I can’t imagine using a busy support forum without clear topic titles – either as a user or a helper.
Titles are important enough that default trust level settings let experienced (TL3+) users edit them. Don’t even have to be moderators.
I’m not the most experienced Meta-phile here but I’ll occasionally change a vague title – like “Why does this keep happening?” – to describe the actual problem, so the person has a better chance of getting help (and so any help provided can be found by others in the future.)
A little guide to titling topics, with examples, is a good idea to include in onboarding material. And if your askers are bad at titles, it might take a period of a lot of editing to set good precedents. But they’re important to both askers and helpers.
I think this is really an interesting idea. People really like to start a topic by just asking stuff. Just typing something in. I know. It’s bad. They should search the forum first. They should think first. They should… but they don’t. They post. On X, Facebook, Whatsapp, Discord. And it’s a mess. But as OP says — for some reason it works.
So what if they could do that? And AI would just give it a title?
Or it could start by asking a chatbot. It could give a first answer. And then the user would be given a choice: “Fancy asking the community? Let’s convert this to a topic. Yes?”
Category, title, tags — all could be AI suggested.
It could encourage the type of users who (are used to) think differently.
Facebook groups have been doing it quite successfully for years, I swear! People just read the posts and then comment!
I agree. I personally like titles. Early in my “web career”, I read an O’Reilly book called Practical Internet Groupware which covered the issue. It changed the way I write e-mail subjects and blog post titles. (Anecdote: that knowledge played a pivotal role in my personal history, making me experience that sometimes a simple and humble suggestion can have significant impact on the “world” around us.)
But on the other hand, in the light of discussions some of us are having about rebooting the blogosphere, titles or no titles is a really significant question when it comes to friction. When we ask ourselves why the “Socials” have taken over the online interactive space, at the expense amongst others of blogs, the fact that when one posts on Facebook, Mastodon, LinkedIn and the like there is no title to choose, is not a detail. Some modern blogging platforms like micro.blog have done away with titles, or, like WordLand, make it optional.
I have been experiencing it myself, since after my Facebook suspension (3 weeks, a lifetime!) this summer I have been pouring more energy into my 25-year-old blog, in addition to participating to the collective reflection mentioned above. The titles. It’s much easier to start writing if you don’t have to stop and pick a title first. I’ll find myself writing a blog-post-length update on Facebook or Mastodon, and catch myself: “wait, why isn’t this a blog post?” – so I copy it over to my blog, and all of a sudden I have to “title” what was initially a rather spontaneous thought that took shape as I went on writing it.
What does this have to do with Discourse? Are cogitations on the role of titles in blogs (and their absence) in the socials relevant to online communities? I’d argue they are very relevant, because if you spend any time in Facebook support groups, it is very clear that a strong online community, made of content and interaction and relationships, does not depend on having titles for posts or topics. The absence of titles lowers the barrier to posting, and therefore participating as an “initiator”.
An ironic twist: my inspiration for starting the community I’m planning on migrating to Discourse was a PhpBB-style message board. Posts had titles. There were very clear guidelines regarding what information should be in a post title. It worked well. So when I started out on Facebook (same topic, different language), I was quite concerned that we could not replicate the “key information in the title” habit of the mother-community. And we couldn’t. But it still worked – without the titles – and has been doing so for the last eight years.
My apologies for the somewhat long digression, but I wanted to give some background regarding how I understand titles, both in the role they play in structuring information and improving readability and searchability, and in increasing friction when it comes to user participation – particularly a population whose online experience is pretty much exclusively limited to facebook, and who probably do not pay much attention to what they write in their e-mail subject lines.
So, to loop the loop: ideally, I’d like a way to collapse the title field. If the poster wants to add a title, they click on “add title”, the field appears, they write their title. If they “just want to post”, they can ignore the title field, and some magic (AI) fills in that field upon topic submission so that it isn’t empty, and some category of community members who have the power to be “title fixers” (and maybe volunteer to do so) get a notice that an “AI-title topic” has been posted, and they discreetly step in to fix the title if needed.
Edited to add: in addition to my arguments above, we need to bear in mind that the largest part of online interaction many people have today is through instant messaging, individual or in group chats. In that context: no titles. You just write what you want to say. So « no titles » is how people are used to talking to each other, including in a group. They don’t email to converse. So the closer a given platform matches with existing user behaviours, the lower the barrier to entry.
I think these are really two different kinds of people from a cognitive standpoint.
More structured and… less Maybe they are afraid. To do something wrong. Some of them don’t even know anything else. They just lived in a chat for their whole life. Or they are just impulsive.
Compared to slow thinking, structured conscious folks.
The former are easier to find, difficult to please with anything less than primitive functionality. The latter are more scarce. Less likely to form a critical mass needed to create a community.
This is very true. All the more in a support community like mine, in which by its very nature and topic we are dealing with people who are often very much distressed. They arrive at a moment where they are facing the prospect of their pet dying (usually not the case but it is their fear right after diagnosis) and of having to take on a level of medical care (injections) they didn’t imagine would ever be asked of them.
I’d rather have temporary AI topic titles than strings of « help! » « my cat was just diagnosed » « what do I do? » — this is not a great context for educating people on good titling practices (though I agree that in time it is a meaningful endeavour, just like we work on educating them on how to ask for help efficiently).
So aren’t the Discourse chatrooms made just for that? We don’t see them used here on Meta like that. But maybe that’s it. Use chat as a first point of contact, topics just for the advanced users. I’ve been thinking about that scenario lately.
Wouldn’t work in my use-case because chat is too volatile: high speed of interaction and loss of historical context. It’s best for synchronous communication or exchanges that have no value once they are part of the past.
We use chat for certain things, but clearly see the limits. Beyond 20 or so people in a chat channel, people get lost because the conversation moves too quickly. If you have impulsive people amongst the participants it can quickly become impossible to « steer » or « course correct » the conversation if needed.
if you think of it, once a topic is started, the discussion under it is in no-title-land. That can also be a way of dealing with the friction titles add: start a topic to create a discussion space for members.
But that does not work for everything. We do want to encourage members to start their own conversation with the issues that are important to them, not just hitchhike on an existing topic.
This does, however, give me an idea for participation: it would make sense to have a « post of the day » started by a moderator or senior community member that acts as a conversation starter to try and « draw out » members who are not posting. (« How are you feeling today? Post a photo of your cat and tell us what your main preoccupation is right now. »)
I tried this. Passive people still don’t participate on these.
I think it goes down to what Hawk said:
Maybe a guide to all cat lovers should be on the forum. Loads of content that people will just find useful. And then they would miss just one simple answer. And they would be motivated to ASK.
I honestly don’t really have the problem the OP lays out. We absolutely solve a huge problem for our members. We give 24/7 support for a chronic illness that most veterinarians are not very comfortable managing, with a degree of expertise that has been lauded by experts in the field.
My preoccupation, if I have one, is that we are dealing with people who are under a lot of stress and not generally not very digitally-literate. So I want to make it as easy as possible for them to participate in the community so that they don’t give up – just like all our documentation and practices aim to make treating their sick cat as easy as possible so they don’t give up.
Super interesting idea, I really like it! What would implementing something like this imply?
(FWIW regarding our exchange on other post, installing plugins: I have unearthed part of the credentials to connect to my server, almost there!)
One thing to note is that we support almost exactly what I’d being described here in chat with threads. There’s an option to have AI automatically title chat threads:
We do use this in our internal forum. The titles themselves are not always in your face, but people do see them in certain views, and they prove helpful in the “my threads” view, or the view that lists all the threads in a given channel. They are also quite humorous sometimes, and the stakes of them being “wrong” feel a lot lower than if they were used for topic titles themselves.
I understand it’s not what you want here, but tinkering with it may be illuminating and inform your thinking about what you are looking for here.
and then comment!
