Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet?

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62

Perhaps less-than-optimally worded. Replace with “Substantially long” - This very discussion thread would qualify.

In a threaded view you get:

  • Post
    • Reply
    • Reply
      • Sub-Reply
      • Sub-Reply
        • Riposte
      • Sub-Reply
    • Reply
      • Sub-Reply

If someone later adds a reply to an early comment in the thread, we get:

  • Post
    • Reply
      • New Sub-Reply
    • Reply
      • Sub-Reply
      • Sub-Reply
        • Riposte
      • Sub-Reply
    • Reply
      • Sub-Reply

How am I supposed to find that new post if I have to scroll up from the bottom of a 60 comment discussion?

I was responding to your comment that you didn’t understand how indentation would make things more difficult. Indentation is a necessary affordance to make a threaded ordering somewhat functional. The issue, at least for me, is the ordering in the first place.

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63

@Sailsman63,

You shouldn’t need to, because a new post notification should direct the user to it, like Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet? - #62 by Sailsman63 does to your comment.

As an example, every time I receive a message via e-mail about a new notification on Reddit, I merely click the button to take me to the comment, rather than trawl through thousands of comments manually.

Would you elaborate on this?

Do you mean that because the sorting is necessarily applied to each hierarchy individually, it produces problems like a file manager can cause:

  1. You’ve a list of files, and want to sort them by modification date to find some old logs. However, because these logs are in a directory of multiple file types (some irrelevant) they’re grouped by type (which is alphabetical) meaning that although they’re generally chronological, the chance for something new to be at the bottom is non-0.

  2. You’ve a list of music. You want to remove some songs you don’t like, but you can’t order them by rating, because too many have identical ratings. You’ve grouped them by rating consequently, and have ordered them by access date, so that you use when you last accessed them as a determiner, too. However, this means that some seriously old songs are missed even if you rated them highly when you were young.

I understand that, but I can’t think of a solution. Discourse implements the sole alternative that I’ve considered, but (of course) I consider it inferior due Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet? - #61 by vel.

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64

The obvious solution is to use the blink tag. And set it to blink as much as possible. Maybe have it cycle through all the colors.

65

The blink tag is depreciated, and generally not recommended for use because it’s bad for accessibility.

From the section in that Wikipedia article about accessibility concerns:

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66

Neither of those.

A “Topic” is a conversation, a volley or round of ideas, each flowing from what came before. As we exchange thoughts, we are affected both consciously and unconsciously by all of the individual comments, even if we are not directly replying to them. Our understanding shifts, we have new information or viewpoints to integrate.

It is fundamentally false to think of a string of direct replies as independent of the rest of the discussion.

Caveat

If a set of replies is truly so divorced from the flow of the rest of the discussion that it benefits from being viewed in isolation, it’s an excellent candidate for being broken out into its own top-level topic.

This is why temporal ordering is important for both reading and composition. For a specific example, our own back-and-forth here would end up as a tree of replies on a platform such as reddit, would it not? However, they don’t really stand alone.

  • If you were to read only that reply string, without the context of intervening posts, It really does sound nonsensical and disjointed - as well as possibly coming across as more acrimonious than I intended.
  • If I had to compose using only the previous direct replies, we probably would have stopped engaging after one or two comments, or at worst, started yelling at each other.

Appropriately enough, it was this exact process - watching the discussion as it unfolded, including the parts that I didn’t directly respond to, and thinking about why I act as I do - that has allowed me to articulate and refine on what had previously been a strong visceral reaction. A threaded model would have deprived me of this experience.

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67

@Sailsman63,

I can confidently state that I am unaffected by text which I see whilst scrolling but do not read. To purport otherwise is nonsensical - if the brain does not deliberately comprehend and then commit observed text to memory, it is not stored and consequently unable to affect the reader. Billboards which you pass on the highway but do not read do not affect you.

For me, as long as a discussion about a topic is logically segmented, whether it is arbitrarily designated as a “topic” or “response” has no effect upon me. Think of a filesystem - it is a simple hierarchy of objects, and yet entirely comprehensible and traversable:

image
image750×759 79.6 KB

A hierarchical conversation should not differ (except that each comment is more frequently multi-line).

Regardless, that’s a rather unsubstantiated opinion, even considering what supposed evidence that you’ve provided:

The example (if I’m correctly identifying the example as the <details>-encompassed section) which you’ve provided doesn’t appear to demonstrate that. However, I understand what you mean, because it’s quite simple to consider a situation in which a threaded response contextually depends upon what it responds to.

However, why do you state this? I ask because all that it appears to demonstrate is that some threads should not be separated into new topics, irrespective of their relevance to the original topic.

I’ve no idea of what you mean by this. It’s too vague.

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68

@Firepup650 and @vel, Discourse appears to have already solved that problem. Just visit a URI to a past response like Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet? - #54 by rokejulianlockhart, and observe that it initially is coloured, demonstrating which post is referred to.

69

It was a joke. The blink tag was overused and distracting and eventually drove people away from the websites that were trying to get attention by it (see overuse of ads, see More cowbell skit by SNL)

Imgur has a threaded discussion model and they get around some of the issues by limiting the comment length. I think the limit is 128 characters or 256. New replies pop in dynamically, notifications to replies are sent to the inbox and link back to the discussion and nothing is lost. At 4 or 5 levels deep they load a new page (not my favorite solution).

They have other UX issues on their platform but the threaded discussion works more than it doesn’t. All comments are collapsed initially so when you see a new post you see a clear list of comments below the post and can read view and read easily and then can drill into them to see the discussion (no reloading, no lost place)

Update:
Not suggesting limiting length of content in discussions at all but describing how that option on imgur might have made threading more readable and suggesting having that as an option on a threading model.

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70

@vel, considering the frequent long and intensely useful responses I see on a myriad of Discourse instances, I’m certain that such a solution wouldn’t be worth it merely to add threading. I’d rather have a flat discussion than have the content limited.

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71

I have no idea how your quote of my post got chopped up like that. The contents of the “Details” (labeled “Caveat”) describes a side discussion that may/possibly should be broken out because it is truly tangential to the overall conversation. The quote version seems to reorder things and reverse my meaning.

Okay, I’ll try to be more detailed and address these two together. I’m asserting that an ongoing conversation cannot be logically segmented in a hierarchical manner.

To this point, the back-and-forth between the two of us is comprised of posts
56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67 & now 71. In a threaded model, these would be their own little tree.

Such a view would, however, be inaccurate. The presentation of my post 62 was influenced by Vel’s 61, and further reflection on it, as well as Piffy’s observation,

have lead me to my current position. There have been other influences, of course, but these are the most direct that I am aware of.

If you note that the arguments I’m advancing have evolved, even in this fairly short time period, you would be correct. I’ve adjusted and refined my ideas as I integrate the various parts of the conversation going forward. If I’d had to work through a threaded interface, the tree-like structure itself would have funneled me into an echo chamber where it was just the two of us, and the cross-pollenation of ideas would never have happened.

If this is how you approach online discussions - speed-running to the next direct response without at least skimming the intervening material to absorb the gist of it - I would respectfully suggest that you are:

  • Depriving yourself of a more nuanced, broad view of the conversation as it has taken place.
  • Depriving others in the conversation of a reasoned response that takes into account what has already been said, at least in cases where there are multiple people chiming in at the same time.

I might postulate that this behavior has at least partly been taught to you by threaded discussion models. I suspect that this is how you get Reddit threads that have:

  • The same comment repeated in multiple locations by different users.
  • An insightful observation that never gets responded to, and therefore has no effect on the discussion because it’s buried 2 or 3 deep in a thread that didn’t get much love due to its own first post not being flashy enough.
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72

@Sailsman63, you’re making a very good point that I actually tend to make over and over again, when (yes, I’ll use this analogy a lot) discussing filesystems with people - direct hierarchy is rarely enough to demonstrate complex relationships.

I think you’ve provided ample evidence for Discourse to have both a more robust common relationship mechanism and separate extensible view models. Specifically:

  1. When writing a new response, allow a person to choose multiple comments to mark as responded to. This means that a user doesn’t have to tag multiple people in their comment if they’re responding to multiple comments, and ensures that it is objectively communicated what they’re responding to.

  2. This can then be consumed by the user’s choice of view model (flat, threaded, MermaidJS-like relationship diagram for that kind of person who spends his days looking at relational databases).

    1. Flat would merely display multiple avatars in the response indication header.

    2. Threaded would base the hierarchy upon either a comment which the responder designated as “primary” (not an ideal solution, but intuitive).

    3. The Mermaid-like view (Star?) would provide an overview of what topics appear to be of most importance, then allowing the user to select a comment and switch to one of the aforementioned standard views.

Agree?

It depends upon the conversation. In topics like these, all of the context must be considered. However, in a thread about a technical issue which has divulged into discussions between multiple people like this has, requesting a summary or commenting upon a specific part distinct to the rest means that the rest need not be considered.

Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. I don’t have infinite time.

It was certainly influenced, indeed.

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73

“Discourse on the other hand is explicitly conversation focused, and the linearity is a constraint to try to enforce that principle.”

Expanding on this further, this is the structure of a real-world conversation:

Topic A → Question → Answer → New Question branching into Topic B
:down_right_arrow: Tangential idea → Cross-reference Topic C → Further exploration
:down_right_arrow: Contextual loop returning to Topic A

Given the hierarchical nature of linear-discussions, like initial framing becoming rigid constraining subsequent discussions, also causing any disagreement with it to be costly, there is hardly any questioning/refining of the top/parent question/topic iteratively like in real discussions.

Also i think that linear hierarchical top-down structure hinders holistic thinking, it’s reductive in its very essence, posing difficulties in seeing the bigger picture(especially, in subjective domains such as social sciences), unlike non-hierarchical non-linear, a collections of horizantal and vertical cards which enable bottom up thinking, making the contextual coherence of diverse views possible, generating empathy as a result.

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74

I am a long-time user of both flat and threaded discussion forums. I run a 15K user group on Facebook and know their threaded system well. In reading this topic, I feel people are not thinking clearly about the issue of flat versus threaded discussions.

First, these are never mutually exclusive methods of organizing a topic’s replies! Threaded discussions are simply a VIEW of information. Discourse has the information about which posts are replies and could construct a threaded view of the replies. There is no reason in principle that you could not simply have a UI that lets a reader select a flat or threaded view of any topic, and change that view while reading it. So it’s simply silly to discuss this issue as if you have to choose one way of organizing information a priori.

Second, I think if we asked one million people whether they preferred flat of threaded discussions, more than 80% would vote for threaded. It’s distasteful to hear the 20% that insist on flat discussions ignore the desires of most users, when the fix is actually just a straightforward UI selection, as I already described.

Third, the value of threaded discussions in a long list of replies is to help someone save time. One use case alone should give an example. Say that we are discussing the use of a prebiotic fiber in the diet to encourage the growth of a specific species of bacteria in the human microbiome. A user from Australia asks “where can I buy this in Australia”. That starts a sub-thread of 50 replies from Australian and Asian users. I am not from Australia. I don’t have interest in this sub-thread. Why make me read those 50 replies? Threading gives me a convenient UI to bypass irrelevant subtopics and lets me focus my time on what I care about.

Now it’s true that this information could have been started as a linked Topic. It’s also true the moderator could have moved out the information to a new topic. But that doesn’t usually happen. In my forum, I barely have time to respond to users. I definitely don’t have time to spend all of my day micromanaging the structure of every thought every user has.

Some day in the future, I would hope that Discourse would stop belittling 80% of the users who want threaded discussions, and just invest in a UI that lets each person make a choice.

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75

Are there any existing discussion systems that do this? I’d be interested in exploring it.

Going from flat to threaded probably isn’t so hard (you allow new threads to spawn) but going from threaded to flat seems like it would introduce a large number of issues… how would you even sort the replies chronologically and keep up with references? You could have 1000 unrelated posts between two replies in a thread… that flat view would likely be very difficult to use. The type of discussion system shapes the way discussion happens, I don’t think they’re interchangeable at all.

We could find large groups that say they prefer pretty much anything… we can’t build for all of them simultaneously.

In a flat system these should be moved to a new topic titled: “Where can I buy prebiotic fiber in Australia?” (and perhaps tagged) because it’s only loosely relevant to the original topic. This would also make it easier to turn up a similar query in search.

I don’t think it would be sensible to have one massive topic about prebiotics that encompasses an infinite number of branching questions about them, would it?

Often threaded discussions are in time-based feeds with little moderation or organizational tools. This is by design, it makes conversations lower-stakes, shorter lived, and more hands-off for the services providing them. This is also why in threaded systems you can see the same questions being asked over and over again week-over-week. To contrast, this discussion about threading is nearly 10 years old!

Facebook threads aren’t designed to build a searchable, persistent knowledge base… and that’s fine for what Facebook is.

There’s no desire to belittle involved, you’re characterizing a design choice as a character flaw and that’s unfair way to frame the discussion.

The decision comes from a place of prioritizing community as a collective over individual 1-on-1 discussions. Flat discussions excel when focused on a single topic of discussion and keep everyone heading in the same direction. You can follow a single line to the destination.

Threading has its uses, but as you state they’re used to hide discussion. It’s no surprise that threads can often veer off into long 1-on-1 discussions or debates, because everyone else can ignore it.

A flat system requires consideration of the topic as a whole and requires some housekeeping and problem management… or absent of any moderation, acceptance that everyone’s going to have to come along for all the twists and turns. It prioritizes for quality of discussion over breadth.

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76

Going from a threaded to a flat view, you would sort the flat view chronologically. Yes, that would allow unrelated subthreads to insert into the flat view. That’s not much different than what you have now.

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77

Say 4 people are discussing things in two separate threads at the same time… by flattening that you essentially get two separate intertwined, but possibly unrelated, conversations. It’s going to be difficult to follow.

Put the same 4 people into a flat discussion from the start and they’re a lot more likely to address each other and stay closer to each other on subject matter, because they have no choice but to see everything that’s happening together. From my perspective, at that point you have an entirely different conversation.

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I completely disagree with the premise that a flat view of replies causes people to avoid replying in implicit subthreads. In my example, the Australian and Asian users are going to punch right through your flat view of the replies and have the sub-thread they want to have no matter what the other subthreads around them are.

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@awesomerobot:

That’s the problem with the current interface: expecting moderators to observe every conversation, then decide when (/whether) to separate a discussion into a new thread is very difficult, and, when it even occurs, prone to disagreement. With threaded discussion, this problem doesn’t exist; at all!

  1. ux.stackexchange.com/revisions/75943/2 ↩︎

  2. theadminzone.com/threads/is-there-a-forum-software-that-has-a-threaded-view.154403/#post-1182217 [3] [4] ↩︎

  3. access-programmers.co.uk/forums/threads/which-view-do-you-use-flat-or-threaded.86730/#post-386100 ↩︎

  4. xenforo.com/community/threads/will-xenforo-ever-adopt-threaded-comment-structures-like-reddit.205394/page-4#post-1695501 ↩︎

  5. theadminzone.com/threads/is-there-a-forum-software-that-has-a-threaded-view.154403/#post-1189037 ↩︎

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Nested footnotes do not render
80

thanks for those references!

the goal is that it’s not only on the moderators though right? it’s a shared space that everyone should participate in the upkeep of… people should be learning to start on an unrelated topic elsewhere and the moderators should be setting an example, not necessarily doing it all

I think the expectation that moderators don’t see everything that happens within threads is kind of a tool larger social networks use as an excuse to not moderate? they hope the worst stuff is just buried in a thread no one else sees… so it’s not necessarily a solution, but just a different problem

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Not quite true - other users observe and flag for moderation. Or are empowered to do so themselves. It can be a wonderful community magic thing when it hums!

Indeed. But the highly significant trade-off is that there is a whole lot of effort required from the user to actually read the Topic.

I’m talking expanding the thread, reading it, deciding if it is relevant, struggling to find it again in future, etc etc.

Hey, the chat in Discourse has threads. It is great for ephemoral complex chats that will never be revisited. Get your fix that way if you want.

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