I was wondering today if someone could create a great way of reading threaded discussions, a little like how Flipboard provide a different way of viewing paged content?
Web Discussions: Flat by Design
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps? To me, there seems to be a very broad divide between "here is a link to an article, discuss", and "here…
> Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. I actually almost mentioned this myself as a form of "level", but decided that it wasn't explicit enough in the navigation; I guess it would then have been valuable to just point out "maybe it should be a level". ;P The analogy to this specific gap in a traditional forum is the…
Well the downvoting was a question I had at one point (but now is answered). I have actually just noticed the FAQ and Guidelines links so that might answer many of the questions I've wondered about.
I am glad that they don't have collapsible branches here. It might be that here the discussion is generally on track and in general is educational and/or polite. On a site like Reddit though I do like the threaded as they (from the little I go there) seem to devolve into long threads with not much substance.
When I didn't find any extensions for Chrome that made comments' depth more visible (but did see many for collapsible) I learned how to write my own extension (not polished but functional) and am in the process of making another.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now, you could argue that lots of topics on a forum is a "kind" of threading... Yes, not only could I, but I have in all of my posts here so far, very explicitly. ;P A "classic web forum" has four levels: categories, forums, threads, and posts. It is critical to look at a web forum as having all of these levels if you want to compare it to a site like HN, as otherwise it is impossible to discuss how end users are a…
Slashdot isn't emulated anywhere (can you name any other site that has a discussion system like Slashdot?), and is near death from my perspective. I view Slashdot as one of the weird Galapagos animals: interesting, to be sure, but a giant evolutionary dead-end.
If you are going to be really specific, no: I can't even come up with another website that uses a discussion system like reddit's or HN's, as they both have subtle differences in all the things that apparently count, from how they hide/collapse subposts to how they handle moderation.
I mean, if all you are looking for is "infinitely-deep hierarchical discussion based around people posting links", then there are tons of clear-cut examples; the #1 difference between more "modern" sites (reddit, HN) and Slashdot is that the latter was slightly less "Web 2.0" in that you didn't vote on the articles: the articles were hand selected from the submission queue.
It is only cookie-cutter systems that are simple to install, like phpBB, Futaba, or OSQA (which as you are well aware, is not really much like StackOverflow except at first glance ;P), that you see replicated exactly all over the Internet. Otherwise, everything has their little quirks (if they didn't, they probably wouldn't exist in the first place ;P).
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#54If conversations aren't nested, how are you supposed to know what the replies are referencing? There's no effective way to talk to each other and have a real discussion. All of the 'problems' of nested comments are trivial in comparison to that. There are certainly good use cases for flat comments, and I think Stack Overflow is a good example, but there is a reason why all of the biggest discussion sites use nested c…
Massive quote trees (or, if you're considerate, a truncated quote tree) are pretty much the norm for old school forums. Sites like 4chan use links. Say what you want, but humans haven't really had a problem projecting threaded discussion onto flat forums since forever.
Indeed, 4chan's way of handling this is pretty good, too bad Jeff didn't refer it.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#55You know the model I wish web discussion would follow? Interleaved email replies. Text only, interleaved email replies is the ideal format for multi-person discussion and it's been around forever. Too bad everyone is trying to figure out a way to fix email, instead of learning how to use it properly and taking those lessons into almost every other ,odel for discussion.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#56I've always found unthreaded/single threaded conversations to be better when you want the discussion to remain civil and focused. For example, on MetaFilter or Edward Tufte's board. I wish/hope someone puts some effort into studying the difference one day though because it might just be confirmation bias on my part.
The most vile and trollish boards I know are single-threaded. It's very easy to derail a discussion.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#57"precious few threaded discussion models survive on the web." Citation needed. Seriously, you can't just casually throw out a phrase like that and not expect to back it up. HN seems to be going fine. Reddit seems to be going fine. Facebook has threads now I've noticed and it hasn't exploded in a ball of threading-related fire. I can't think of a website that has died because it uses threads, nor can I think of a webs…
My take on the entire flat versus threaded discussion is that it boils down to a few facts. 1) Outside of computers people don't experience recorded threaded discussions Instead what they experience is much like a flat forum. Everybody talks in chronological order about the current topic at hand. Some small number of side conversations are free to start, but too many and the rooms becomes noisy and all the conversati…
The primary lesson of Usenet is that Usenet is dead.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#58I very often will find a post on HN where the conversation forked in numerous unrelated directions: one thread taking about the politics, one talking about the economics, one talking about the font used on the website, and another angry that the post got enough upvotes to be on the front page in the first place. I consider it of immense value that I can skip most of the content I am not interested, and concentrate on…
Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps? To me, there seems to be a very broad divide between "here is a link to an article, discuss", and "here…
Have we also talked about first topic reply advantage? How many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade about politics to get to anything else?
How do you handle that anyway? If you make it a flat discussion, if someone brings up a new topic (in other words, a branch) then how do you respond to it if there were lots of responses between the time you wanted to reply and the time the original post was made?
If you have a long distance between the original post and the post you are responding to, then that means that the audience loses context and don't know what you are talking about - thus instead of asking "how many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade?" you now have to ask "how many people will bother to read past the first insightful comment?"
Basically, how do you keep the thread of discussion without using indenting, or expanding/contracting the discussions? I can well understand that StackExchange needs to keep discussions punchy by design, because it's about keeping information succinct in order to properly answer questions, but on a site like HN that is designed for discussion I think that flat discussions would be an absolute disaster!
Slashdot actually allows for flat discussions, try using it sometime and I think you'll see that it's a nightmare.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#59I very often will find a post on HN where the conversation forked in numerous unrelated directions: one thread taking about the politics, one talking about the economics, one talking about the font used on the website, and another angry that the post got enough upvotes to be on the front page in the first place. I consider it of immense value that I can skip most of the content I am not interested, and concentrate on…
Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps? To me, there seems to be a very broad divide between "here is a link to an article, discuss", and "here…
> [...] I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps?
There is -- in the top bar, there's a link called "ask" [1] that shows only the "here is something I am thinking, discuss" sort of submissions.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#60Ugh.
I don't know where this hate of threaded forums comes from, but these arguments are obviously based on something emotional rather than rational. If you don't know where the heck you are in a threaded forum, where sub-threads often have changed subjects and you can quickly navigate up and down in that subthread(!), how would you know where you are in a flat discussion where people just quote some bits and just pretend they are in a subthread (they are discussing a sub-topic, the context for the post you're reading is spread over 2-3 other posts somewhere on the past ~10 pages on typical boards)?
New replies can easily be found through a special display of new (unread or recent) posts, in our forum we just display the subject in bold or green (if it is a reply to your post), it works fine.
One of the best implementation of threaded discussions is slashdot, where you can find the interesting stuff quickly even when there are more than 1000 posts. Please show me a comparable flat forum.
It's terrible that the crappy flat forums (you know, that widespread PHP-written stuff that is regularly exploited) broke threaded discussions for so many people, because they decided to go "guestbook style" (that's what it is - a guestbook, not a discussion, despite the lame attempts of some people to quote each other so they could pretend to stick to a topic) and never look back. I can only conclude that flat forums are preferred by people who don't really like discussions, they like Q&A (like SO) or guestbooks, or perhaps a maximum of ~10 replies on any subject. That works fine as a flat list. For the rest of us, threaded forums have worked fine since the BBS and Usenet times.