Web Discussions: Flat by Design

Usenet is not dead because it had threaded discussion (Edit: not that you were saying that); it's dead because people find it easier to find discussions on website forums than install and set up a newsreader to access Usenet.

Edit: I use a few chrome extensions that track what I've read on hacker news and mark new posts, and allow me to collapse a post and it's replies, or the the entire thread it is in. It's not perfect but I'd rather have this than no threading.

There's Polish site wykop.pl, it's a digg (now reddit) analogue. They use capped level system (article -> comment -> reply) with special formatting for > quotes and @nicks so people can refer to each other in the comments, and the discussion doesn't differ much in structure from the one on reddit, from what I noticed. It's rather large site, often there's around 300 comments on one article, but it is easy to read (easier than reddit, at least for me).

Overall I think its amazing that an unstructured discussion involving dozens or even hundreds of people can be possible at all. It's not possible in person.

Whatever the format (threaded, non threaded, threaded with limitations) it's going to run into some limitations. They're all imperfect and I think that which one is right depends on the number of participants and velocity of comments. This threaded format seems to work well for 10-50 participants.

Stackoverflow is different in that every "topic" has a predefined structure an hierarchy of importance: a question, answers & comments. In a way, it's not tackling the same problem as HN, reddit, forums, disquss, etc.. These are trying to allow discussion regardless of the topic & structure. They are also different in that they place high importance on being accessible to casual future readers.

Unstructured "discussions" hundreds or thousands of participants is largely a problem that twitter tackled. That's why celebrities and high profile people like it.

I have never liked the threaded model, largely for the reasons pointed out in the link. Threaded discussion is nice when you first read something, but becomes a total pain in the ass instantly afterwards if you want to participate in the discussion and/or actively follow it (oh hey, there were 85 comments in the last refresh. Now there's 89. Time to go comment hunting, since they could be literally anywhere!). One of the most annoying cases I've seen is Techdirt - it offers both flat and threaded view, but everyone seems to assume that everyone is using the threaded view and doesn't properly quote the posts they are replying to, which essentially makes the flat view completely useless for trying to follow the discussion. And in threaded view, you can end up with ridiculously thin posts where they're practically unreadable. Oh dear.

This is why a strong quote system is absolutely essential for a great flat discussion model. I personally consider 4chan (powered with an userscript like 4chan X or with the inline extension introduced a while back) to be a fantastic example of this. With simple quote links, backlinks to replies, hover previews and inline quote expansion, you can follow discussion within a thread incredibly easily and even do basically on-demand threading! Allow me to demonstrate it with this image: http://i.imgbox.com/adss6lfu.png (functionality and style in this case provided by 4chan X[1] and OneeChan[2] with a slightly customized Photon theme)

[1] http://mayhemydg.github.com/4chan-x/

[2] http://seaweedchan.github.com/OneeChan/

Also, in regards to HN, a while back I thought about writing a userscript to turn the comment view to flat (with some sort of auto-quote links), but turns out it's not really possible because there's no way to get the accurate post times for comments due to the "X minutes/hours/days ago" - though this could be easily solved if the relative timestamp was wrapped in a element (or heck, even a with the accurate timestamp in a title attribute or something, anything).

There are problems with the threaded model, but they're not the same problems that Jeff is saying that there are. The real problems are:

1. When ranking threaded comments, often times a low-ranked comment attached to a high-ranked comment will be read before a more highly ranked top-posted comment.

2. Two diverging branches of the tree can result in the same discussion occurring at two different points in the thread.

3. It's very easy for niche discussions to become the focal point of the conversation, which, while good for discussion, detracts from the subject matter.

I don't think any threaded discussion system has solved all of these - Slashdot has its threshold filters, reddit compresses large threads with a similar threshold, HN is more simple but I find the text dimming effect to be valuable. Facebook doesn't really need to be concerned with these things as much, because the discussions are usually more personal and shorter. Stack Exchange is obviously an outlier here, but I feel that if its mods weren't so jackbooted it would have devolved into a similar discussion system long ago.

I think the biggest problem with our current discussion systems is that they are inefficient. Sometimes experts will avoid a conversation because they can't quickly and easily reply on all points. Multiple conversations can happen on the same topic (or in the case of the news sites mentioned, across different posts entirely). People get karma for being snarky but that's different than the karma given for being wise, being analytical, or doing the legwork (finding references, etc) so that others don't have to.

If you then consider the extreme - a contextual tag-based karma system with threads combined based on their subject matter, you quickly realize that no one will do anything with that because it's too complex.

What we need is curated discussion - not the Steve Jobs kind, but rather the kind you get when you go to a dinner party and the host introduces you to someone that you really wish you had met years ago. Unfortunately, that kind of discussion can only happen currently in more intimate settings, or, in the case of a site like reddit, if we have limited AIs that can actually determine the context and sentiment of a discussion, and alter the structure of the thread tree based on that.

Unfortunately, you're never going to get something like that in an ad-driven Internet.