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It's not entirely clear from the text what these guys mean by "threaded replies", so I must assume from their screenshot they mean replies which come in in thre

It's not entirely clear from the text what these guys mean by "threaded replies", so I must assume from their screenshot they mean replies which come in in threaded order. And this is, I think, a terrible idea. I understand the need: you can't tell who's replying to what. But the fix is wrong. Unlike, say, HN or reddit, chats are real-time things. Like most real-time things we perceive and digest them as streams which dribble in one message at a time. As humans we're designed to perceive and understand real-time things as streams: video, audio, events, timelines. We can sit right at the point of "now" and watch every single one of the messages come in, and respond to the ones we need to. Threaded replies don't come in in a stream order. They get scattered throughout the space of all messages from all points of time. They're buried under heaps of hierarchies or lost off-page. Even if you're cued into the fact that they've arrived, you have to go hunt for them, a cognitively challenging task which takes away from following the stream of time. It's as if late books to a library didn't come in through the late book slot but rather magically appeared all over the library, back on their respective shelves, where you had to go manually find each one of them and stamp it returned.

toddmorey 14y ago
Excellent point and this is certainly a feature that we are tweaking the dials on. We've currently landed on a solution where a reply comes in as the latest item (in chronological order) with a reference back to the original message. That saves you from the tedious work of describing who you are replying to in a fast moving chatroom. That view persists throughout your active session. Later, when you return for reference, the chat lines organize themselves in the threaded view you see in the screenshot. It's starting to feel right but like all the features, we need to live with them a while to know for sure.
- majormajor 14y ago
  I've always loved SBNation's solution for this. When you're logged in, comments auto-refresh (still in the original threaded tree form), and there are keyboard navigation shortcuts for navigating comments and marking them as read (so that when new comments come in, you can then navigate only the new ones). There are also "up" links to the parent comment. Another huge benefit compared to something like HN is that it saves the state of which comments have been shown to you to your user account, so if you close the window and come back to the discussion later it knows exactly which comments came in since you were last on the page, so you can quickly review only the new content. It creates (especially for real-time stuff like discussing an ongoing sports game) a fantastic blend of the live nature of a chat with the ability to have deeper individual discussions (through the threading preservation and display) at the same time.
ANTSANTS 14y ago
I have to agree with this. I believe threaded reply systems (in combination with upvote systems) work reasonably well to produce digestible and shallow conversations (in terms of the number of participants, not necessarily quality) for news articles, but are absolutely terrible for conversations that happen in real time, grow to a certain length, or are expected to be read in full by participants. The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes: I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract. I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read. I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning. I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.
cheald 14y ago
Google Wave tried this, and it was interesting and completely unusable.
deleted 14y ago
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toddmorey 14y ago

Excellent point and this is certainly a feature that we are tweaking the dials on. We've currently landed on a solution where a reply comes in as the latest item (in chronological order) with a reference back to the original message. That saves you from the tedious work of describing who you are replying to in a fast moving chatroom. That view persists throughout your active session. Later, when you return for reference, the chat lines organize themselves in the threaded view you see in the screenshot. It's starting to feel right but like all the features, we need to live with them a while to know for sure.

majormajor 14y ago
I've always loved SBNation's solution for this. When you're logged in, comments auto-refresh (still in the original threaded tree form), and there are keyboard navigation shortcuts for navigating comments and marking them as read (so that when new comments come in, you can then navigate only the new ones). There are also "up" links to the parent comment. Another huge benefit compared to something like HN is that it saves the state of which comments have been shown to you to your user account, so if you close the window and come back to the discussion later it knows exactly which comments came in since you were last on the page, so you can quickly review only the new content. It creates (especially for real-time stuff like discussing an ongoing sports game) a fantastic blend of the live nature of a chat with the ability to have deeper individual discussions (through the threading preservation and display) at the same time.

ANTSANTS 14y ago

I have to agree with this. I believe threaded reply systems (in combination with upvote systems) work reasonably well to produce digestible and shallow conversations (in terms of the number of participants, not necessarily quality) for news articles, but are absolutely terrible for conversations that happen in real time, grow to a certain length, or are expected to be read in full by participants. The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes: I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract. I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read. I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning. I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.

cheald 14y ago

Google Wave tried this, and it was interesting and completely unusable.

deleted 14y ago

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