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FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

mcnutt.in

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Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#51

Post by kolinko »

duxup wrote: post #48

I like the idea although I can't help but think the visualization sort of draws me to comments with lots of responses....and on HN that is ok. On sites that heavily rely / encourage getting responses such as Twitter I worry it just encourages posts that are trite, obnoxious and such as those get the most responses. Granted this is a visualization tool so it's not "responsible" for issues that are largely human / plat…

+1.

I like that mini-summaries on the left-hand side ("subconversations about XX"), but the graph view seems to prioritise responses with the maximum amount of comments.

E.g. if there is a flame-war going on in one of the subthreads, it will be more visible than a highly rated comment with a few interesting subcomments.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#52

Post by oh_sigh »

ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

Off topic but your home page(https://www.mcnutt.in/) has a typo in bold: LANGUGAGES instead of LANGUAGES.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#53

Post by sitkack »

This is freak'n awesome. Please, we need to do more experiments like this. There are small usability nits about things going out of focus and changing when you move the mouse but for the most part, it is pretty good.

I'd like to see sentiment analysis color code the nodes and maybe node to node distance represent response time. And link width represent number of characters in post.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#54

Post by davidy123 »

I'm sorry to be a cynic. I love graphs. The web is a graph, web pages are graphs, linked data, machine learning all use graphs. And they can look really cool. I especially loved the hyperbolic graphs that were the rage a decade or two ago. I don't know how many projects I've dropped this type of viz in. Then removed it, because there are three different reactions from end users: It's scary and confusing, it looks neat but it's never used, or it looks neat and it's clicked on a few times. I hope as we move into massive data they become digestable for ordinary UI, but until then they're mostly actually useful for specific edge cases.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#55

Post by jcims »

ventedfins wrote: post #12
taliesinb wrote: post #3

Funny 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!

Have you thought about extending the graph to include links found in the individual comments? Internal links to HN could surface those threads and external link nodes could show all stories with said link to find related content.

Unrelated, might be fun to surface some kind of iconography to indicate semantics of the content (e.g. flames/smilies/etc)

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#56

Post by ventedfins »

JohnFen wrote: post #49
jolmg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/forum-explorer/issues/68 JohnFen's may more accurately be this other issue: https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/forum-explorer/issues/69 I also made an issue for how it looks on Chrome in Android: https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/forum-explorer/issues/70 On checking Firefox on Android, I wonder if this is the platform JohnFen was trying: https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/forum-explorer/issues…

Yes, my issue appears to be #69. I'm using Waterfox on a desktop.

i think these issues should be addressed now? let me know if not

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#57

Post by ventedfins »

kolinko wrote: post #51
duxup wrote: post #48

I like the idea although I can't help but think the visualization sort of draws me to comments with lots of responses....and on HN that is ok. On sites that heavily rely / encourage getting responses such as Twitter I worry it just encourages posts that are trite, obnoxious and such as those get the most responses. Granted this is a visualization tool so it's not "responsible" for issues that are largely human / plat…

+1. I like that mini-summaries on the left-hand side ("subconversations about XX"), but the graph view seems to prioritise responses with the maximum amount of comments. E.g. if there is a flame-war going on in one of the subthreads, it will be more visible than a highly rated comment with a few interesting subcomments.

I know what y'all mean. As i've used the extension myself I find myself reading a really different type of comments then when i read linearly. It makes it easier to find people have discussions (which are, admittedly, often arguments), and it makes it easier to see when a couple people are just all over the conversation.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#58

Post by ventedfins »

oh_sigh wrote: post #52
ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi hackernews! I'm the author of this site/chrome extension/app. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have/field any comments

Off topic but your home page( https://www.mcnutt.in/ ) has a typo in bold: LANGUGAGES instead of LANGUAGES.

:8 someone else actually went to the trouble of filing me a PR https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/pull/...

I really wish my tooling for spell checking while writing jsx-y code was better, i feel like this happens a lot

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#59

Post by solipsism »

mthoms wrote: post #20
ventedfins wrote: post #2

Hi 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.

People are going to build their apps where there are users, whether it's Chrome apps or iOS apps or Windows games. Asking people not to is the wrong move. It will lose almost every time.

Re: FeX: Forum Explorer – Rethinking how we interact with threaded conversations

#60

Post by macleginn »

ventedfins wrote: post #58
oh_sigh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic but your home page( https://www.mcnutt.in/ ) has a typo in bold: LANGUGAGES instead of LANGUAGES.

:8 someone else actually went to the trouble of filing me a PR https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/pull/... I really wish my tooling for spell checking while writing jsx-y code was better, i feel like this happens a lot

There is another typo in the first tip: s/seperate/separate
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