11 ms·

No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.

mmahemoff 14y ago
I don't think nesting has become any more or less popular since 2004. Slashdot was nesting a lot earlier than 2004, as was email and usenet. At the other end, Google Plus comments don't nest, and nor have the typical PHP forums added it.
iends 14y ago
I've never really liked nested conversations, personally.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.
  - stch2 14y ago
    The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
    - Androsynth 14y ago
      I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new. local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.
      - cpsales 14y ago
        There is the hckrnews [1] browser extension that does exactly this for news.ycombinator.com. I believe the reddit enhancement suite also does this, but I've only heard about it since I don't use it. I do know, however, that reddit gold members get this functionality via the more-inefficient server-side magic. The coolest thing about the reddit gold implementation is that it allows you to select highlighting of comments from different times of past views so if you happened to visit but not read the new comments they're not wiped out on you. About the original topic of conversion, discourse, I think I really need to see the site without all the cruft before deciding much about it. As it is, it's far too busy for me. I really hate this trend of "modern" web development, but the developers have stated that it should be themeable by those who deploy it. Funny thing is, a couple ideas I've had myself about possible features of discussion forms appear to be present there but I dislike them already. Prime among this is the ability to spawn off a discussion thread from a main post to its own subpost. I always though that subthreads tend to get derailed to the point of needing to be a separate discussion. I think that what really matters is how the surrounding communities use such features. It being a playpen that is wiped every day, with users coming in to test features over and over might be painting my experience a bit. [1] http://hckrnews.com/about.html http://hckrnews.com/about.html
    - moe 14y ago
      nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off We have the technology, we can do both! The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets. The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me. The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years... What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".
  - Bockit 14y ago
    I find it a very different experience and have no trouble following discussions in linear threads. I find linear gets you more substantial discussions with multiple contributors all aware of one another.
  - rohit89 14y ago
    In my experience, I've found that a linear forum works great when its strictly moderated. No off-topic posts, sometimes not even something tangentially related. The community also plays a huge role in maintaining the quality.
- damncabbage 14y ago
  But conversations are nested anyway. In real life you rarely have discussions with more than ten people at once. Even when you do, it's frustrating as you have to switch between topics instead of following the "threads" of the conversation. (And inevitably someone doesn't shut up and derails the conversation in a particular way.) So what do current systems do? * Go for broke, go full threading (eg. HN, Reddit, Usenet). * Ignore it (eg. phpBB). Just like real life, everything gets muddied, but you have far more people in the conversation that would be practical in reality. * Track it but try to hide it (eg. Twitter). Discussions have tree structures, but you can only have a flat view of them. You have to manually sift through replies to find the branching points and then trace it from there. For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter: https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352 https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352 https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072 https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072 In any case, I suspect Discourse's threading mostly stems from Jeff Atwood's dislike of threading: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla...
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    Ours is essentially the twitter model, with a few tweaks. I think a hybrid approach -- flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context -- is best.
- dmsinger 14y ago
  I don't care for nesting much either. While it may be more like real life one-on-one conversations, I find it more difficult to follow an entire thread and very hard to scan through. I can enjoy a segment, but that's one of the problems I see: it segments a conversation greatly. I think things stay more on topic with a flat discussion, and I discover things I would have missed in a threaded one. I'd love to see some innovation in the forums space, it's been a while. I still don't see it, but I'm hopeful.
Alex3917 14y ago
Not to mention the page is so wide that it's completely unreadable. By the time I get done digesting the views or or activity, I've already completely forgotten the headline.
runn1ng 14y ago
Nesting is both good and bad. For hacker news it's good, because those are more "asocial" conversations - I don't know who I am replying to, I don't personally know any of you folks and I don't really remember to who I replied. However, a lot of forums (phpbb and the like) are more "social" - you get to know the people, you want to read what they have to write even if it's not a reply to you. You just want to follow the whole conversation. Usually it's doable, because the forums are rather small in audience, people know each other and so on. Yes, it wouldn't work for reddit or digg or slashdot because there are tons of people there and you just can't read everything. But for a smaller forum? Yes, I want PhpBB style conversation rather than nested one.
robryan 14y ago
Back in the early 2000's I much preferred a flat forum. As I remember VBulletin had flat/ nested or a hybrid of both. When I was designing my own forum software I went with flat. I think it really depends on the topics and the audience though. For something like Hacker News, flat would be a nightmare as it is such a large loosely connected community and each submission usually generates comments that are only loosely connected. A smaller online community, maybe a few thousand where all the regular contributors know each other can have flat work fine depending on the topics discussed. What is the answer? Probably the ability to configure. One thing I can say I do hate is nesting to one level, this confuses people more as the first reply will be nested then subsequent replies to the first nested level will be awkwardly placed at that first level also. (Guess I am mainly thinking of Disqus here)
wpietri 14y ago
I've built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly. My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of argument is valuable, but generally it's just a strain on the social fabric without a lot of upside.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  >"His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly." This is called "having a conversation". In flat discussions you can't bicker endlessly because a large portion of the posts are just replying to the OP. There isn't as much back-and-forth or progression of the discussion. Discussions tend to get only a few levels deep. The only time anybody has changed my mind has been on nested forums, like this one. It is because we had to go back and forth three or four times to arrive at a new understanding. Nesting let us track that discussion. Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I have had far fewer enlightening experiences on flat forums!
  - wpietri 14y ago
    It is sometimes conversation, and that's great. It is much more often argument. And it is frequently pointless argument between two people who don't want to learn anything but instead are playing "king of the hill" with words. For people who really want a conversation, I think a forum should support some way to privately contact one another. And a good ability to start new discussions. But for general-audience, broad-appeal forums, I think threads usually create more problems then they solve.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  The problem is that the way flat forums limit "bickering" is by making it harder to follow sub-threads. However this doesn't mean there aren't sub-threads—there almost always are when more than 2-3 people are involved—it just means that the result is much more confusing; at some point people give up responding because they get lost or lose track. So you've replaced a perhaps over-verbose but relatively easy-to-follow set of discussions with a smaller, but much more confusing and hard-to-follow set of discussions. You might have succeeded in limiting "bickering," but I think to a much greater degree, you've reduced the quality of the discussion (to a bewildering mush in the worst cases). So I think it's no accident that, based on my experience, flat forums usually seem to be, well .... pretty shallow (and I mean that in a bad way :)... they're fine for saying "hi!" and talking about the weather, but surely we'd sometimes like more than that?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tomdale 14y ago
Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It's especially hard to come back later and see what's new. Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically. If, however, you'd like to change the topic, there's a "Reply as New Topic" button to the right of every post. This allows you to create a new thread, with a new topic. Metadata about this forked topic is saved, so that future readers can easily bounce between related threads, while still having every message in sequence about the same "topic." In my experience, this approach maintains the simplicity of flat discussion with the ability to fork topics of nested threads, without the complexity.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  notice that one of the flag reasons is "off-topic", to give the poster (if threshold reached) a gentle nudge that hey, maybe they can click "Reply as new Topic" and take it there. Or mods can click "select posts", click click click the posts they want, then click "move to new topic". And topics created either way are bidirectionally linked, so you can follow different related tangents back and forth without breaking your flow in the main topic. So either the community or mods can hopefully assist in keeping things on topic.
  - jacoblyles 14y ago
    Linear forums can't achieve depth of discussion. Discourse only supports one layer of replies with its slight improvement on an archaic quoting mechanism. Flat forums have to worry more about staying on topic because all the conversations happening in a thread are thrown together. There's no "flow". Posts responding to each other and posts responding to the OP are all jarbled up. On reddit you don't worry about conversational tangents. You just fold them. Notice how I didn't have to quote you for others to follow our discussion? That's because our conversation is nested :) If this were a flat forum, my original post would be at the top of the page, your reply would be in the middle, and this comment would be at the bottom. Multiple other conversations would be in between. And we would have to quote each other to have any chance of following the conversation. Flat forums are strictly worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion.
Executor 14y ago
Yes "no nesting". Read Jeff Atwood's article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or-threaded.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or.... It happens to by my opinion as well.
gojomo 14y ago
Nesting (and reordering by votes or activity) works well for divergent discussions: expressing views, exploring the possibility space, brainstorming. Or: exhibition. Flat (and stably ordered by time) offers some hope for a convergence of viewpoints, or at least shared-narrative and common-knowledge. Or: deliberation.
- eurleif 14y ago
  Which are presumably both useful to have within the same community. Maybe forum software should allow individual threads to be made flat or nested, at the discretion of the person creating the thread?
  - gojomo 14y ago
    I could see that working, with the right community and moderators, especially if the choice were presented not in terms of simply flat-vs-nested, but "what is the goal of this discussion?" Those for informing and airing possibilities might have certain titling, features, and moderation (including nesting)... while those for hammering out some common experience/decision would have other titling, features, and moderation (including flatness). (Remembering, as always, that it's not exclusively a goal for software design to solve, but also and probably primarily up to the participating people and their behavior... who can and do bend any offerings from the designers/coders to their own ends.)
- blablabla123 14y ago
  How about: Nesting: discussions converging towards separation, isolation, protectionism and flamewar ;) Flat: discussions converging towards consent. EDIT: Getting downvotes, but face the facts: HN, Reddit are pretty exceptional. Look at the legacy from the 90s and try to proof me wrong.
  - eurleif 14y ago
    You can't just declare evidence against your claim "exceptional". Reddit has a large userbase, and includes numerous communities. Nested discussion seems to work pretty well for it.
lazyjones 14y ago
He hates threads (see other blog entry: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla...). Or, to put it differently: he confuses discussions with guestbooks (he prefers the latter).
bonaldi 14y ago
Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost. All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  I would argue that the problem with flat forums is that people have to hold a lot of state in their heads to follow the conversation.
  - bonaldi 14y ago
    But that's hardware accelerated. There's a lot of brain given over to doing just that. When you stop that working by presenting the conversation in an incompatible codec (threaded), you switch over to the equivalent of software decoding. And that is as bad an idea for conversation as it is for h.264.
- ramblerman 14y ago
  Isn't that an oversimplification? Say a newcomer joins the conversation (at the bar) halfway through. He is missing a lot of context. His kind friends would then fill him in, unlike the internet. A threading like structure however, allows you to quickly scan the parent, and if need be the parent's parent. It's within the user's perogative to choose how much information he needs to be caught up. That being said, I'm very open minded about seeing the new approach develop. Heavily nested threads are a far from perfect solution.
- Shorel 14y ago
  There are some parts of a conversation I don't want to follow. Threads allow me to skip them faster than any other method.
webwanderings 14y ago
No nesting works, ask Facebook Groups. The key is to see that in no-nesting, people make less noise and audience see less circular arguments.

mmahemoff 14y ago

I don't think nesting has become any more or less popular since 2004. Slashdot was nesting a lot earlier than 2004, as was email and usenet. At the other end, Google Plus comments don't nest, and nor have the typical PHP forums added it.

iends 14y ago

I've never really liked nested conversations, personally.

jacoblyles 14y ago
A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.
- stch2 14y ago
  The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
  - Androsynth 14y ago
    I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new. local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.
    - cpsales 14y ago
      There is the hckrnews [1] browser extension that does exactly this for news.ycombinator.com. I believe the reddit enhancement suite also does this, but I've only heard about it since I don't use it. I do know, however, that reddit gold members get this functionality via the more-inefficient server-side magic. The coolest thing about the reddit gold implementation is that it allows you to select highlighting of comments from different times of past views so if you happened to visit but not read the new comments they're not wiped out on you. About the original topic of conversion, discourse, I think I really need to see the site without all the cruft before deciding much about it. As it is, it's far too busy for me. I really hate this trend of "modern" web development, but the developers have stated that it should be themeable by those who deploy it. Funny thing is, a couple ideas I've had myself about possible features of discussion forms appear to be present there but I dislike them already. Prime among this is the ability to spawn off a discussion thread from a main post to its own subpost. I always though that subthreads tend to get derailed to the point of needing to be a separate discussion. I think that what really matters is how the surrounding communities use such features. It being a playpen that is wiped every day, with users coming in to test features over and over might be painting my experience a bit. [1] http://hckrnews.com/about.html http://hckrnews.com/about.html
  - moe 14y ago
    nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off We have the technology, we can do both! The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets. The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me. The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years... What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".
- Bockit 14y ago
  I find it a very different experience and have no trouble following discussions in linear threads. I find linear gets you more substantial discussions with multiple contributors all aware of one another.
- rohit89 14y ago
  In my experience, I've found that a linear forum works great when its strictly moderated. No off-topic posts, sometimes not even something tangentially related. The community also plays a huge role in maintaining the quality.
damncabbage 14y ago
But conversations are nested anyway. In real life you rarely have discussions with more than ten people at once. Even when you do, it's frustrating as you have to switch between topics instead of following the "threads" of the conversation. (And inevitably someone doesn't shut up and derails the conversation in a particular way.) So what do current systems do? * Go for broke, go full threading (eg. HN, Reddit, Usenet). * Ignore it (eg. phpBB). Just like real life, everything gets muddied, but you have far more people in the conversation that would be practical in reality. * Track it but try to hide it (eg. Twitter). Discussions have tree structures, but you can only have a flat view of them. You have to manually sift through replies to find the branching points and then trace it from there. For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter: https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352 https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352 https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072 https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072 In any case, I suspect Discourse's threading mostly stems from Jeff Atwood's dislike of threading: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla...
- codinghorror 14y ago
  Ours is essentially the twitter model, with a few tweaks. I think a hybrid approach -- flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context -- is best.
dmsinger 14y ago
I don't care for nesting much either. While it may be more like real life one-on-one conversations, I find it more difficult to follow an entire thread and very hard to scan through. I can enjoy a segment, but that's one of the problems I see: it segments a conversation greatly. I think things stay more on topic with a flat discussion, and I discover things I would have missed in a threaded one. I'd love to see some innovation in the forums space, it's been a while. I still don't see it, but I'm hopeful.

Alex3917 14y ago

Not to mention the page is so wide that it's completely unreadable. By the time I get done digesting the views or or activity, I've already completely forgotten the headline.

runn1ng 14y ago

Nesting is both good and bad. For hacker news it's good, because those are more "asocial" conversations - I don't know who I am replying to, I don't personally know any of you folks and I don't really remember to who I replied. However, a lot of forums (phpbb and the like) are more "social" - you get to know the people, you want to read what they have to write even if it's not a reply to you. You just want to follow the whole conversation. Usually it's doable, because the forums are rather small in audience, people know each other and so on. Yes, it wouldn't work for reddit or digg or slashdot because there are tons of people there and you just can't read everything. But for a smaller forum? Yes, I want PhpBB style conversation rather than nested one.

robryan 14y ago

Back in the early 2000's I much preferred a flat forum. As I remember VBulletin had flat/ nested or a hybrid of both. When I was designing my own forum software I went with flat. I think it really depends on the topics and the audience though. For something like Hacker News, flat would be a nightmare as it is such a large loosely connected community and each submission usually generates comments that are only loosely connected. A smaller online community, maybe a few thousand where all the regular contributors know each other can have flat work fine depending on the topics discussed. What is the answer? Probably the ability to configure. One thing I can say I do hate is nesting to one level, this confuses people more as the first reply will be nested then subsequent replies to the first nested level will be awkwardly placed at that first level also. (Guess I am mainly thinking of Disqus here)

wpietri 14y ago

I've built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly. My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of argument is valuable, but generally it's just a strain on the social fabric without a lot of upside.

jacoblyles 14y ago
>"His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly." This is called "having a conversation". In flat discussions you can't bicker endlessly because a large portion of the posts are just replying to the OP. There isn't as much back-and-forth or progression of the discussion. Discussions tend to get only a few levels deep. The only time anybody has changed my mind has been on nested forums, like this one. It is because we had to go back and forth three or four times to arrive at a new understanding. Nesting let us track that discussion. Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I have had far fewer enlightening experiences on flat forums!
- wpietri 14y ago
  It is sometimes conversation, and that's great. It is much more often argument. And it is frequently pointless argument between two people who don't want to learn anything but instead are playing "king of the hill" with words. For people who really want a conversation, I think a forum should support some way to privately contact one another. And a good ability to start new discussions. But for general-audience, broad-appeal forums, I think threads usually create more problems then they solve.
snogglethorpe 14y ago
The problem is that the way flat forums limit "bickering" is by making it harder to follow sub-threads. However this doesn't mean there aren't sub-threads—there almost always are when more than 2-3 people are involved—it just means that the result is much more confusing; at some point people give up responding because they get lost or lose track. So you've replaced a perhaps over-verbose but relatively easy-to-follow set of discussions with a smaller, but much more confusing and hard-to-follow set of discussions. You might have succeeded in limiting "bickering," but I think to a much greater degree, you've reduced the quality of the discussion (to a bewildering mush in the worst cases). So I think it's no accident that, based on my experience, flat forums usually seem to be, well .... pretty shallow (and I mean that in a bad way :)... they're fine for saying "hi!" and talking about the weather, but surely we'd sometimes like more than that?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tomdale 14y ago

Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It's especially hard to come back later and see what's new. Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically. If, however, you'd like to change the topic, there's a "Reply as New Topic" button to the right of every post. This allows you to create a new thread, with a new topic. Metadata about this forked topic is saved, so that future readers can easily bounce between related threads, while still having every message in sequence about the same "topic." In my experience, this approach maintains the simplicity of flat discussion with the ability to fork topics of nested threads, without the complexity.

codinghorror 14y ago
notice that one of the flag reasons is "off-topic", to give the poster (if threshold reached) a gentle nudge that hey, maybe they can click "Reply as new Topic" and take it there. Or mods can click "select posts", click click click the posts they want, then click "move to new topic". And topics created either way are bidirectionally linked, so you can follow different related tangents back and forth without breaking your flow in the main topic. So either the community or mods can hopefully assist in keeping things on topic.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  Linear forums can't achieve depth of discussion. Discourse only supports one layer of replies with its slight improvement on an archaic quoting mechanism. Flat forums have to worry more about staying on topic because all the conversations happening in a thread are thrown together. There's no "flow". Posts responding to each other and posts responding to the OP are all jarbled up. On reddit you don't worry about conversational tangents. You just fold them. Notice how I didn't have to quote you for others to follow our discussion? That's because our conversation is nested :) If this were a flat forum, my original post would be at the top of the page, your reply would be in the middle, and this comment would be at the bottom. Multiple other conversations would be in between. And we would have to quote each other to have any chance of following the conversation. Flat forums are strictly worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion.

Executor 14y ago

Yes "no nesting". Read Jeff Atwood's article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or-threaded.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or.... It happens to by my opinion as well.

gojomo 14y ago

Nesting (and reordering by votes or activity) works well for divergent discussions: expressing views, exploring the possibility space, brainstorming. Or: exhibition. Flat (and stably ordered by time) offers some hope for a convergence of viewpoints, or at least shared-narrative and common-knowledge. Or: deliberation.

eurleif 14y ago
Which are presumably both useful to have within the same community. Maybe forum software should allow individual threads to be made flat or nested, at the discretion of the person creating the thread?
- gojomo 14y ago
  I could see that working, with the right community and moderators, especially if the choice were presented not in terms of simply flat-vs-nested, but "what is the goal of this discussion?" Those for informing and airing possibilities might have certain titling, features, and moderation (including nesting)... while those for hammering out some common experience/decision would have other titling, features, and moderation (including flatness). (Remembering, as always, that it's not exclusively a goal for software design to solve, but also and probably primarily up to the participating people and their behavior... who can and do bend any offerings from the designers/coders to their own ends.)
blablabla123 14y ago
How about: Nesting: discussions converging towards separation, isolation, protectionism and flamewar ;) Flat: discussions converging towards consent. EDIT: Getting downvotes, but face the facts: HN, Reddit are pretty exceptional. Look at the legacy from the 90s and try to proof me wrong.
- eurleif 14y ago
  You can't just declare evidence against your claim "exceptional". Reddit has a large userbase, and includes numerous communities. Nested discussion seems to work pretty well for it.

lazyjones 14y ago

He hates threads (see other blog entry: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-fla...). Or, to put it differently: he confuses discussions with guestbooks (he prefers the latter).

bonaldi 14y ago

Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost. All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.

jacoblyles 14y ago
I would argue that the problem with flat forums is that people have to hold a lot of state in their heads to follow the conversation.
- bonaldi 14y ago
  But that's hardware accelerated. There's a lot of brain given over to doing just that. When you stop that working by presenting the conversation in an incompatible codec (threaded), you switch over to the equivalent of software decoding. And that is as bad an idea for conversation as it is for h.264.
ramblerman 14y ago
Isn't that an oversimplification? Say a newcomer joins the conversation (at the bar) halfway through. He is missing a lot of context. His kind friends would then fill him in, unlike the internet. A threading like structure however, allows you to quickly scan the parent, and if need be the parent's parent. It's within the user's perogative to choose how much information he needs to be caught up. That being said, I'm very open minded about seeing the new approach develop. Heavily nested threads are a far from perfect solution.
Shorel 14y ago
There are some parts of a conversation I don't want to follow. Threads allow me to skip them faster than any other method.

webwanderings 14y ago

No nesting works, ask Facebook Groups. The key is to see that in no-nesting, people make less noise and audience see less circular arguments.