Nice. I wonder if this something like this could be applied to code, to easier get a overview of how classes and functions relate to each other.
FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
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Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#12Funny story, I had almost exactly the same idea in 2013 and prototyped it in Mathematica (probably a lot of people have had this idea). Here's a screenshot of some random thread that I happened to visualize (comments were visible as tooltips in my rough and ready implementation): https://imgur.com/a/9xfw6cA (color represents common authorship, size is comment length). I didn't have the Javascript chops to do anything…
I've talked to a few people who've had similar ideas! In fact there is a pretty long history of people in visualization/hci communities creating applications like this. There's an extended abstract that goes along with this work that details this history.
Dropping the root node is an interesting idea!
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#13Although I believe it was a good idea to remove them, I miss the vote score shown on comments. I had a script that would highlight the top comments. This would frequently reveal insightful comments 2 or 3 levels deep in a random thread I would have otherwise missed.
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#14Ooh, this is neat, thanks for sharing! I made something similar for Twitter conversations (shameless plug: https://treeverse.app ) so it's neat to see the UI decisions you made, especially the timeline interaction.
I love treeverse! I spent a lot of time looking at treeverse when I was building forum explorer. Did you see that it got used in this paper https://mw18.mwconf.org/paper/to-journey-in-twitter-canoes-m...
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#15Slight issue, graph node highlight color should be the same as comment highlight color.
Some of the nodes in a vertical tree, for example here[1], are very close to each other while there is room for them to be a bit more separated.
Comment scrollbar goes beyond window edge.
Firefox 67.0b18 64bit Windows 10.
Overall looks neat and interesting, thanks for sharing.
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#16Reminds me a little of the "Wikum" project that was worked on at MIT: http://wikum.csail.mit.edu/
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#17Nice. I wonder if this something like this could be applied to code, to easier get a overview of how classes and functions relate to each other.
Visual Studio provides a feature called Code Map. To create them you need VS Enterprise, but the other versions can open them.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/modeling/map-d...
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#18That page has a major layout issue for me: it appears to have a fixed height with no vertical scrollbar, so the bottom portion of the page is completely inaccessible to me even if I maximize the window. Is that part of what you're trying to test, or is it just an unimportant artifact of the test page? Also, I'm not actually on board with the visualization -- it just makes everything more confusing and harder to follo…
The bottom cutoff happens intermittently for me, too (e.g. when viewing the graph for these comments). When it does, changing the layout to TreeX under settings seems to help.
In general, the different layouts might be more to your liking.
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#19Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments
Thanks for sharing. I'd suggest adding a bit of descriptive prose / "about" / readme / FAQ on the linked page. Also, its layout is suboptimal on mobile safari.
Unfortunately this work isn't really targeted at mobile devices. It seems to work reasonably well on tablet size device (IMO), but I wasn't really sure how to address phones. I think there was some work in the earlier 00's that tried to use treemaps as a way to explore social graphs on phones that had styluses but I haven't really heard of stuff since then
Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations
#20Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments
Very cool.
I've got to admit though, I'm a little jaded towards "Chrome only" extensions. Is there a reason you couldn't build this in Firefox?
As web developers, we've really got to stop this practice lest the web become further fragmented.
Anyways, I don't want to come down on you specifically - I realize this is probably just an MVP. You did a great job.