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>If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by

>If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either It definitely does, and it works better than "popular" sorting, here's how. You walk by rooms and overhear people talking. You hear a lot of small conversations, sorted by most recently heard. You find one you're interested in, and you're welcomed into the room of 2-20 people. You continue having a discussion, and it's less likely for it to turn "heated" because everyone in the group knows each other a bit. You argue that it's "too hard to follow if everyone is talking". But the point is that you don't try to follow every thread/room. The alternative is worse: On Reddit, there are only a few ballrooms (posts on the front page of a subreddit), but they each have a couple keynote speakers (comments upvoted 2,000 times). But if you try to talk to anyone in the ballroom, they'll won't pay attention because the speaker they came to listen to is at the podium. On Hacker News, it's not as bad because it's small. Instead of walking into ballrooms, you're walking into seminars at a university. There's a designated speaker, but anyone can interrupt the speaker at any time to offer helpful comments.

ehnto 7y ago
Well your solution sounds a lot like a traditional chat network or forum, and I agree that they work better for community building. So I think we're probably on the same page there. However I don't think they would work unmodified, as a replacement for the much higher populations of the internet now. Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life. Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion. Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.
- 1_player 7y ago
  > Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. Is there any practical prototype or example of threaded real time chats?
  - ehnto 7y ago
    Slack actually has threaded chat, which was really useful when you needed to dig deeper into a topic but it wouldn't be relevant for everyone in the room at the time.
bighi 7y ago
When you say it does work, do you mean it work well? Because there might be a very good discussion, but the latest comments could be "my peepee is very big" and "no, your peepee is small!". And the good discussion would be overshadowed by garbage comments. When there are hundreds or thousand of people talking, I do believe popularity is better than recency.

ehnto 7y ago

Well your solution sounds a lot like a traditional chat network or forum, and I agree that they work better for community building. So I think we're probably on the same page there. However I don't think they would work unmodified, as a replacement for the much higher populations of the internet now. Community driven content feed sites are not great at fostering close communities, but they are great at offering a more shallow community experience to more people at once. I want to blame feed style sites for the downfall of community online, but they are likely just a symptom of an influx of people online and needing a different way to accommodate that. Imagine a global chat network where #science had 20,000 chatters, how would you chat about anything meaningfully? So you can see feed sites as inverting the dynamic of community to cater for larger numbers, which matches your analogy with the ballroom and keynote speakers and also what happens in real life. Community driven content feed sites definitely offer something that chatrooms or threaded discourse can't, which is discoverability of information over a broad range of topics in a short time period. But it does this at the expense of depth and community, and also at the expense of breadth of opinion. Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. You can enter some.network/#science for general chatter amongst friends, and then when a topic you care about comes up you and all the people who care can dive into a thread to talk about it.

1_player 7y ago
> Threaded chatrooms are actually a pretty cool alternative, and I would love for them to have more wide spread usage. Is there any practical prototype or example of threaded real time chats?
- ehnto 7y ago
  Slack actually has threaded chat, which was really useful when you needed to dig deeper into a topic but it wouldn't be relevant for everyone in the room at the time.

bighi 7y ago

When you say it does work, do you mean it work well? Because there might be a very good discussion, but the latest comments could be "my peepee is very big" and "no, your peepee is small!". And the good discussion would be overshadowed by garbage comments. When there are hundreds or thousand of people talking, I do believe popularity is better than recency.