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Web Discussions: Flat by Design

codinghorror.com

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Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#61

Post by damncabbage »

prawn wrote: post #50
Alex3917 wrote: post #32

If 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…

How do you have a real discussion in real life when the discussion is effectively flat? You let a 'branch' peter out, then re-raise a previous point for response.

But it also gets frustrating. Conversations can go in many very interesting directions, but you can't, and you often end up railroaded down one path with the others mostly forgotten as you come across more branching points in the discussion. It feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where you only get to read it once.

With HN, Reddit, Usenet, or whatever, you can keep that line of discussion going at whatever speed you want.

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#62

Post by damncabbage »

The Twitter example was terrible, mainly because it does have a tree structure to the discussions, but you can only have a flat view of them. You have to manually sift through replies to find the branching points and then trace it from there.

For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter:

https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352

https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#63

Post by hmbg »

prawn wrote: post #50
Alex3917 wrote: post #32

If 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…

How do you have a real discussion in real life when the discussion is effectively flat? You let a 'branch' peter out, then re-raise a previous point for response.

I very rarely have rewarding real-life discussions involving more than 50 people. Online I've found tools that make this possible. Like threading.

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#64

Post by lmm »

codinghorror wrote: post #49
saurik wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

Slashdot is threaded, Reddit is threaded, HN is threaded. You're right that J. Random PHPBB forum isn't (and that taken together there are more of J. Random PHPBB forums around).

I wonder if it's simply the lack of any super-simple forum software in a popular language that supports threading - slashcode was famously unreadable perl, HN is a dead lisp dialect, I don't know what reddit uses.

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#66

Post by telent »

travisb wrote: post #38
SCdF wrote: post #16

"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…

Indeed, the value of threading on usenet was that it provided data for the user-agent to decide in what order to present unread posts to the user - if the original topic A had drifted to subjects B C and D which were being discussed in parallel, when reading it three hours later I would get all the posts about B before the posts about C and then the posts about D. And if I grew tired of B I could hit 'k' and move immediately onto C. As long as I wanted to carry on reading, though, all I needed to do was hit SPACE (or in today's language, scroll down)

This is all a completely separate issue from the one of whether replies should be indented under their parent. For my money, this only makes sense if the reply is approximately as long as 'ME TOO!!!11!!!1!' and in the more interesting case that the reply is actually a reply and not just a comment, indenting is the wrong decision. But there is no need to conflate the two: ordering and indenting are independent decisions

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#68

Post by 89a »

pseut wrote: post #21

Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design. Threaded's not great, but completely flat comments scale really poorly -- I can't imagine scanning a page with ~100 unthreaded comments, but I do that all the time at HN. A lot of the points seem like they could be improved a lot with a little javascript (ie, nuking unproductive threads), bu…

> Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design

The un-design is what makes it appealing to me

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#69

Post by tripzilch »

Flat discussions can be implemented without much extra thought, just the comments below eachother and you're done, and it'll work as well as the next flat comment system.

Threaded discussions require a bit more thought. If you just make a basic "reply-to" tree style discussion, you get something unwieldy quick. It can work, if you happen to catch the right community, but it'll be fragile.

So you need clever things like voting, sorting and collapsing/pruning.

Now for some reason, the article's first example was HN, which gets almost all of these things quite wrong. The voting/sorting algorithm makes threads stagnant and rigid (top voted comment will stay on top, even if it's off-topic) and there is no collapsing/pruning going on whatsoever.

His other example is his own site that he says is not a discussion platform.

And then there's Reddit, which he passingly mentions. I know HN doesn't like Reddit much, and whatever you may dislike the community but there is one thing: Not only is it one of the largest discussion sites on the web, it is one of the very few sites that get threaded discussion really right. Comments are collapsible and do so automatically at smart places, but the interface to expand/collapse them yourself is responsive enough to be pleasant to navigate. The sorting algo almost always gets it right, and (especially for top-level comments) I hardly see an interesting comment buried to obscurity by a most top-voted one (something that happens on HN threads all the time).

Well. I didn't really intend for this post to come off as so much critique on HN's discussion system. But if you're talking about flat vs threaded discussions, then HN just isn't a very important example. Also not for "why threaded doesn't work" (not with all the other low-hanging fruit).

So yeah, if you just want quick comments/discussion, go flat. But threaded can be done right. Especially if you want to stimulate "discussion" vs "comments". But it's not set-and-forget, you need to tweak it for the community, and the style of discussion. Flat is easier. Or maybe I should say it's easier to do threaded wrong :)

Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design

#70

Post by martinced »

Amazingly ironic that he uses StackOverflow's (very basic, lame and restrictive and, yes, I have several Ks rep there) commenting system in a blog post title "Web discussions" when, years after years, they kept repeating:

"StackOverflow is not a place to get interesting discussions because StackOverfow is not a place to get discussions at all"

It's not very honest to use SO as an example of a good way to do "discussions" correctly.

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