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Web Discussions: Flat by Design
81–86 of 86 posts
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#82Earlier 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…
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…
> How do you handle that anyway?
Reddit does it by limiting both the tree depth with a "continue this discussion" link (often seen in pun-offs) and the vertical tree length / number of replies with a "load more comments" link.
This ensures that the top thread is never really more than 1.5 screenlengths. Works very well IMO.
(For completeness sake, there's one other comment hiding feature, "Comment score below threshold", but that serves a different purpose--a bit like HN's [dead] comments except you can collapse/expand them and reply to them).
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#83You 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.
Isn't email just an example of a fundamentally threaded medium, with emphasis on quoting in responses?
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary lesson of Usenet is that Usenet is dead.
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 per…
It's also dead because spam killed it. It wasn't designed to deal with it (see the famous Canter-Siegel incident)
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary lesson of Usenet is that Usenet is dead.
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 per…
This is but one example of an unfortunate bias I see in tech generally and the web specifically. A short name might be Not Invented Now syndrome.
Not Invented Now syndrome is the tendency to dismiss technologies simply because they are not the newest hip thing. Sometimes this argument is phrased as "X is dead" or some equivalent. This ignores any lessons which may be learned from those older technologies and there are always lessons.
The old systems have always tackled intrinsic domain problems, such as how to keep threads of discussion straight within a large public forum with hundreds of participants, which just keep on coming up. The old systems have also tried most, not all but most, of the possible solutions to this problem. Ignoring the wealth of research done into the intrinsic problems, especially the ones which aren't immediately obvious, just results in new systems wasting time dealing with well known and understood problems. These are the positive lessons.
There are also negative lessons to be learned from old technologies. It can take decades to determine what just isn't working well. Often you can see this in the reasoning behind why a technology was left behind. These are the only problems within a domain that a new development effort should be working to fix. Sometimes these failures of the old system are due to technical limitations at the time and sometimes due to unforeseen use cases or issues which strained the original architecture. Failure to note these failings just causes new systems to leave consideration and solution of these issues until the architecture has been set and only inferior bolt-on fixes can be applied. SPAM is one good example of this. There are methods of drastically reducing SPAM which require core changes to the design of communication systems. A new system which fails to consider SPAM in its design from the outset is stuck with inferior solutions.
If you don't know history you are doomed to repeat it may be a cliche, but cliches only exist because there is some truth to them.
Re: Web Discussions: Flat by Design
#86I'd just like to note that vBulletin, used on on many of the largest web forums on the internet, historically, and presently, has for some time supported a dual flat and threaded view. Most sites will default to the flat, but there is a setting to set it per user to threaded. That's why every post has their own reply link/button - to maintain the threading.
Whew, I bet that causes some problems for threaded readers: I know when I used to be more active on forums I rarely used the proper reply buttons to compose my posts.
Quite a bit, in fact, from time to time but overall really not so much as you would think if they had a sane quick-reply feature since ultimately people are lazy, if the easiest place to reply is the right one things work a lot better. Pedantically, I'm referring to where clicking reply opens a reply box under that post and maybe with quote so you KNOW you are replying to that, or you use the box at the bottom which joins the main "flat" thread of responses of everyone yelling at each other in a single-threaded dance to the "right".