Well, we started setup in May – the first post was May 13th 2013. So it’s not far off to a year.
My primary general thought after nearly a year of BBS:
It is painful to take a community from one extreme to another in a single day, but BBS did it in two extremes at once:
- on-page vs. off-page commenting
- flat vs. threaded commenting
Either of these alone would be a massive change. Together they’re enormous. Would I recommend doing that again, all at once? I dunno.
I’m not sure there was a better way to transition, necessarily – I guess you could argue for the “rip the band-aid off the wound fast” approach? But those were two enormous changes that had to be absorbed in one fell swoop. And the alternative “solution” was no comments at all…
My secondary thought is that I’m surprised that there are relatively few “endless” topics of 500+ replies.
I view this as vindication of the flat discussion model – you can’t sneak repeated cyclic endless discussions into flat discussions like you can in the many-headed threading hydra. Any new replies have to be made at the same singular entry point at the bottom of the topic everyone else uses, so all new replies are vetted.
If you start repeating yourself – people will notice! And if the discussion starts repeating itself – people notice! Because they have one place to look for new replies to the topic rather than dozens. As a result, you have discussions that, mercifully, end. Everyone says their piece and eventually moves on.
Of course, it helps tremendously that BBS has a five day window on all discussions where discussions close. So the endpoint is always in sight, but the dropoff in interest is so rapid anyway that once things fall off the BB homepage, they’re pretty dead after 5 days, automatic close date or not.
