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StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

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Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#51

Post by blablabla123 »

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 .

How about:

Nesting: discussions converging towards separation, isolation, protectionism and flamewar ;)

Flat: discussions converging towards consent.

EDIT: Getting downvotes, but face the facts: HN, Reddit are pretty exceptional. Look at the legacy from the 90s and try to proof me wrong.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#52

Post by koralatov »

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…

`Reply as New Topic' is a pretty elegant solution, but has a huge failure point: the user. It might work with a technically minded audience, but with Joe Bloggs, it's almost certainly not going to be used. The result will most likely be one massive thread that lurches on and off topic post-by-post, with the responsibility for forking it into new threads -- and replies to the OT `new thread' -- pushed onto the moderators/admins.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#53

Post by koralatov »

jacoblyles wrote: post #45
codinghorror wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#54

Post by cabalamat »

tomdale wrote: post #33
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.

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…

> 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.

Then have multiple views of the same data, so you can see it threaded, oldest first, newest first, etc.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#55

Post by snogglethorpe »

wpietri wrote: post #31
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've built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly. My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of ar…

The problem is that the way flat forums limit "bickering" is by making it harder to follow sub-threads. However this doesn't mean there aren't sub-threads—there almost always are when more than 2-3 people are involved—it just means that the result is much more confusing; at some point people give up responding because they get lost or lose track.

So you've replaced a perhaps over-verbose but relatively easy-to-follow set of discussions with a smaller, but much more confusing and hard-to-follow set of discussions. You might have succeeded in limiting "bickering," but I think to a much greater degree, you've reduced the quality of the discussion (to a bewildering mush in the worst cases).

So I think it's no accident that, based on my experience, flat forums usually seem to be, well .... pretty shallow (and I mean that in a bad way :)... they're fine for saying "hi!" and talking about the weather, but surely we'd sometimes like more than that?

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#57

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

For tech discussions Reddit/HN are fine...

But I really miss places where to discuss political stuff. These kinds of discussions really got stick in some 90s style niche forums. And in the forums I know that still have these discussions, they got just boring and repetitive.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#59

Post by koralatov »

orangethirty wrote: post #10

Nuuton makes this obsolete due to being able to hold conversations (with nesting) about a given topic or website without actually having to be on it. Plus it eases search for information inside those same topics by indexing each post as an independent entity. Good try, though. Nuuton launches in March.

You're going to have to be a little more specific. How can you ``hold conversations ... without having to be on [the website]''? If you're talking anonymous comments, we already have those and they're largely a disaster. If you're talking something different, then what is it? I'm sure you can share the general concept without giving away your `secret sauce'.

Re: StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

#60

Post by polyfractal »

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.

I think that depends on the audience of a forum. I'm a pretty regular poster at the SomethingAwful forums, which still utilizes a flat, quoted forum style.

Say what you want about SA, but the average poster is pretty good. We routinely carry on huge megathread discussions about a single topic with no difficulty. Just pop into any of the subforums and check it out. The Recipes subforum, for example, may have a huge megathread dedicated to Cookies. Another about Stews. Another about Chicken.

Within those, there will be all sorts of discussions, quoting, etc...but it never becomes unmanageable. You just learn to skim posts that don't interest you, read those that catch your eye, quote those that you want to respond to.

The SA forum automatically limits quoting depth, so you only see the last quote or two.

Frankly, I prefer a flat forum over threaded any day. Threaded forums are where discussions die. Once you leave the real-time, "in the moment" posting of a threaded discussion...it's impossible to spark the conversation again. Threads get too deep, there is no sense of what is new vs. old. New readers have an impossible time getting "into" the conversation, often piling into the top of a thread instead of the more active inner-parts.

With a flat forum, you just skip to the end and see what's going on, maybe browse back a few pages to catch up.

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