHPBB and MyBB feel horribly dated and vBulletin is expensive and looks like it hasn't been updated in about 15 years.

The forum market is ripe for disruption on the same scale Wordpress disrupted the CMS market, fancy Javascript is not enough to disrupt the market. I personally find infinite scrolling to be buggy and highly annoying when you're scrolling and trying to read text, then BAM! scrollbar gets longer and the page jumps.

Simplicity is the key, not a large number of features and copious amounts of Javascript unnecessarily added in. Discourse as it currently stands doesn't impress me on the same scale Stack Overflow did at least not in its current form.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#65

Post by mattmanser » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

troymc wrote: post #26

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.)

They've said in the other thread a couple of days ago one of the long term aims is to make this super easy to install and as part of that they want to help make Rails super easy to install.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#66

Post by PavlovsCat » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 1:02 PM UTC

If you go through the list in that wired articles of things that supposedly set this apart, you'll find that in most cases, that stuff already exists. That leaves two things:

"a “best of thread” view, which shows the best reply to a particular thread based on unspecified factors" & "“aggregated links” view, which displays all outbound links mentioned in a thread, plus how many times they’ve been clicked"

Wow. This is turning from puzzling to genuinely funny. You know, two things anyone could add about to any existing mature forum software in about an afternoon, and which they don't, because they do nothing to improve online discourse. And Wired writes an article about it.. love of money truly is the root of all unintentional comedy.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#67

Post by lazyjones » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 1:43 PM UTC

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.

He hates threads (see other blog entry: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla...).

Or, to put it differently: he confuses discussions with guestbooks (he prefers the latter).

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#68

Post by lazyjones » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 1:48 PM UTC

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.

> The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off

False.

In the early days, browser designers took care to use different link colors for visited/unvisited links (gasp!). Nowdays, in the age of fancy JS gimmicks and contrast-less design, we are overriding this functionality because it apparently looks better (if you don't see the extra information).

Forums with diffent link colors for visited/unvisited posts and threading work pretty well. It's not to hard to implement something like this with JS (unless one wants all posts to be open/visible as default).

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#69

Post by Kiro » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #36

dmazin wrote: post #22

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…

I hate phpbb and their ilk and use them often in forums for the tight, obscure subcultures that I'm a part of. I don't think phpbb gives a sense of community. I think a sense of community makes people willing to put up with the barfy fugliness of phpbb. On the other, discourse actually just seems to have a different kind of ugliness rather than a good design or a good interface. Why do they all have a banner/header t…

You must have a really small screen with low resolution.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#70

Post by marbletiles » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 2:23 PM UTC

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.

Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost.

All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.