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> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So thread

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long. Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.: * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-messages-by-conversation-in-outlook https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-... Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?

lelandfe 3mo ago
Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations? It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB That new thing could be possible, though
- krapp 3mo ago
  That's literally just how imageboards work.
  - lelandfe 3mo ago
    You’re describing one view. We want two.
MrJohz 3mo ago
The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y. You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.
- cogman10 3mo ago
  And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes. Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
  - krapp 3mo ago
    And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading. Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.
  - MrJohz 3mo ago
    Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more cohesive. You had at most 2-3 separate trains of thought happening at once, as opposed to in a threaded forum like HN or Reddit, where the fringes of a conversation feel much more spread out.
    - cogman10 3mo ago
      The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.
      - MrJohz 3mo ago
        In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...
dredmorbius 3mo ago
I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes. The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely. Usenet, effectively ;-) Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.
- econ 3mo ago
  Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer. Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting. It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way. You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like: <index src="index.json" max="100"> <h3><title/></h3> </index> Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible. Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.
  - dredmorbius 3mo ago
    What kinds of forms do you have in mind? Another ask of mine would be standard page formats, such that there could be standard styles which could be consistently applied to them. Article, index, search, gallery, discussion/thread, off the top of my head.
    - 3mo ago
TheScaryOne 3mo ago
Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.
abruzzi 3mo ago
If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior. To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.
- krapp 3mo ago
  You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier. * It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.
  - KajMagnus 3mo ago
    You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861 If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context. > You can have a chronologically sorted tree view Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?
    - krapp 3mo ago
      I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well. I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript. Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time. Only a very fringe subset of nerds (myself included, I still weep for my HN clone in Hack that will never be finished, and my Godot client that will never be released) considers forum UI design to be interesting.
KajMagnus 3mo ago
> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing). Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar. See: (incl demo video) https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve... (Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))

lelandfe 3mo ago

Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations? It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB That new thing could be possible, though

krapp 3mo ago
That's literally just how imageboards work.
- lelandfe 3mo ago
  You’re describing one view. We want two.

MrJohz 3mo ago

The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y. You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.

cogman10 3mo ago
And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes. Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
- krapp 3mo ago
  And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading. Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.
- MrJohz 3mo ago
  Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more cohesive. You had at most 2-3 separate trains of thought happening at once, as opposed to in a threaded forum like HN or Reddit, where the fringes of a conversation feel much more spread out.
  - cogman10 3mo ago
    The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.
    - MrJohz 3mo ago
      In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

dredmorbius 3mo ago

I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes. The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely. Usenet, effectively ;-) Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.

econ 3mo ago
Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer. Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting. It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way. You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like: <index src="index.json" max="100"> <h3><title/></h3> </index> Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible. Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.
- dredmorbius 3mo ago
  What kinds of forms do you have in mind? Another ask of mine would be standard page formats, such that there could be standard styles which could be consistently applied to them. Article, index, search, gallery, discussion/thread, off the top of my head.
  - 3mo ago

TheScaryOne 3mo ago

Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.

abruzzi 3mo ago

If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior. To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.

krapp 3mo ago
You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier. * It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.
- KajMagnus 3mo ago
  You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861 If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context. > You can have a chronologically sorted tree view Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?
  - krapp 3mo ago
    I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well. I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript. Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time. Only a very fringe subset of nerds (myself included, I still weep for my HN clone in Hack that will never be finished, and my Godot client that will never be released) considers forum UI design to be interesting.

KajMagnus 3mo ago

> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing). Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar. See: (incl demo video) https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve... (Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))