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StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

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Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#41

Post by codinghorror »

tferris wrote: post #3

"Forums are the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet. But they matter," I totally agree with Jeff and do welcome any innovation in this space but it's hard to imagine more efficient comment/forum systems than the Reddit/HN style (I like even more the Reddit style since it offers more features and hides irrelevant or long discussions in a better way). I'm not much a fan of the linear, non-nested, old-f…

Part of my working hypothesis is that the reason flat forums are so ubiquitous is their simplicity -- I think larger audiences just don't "get" threading at all, and there are a lot of ways for misused (and even correctly used) threading to actively harm the discussion.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#42

Post by codinghorror »

damncabbage wrote: post #14
iends wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really liked nested conversations, personally.

But conversations are nested anyway. In real life you rarely have discussions with more than ten people at once. Even when you do, it's frustrating as you have to switch between topics instead of following the "threads" of the conversation. (And inevitably someone doesn't shut up and derails the conversation in a particular way.) So what do current systems do? * Go for broke, go full threading (eg. HN, Reddit, Usenet…

Ours is essentially the twitter model, with a few tweaks. I think a hybrid approach -- flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context -- is best.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#43

Post by codinghorror »

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…

Excellent, if you need any help from us, ping us on meta.discourse or on GitHub!

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#44

Post by Executor »

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.

Yes "no nesting". Read Jeff Atwood's article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or.... It happens to by my opinion as well.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#45

Post by jacoblyles »

codinghorror wrote: post #39
tomdale wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It's especially hard to come back later and see what's new. Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically. If, however, you'd like to change the topic, there's a "Reply a…

notice that one of the flag reasons is "off-topic", to give the poster (if threshold reached) a gentle nudge that hey, maybe they can click "Reply as new Topic" and take it there. Or mods can click "select posts", click click click the posts they want, then click "move to new topic". And topics created either way are bidirectionally linked, so you can follow different related tangents back and forth without breaking…

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 conversational tangents. You just fold them.

Notice how I didn't have to quote you for others to follow our discussion? That's because our conversation is nested :) If this were a flat forum, my original post would be at the top of the page, your reply would be in the middle, and this comment would be at the bottom. Multiple other conversations would be in between. And we would have to quote each other to have any chance of following the conversation.

Flat forums are strictly worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#46

Post by dietrichepp »

I don't care what makes it different from PHPBB. We know that PHPBB is horribly broken for a wide variety of uses (and incredibly useful in its niches). I want to know what makes Discourse different from Google Wave. Google Wave is a lot more recent, and has already bubbled and fizzed out, and the idea that you can invite people into conversations, the idea of unlimited flow, reminds me much more of Google Wave than anything else.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#47

Post by gojomo »

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 (and reordering by votes or activity) works well for divergent discussions: expressing views, exploring the possibility space, brainstorming. Or: exhibition.

Flat (and stably ordered by time) offers some hope for a convergence of viewpoints, or at least shared-narrative and common-knowledge. Or: deliberation.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#48

Post by eurleif »

gojomo wrote: post #47
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 (and reordering by votes or activity) works well for divergent discussions: expressing views, exploring the possibility space, brainstorming. Or: exhibition . Flat (and stably ordered by time) offers some hope for a convergence of viewpoints, or at least shared-narrative and common-knowledge. Or: deliberation .

Which are presumably both useful to have within the same community. Maybe forum software should allow individual threads to be made flat or nested, at the discretion of the person creating the thread?

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#49

Post by mmahemoff »

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.

I don't think nesting has become any more or less popular since 2004. Slashdot was nesting a lot earlier than 2004, as was email and usenet.

At the other end, Google Plus comments don't nest, and nor have the typical PHP forums added it.

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