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Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea. If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding
by eternityforest 5y ago
Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea.
If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible.
Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way.
Anything that funnels people into multi-thousand post individual pages is going to lose information.
Old proboards forums, github issues, and wikis don't have this problem. Content is in smaller blocks that can be linked to easily, and there is a strong culture of keeping topics focused. You don't have multiple unrelated conversations in one place.
You can jump to the end or beginning of a thread when quickly skimming to see if it's relevant.
And you can see all threads in a given time period pretty easily with pagination, when you want to understand the larger picture at a point and time.
These are all things that are useful both for a sense of community and for technical work itself.
- jsemrau 5y agoThe UI should differentiate between comment and relevant contextual replies. None of the existing social networks manage that properly.
- CyberShadow 5y agoDiscourse isn't all that bad with JavaScript disabled.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoyou can search everything in discourse and categorize it, it has all the same features you mentioned about github I never lose info like I do in discord
- guywhocodes 5y agoI've been working with this idea for a while, that it's immutable pagination that makes any written work worthwhile. With it we can spatially reason about it and we commit its location to memory. You can never do that with an infinite scroll. Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use slack for example.
- ffhhj 5y agoTimestamp instead of page number?
- guywhocodes 5y agoThe problem with growing content is that either the location changes because you either see newest first or you autos roll down to the latest on entry. Navigation through a time based ToC seems like a compromise but not one I love
- eternityforest 5y agoForum pagination locations never change unless a whole bunch of stuff is deleted. Page 0 is always the oldest. Even with deletion, and traditional pages, you could make pages immutable in several ways. actually creating explicit page objects in the database, saying "page 40 starts at N time and goes until the next page object"
- agumonkey 5y agoI find myself enjoying searching vintage mailing lists a lot more. Maybe a matter of information density (people think more and speak less ?)
- urthor 5y ago> There is a strong culture of keeping topics focused I think you're mistaking the type of content on Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their platforms. Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of academic citations. GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe. They both have the same property: end users displaying individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments. People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work. And that's okay, we all do. Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use. It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search, grep, or any other search bar I've encountered. Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord than picking up regex and grep ever was.