I miss the old site with comments on the same page

meta
21

I think we’re getting side-tracked by the threading issue, when in reality my primary issue (even in the title of this thread) is the separation of content and commentary.

That’s what I don’t think works; and I can’t imagine any real justification of how or why it would work. That’s the real issue. Having the first comment of every thread as a permalink to the actual website is just odd - clearly that’s where the content should be, which would bring us back to the same content/commentary metaphor we had previously.

The threading just needs slight improvements (IMO), and is perfectly acceptable for a beta.

I’m also not surprised that usage on BBS is going up. I stopped commenting for quite a while when it was launched, but at the end of the day I like the community here and I like the authors/articles etc - so I make do. If you were the only guy selling water in the desert but kicked the shins of every customer, I’d still buy water from you - but that doesn’t mean that shin kicking is a good idea.

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22

Fair enough. I agree that the separation is awkward – but it seems unavoidable if you want a strong wall between editorial and community content.

What I sometimes object to is when the original BB article is little more than a link to another place, itself. Then I’m basically clicking through from BBS to BB just to read a short blurb and find the relevant single link the blurb is about.

I don’t mind clicking through at all when the BB article is substantive and contains a number of links, extended commentary, etcetera.

I’m guess I’m advocating a position where short BB articles are reprinted here on BBS in their entirety in the first post of the topic – and longer ones remain permalinks. But it’s just an idea.

23

I just don’t think combining a blog and a forum works.

You can have the commentary inline with the blog article, or the blog article as the first post in a forum. But separating them is inherently disjointed. You wouldn’t put the comments from a StackExchange (edit: I meant Stack Overflow) question into a separate forum and permalink the question as the first post - maybe not a perfect analogy, but I don’t think it’s actually that far off.

That is why I stated that I felt the platform was chosen because it’s what you wanted, and not because it’s the most appropriate tool for the job. Maybe that’s unfair, but it’s how it looks.

It’s a square peg in a round hole.

Edit: HOWEVER, having a forum as an addition to a commenting system is a great idea. As they do provide different benefits.

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Why are you assuming that I was the person who made that decision?

I will say that I am definitely a fan of strong separation between community content and editorial content – which can take many forms. But the details of how that breaks down specifically, and all the decisions behind it, were not mine to make – nor should they be.

(on the other hand, it is fair to engage me in discussion about the hybrid threading in Discourse, as that was completely my decision.)

25

Simply because of the amount of time you’ve spent defending the decision. But I appreciate there are many stakeholders involved. I know that Rob was keen to separate commentary from the articles, but I also know why that was, which had nothing to do with increasing or aiding engagement.

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Personally, I don’t know why that was, though I’d like to know. It bugs the hell out of me, since that’s gotta be the reason for the content-free permalinks at the top of every BBS thread, which are extra-irritating, as Jeff points out, when the original post wasn’t much more than a link in the first place. I like BoingBoing equally for the blog content and the commentariat, and separating them strikes me as needlessly inconvenient. I can start at BB, read posts, then click again to read the comments (which I’ll always want to read if I was interested enough to read the post in the first place). Or, I’ll start at the BBS summary page to see what people are gabbing about, then find an interesting topic, click through to that, then have to click again to get the actual post, possibly have to click further on any links in the post, and then back up a click or two to read the comments. A week or two ago I suggested including a direct link to each topic’s permalink on the same line as the discussion topic on the BBS home page, just to reduce the clickery a bit. No idea how that idea was received upstairs.

But anyway, divorcing the posts from the comments makes no sense to me. It’s not like they’re hidden. It’s not like they’re kept separated from the editorial voices in any way that preserves any kind of purity of opinion or anything. It’s just less convenient. In the old system, people who didn’t wanna read the comments simply didn’t have to scroll down. What we have here is the equivalent of a walled garden with a 2" tall wall. Won’t keep anything out (not even the slugs), but it does manage to trip and annoy people.

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He knows all of this and he doesn’t seem to care what the community want, it’s his baby and he’s keeping it like this. It’s apparently a ‘religious issue’ (his words).

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Is that fair though? If we want to weigh in on a BB post, our only option is your unthreaded system. If I had the choice between this and something more akin to reddit (but without the stupid karma thing they have, posts sorted in thread/chronological order) then I would choose that. As it is this system is the only option, so of course its going to get used.

Which you have declared yourself on the right side of and refuse to hear any arguments against.

Fact is, I personally find the current system at best irritating when I end up reading multiple posts twice as I scroll down the page (which doesnt load in one go, another irritation) and at worst outright confusing when it seems people are replying to the OP because the context of the reply button is ambiguous.

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Man, I know you’re talking to Nathan and not me here, but do I ever hate it when you do that. I don’t work in tech, and I’m just another user who quit using AOL in 1997 and wouldn’t know a stack (underflowing or otherwise) from a cheese danish, so maybe it’s no surprise that no, I’ve never heard of Stack Overflow before coming here. Yeah, sure, maybe the people who do spend a fair amount of their waking hours dealing with web forums and code should recognize you and your no doubt excellent and highly influential works, but “do you know who I am?” especially used as defense for why you do the things you do, comes off as pretty arrogant. You’re right that “threaded vs flat” can be considered a religious argument wherein nobody’s gonna change anybody’s mind, and I expect it must be tiresome to have to keep sending people the link to your flat manifesto, but that doesn’t mean you have to be rude about it. As you said, this is a beta work in progress, and as such you’re gonna keep getting people offering feedback and asking why you make the choices you (or the BB honchos) have made.

But come now. Wrybread began by apologizing for the possibly-perceived-as-rude tone of his initial comment, went on to describe Discourse as “pretty amazing in a lot of ways” and even called your keyboard “awesome.” His or her critiques of the BBS user experience were couched in polite, respectful, earnest terms. But then you immediately call the idea that Discourse might evolve into a fully threaded system as a “delusion.” Not a “misapprehension” or a “forlorn hope” or even a “mistake.” I know you might be tired of telling people why you prefer flat over threaded, and it follows that Discourse is your baby and certain aspects of it are subject only to your own choices. But when someone asks for the first time (for them) why you do it this way, it’d be nice if your response didn’t seem designed to make them feel like idiots for asking.

If you’re gonna be the PR for your own product, you better make damn sure your product itself is its own best salesman, because you’re not helping matters here. Like wrybread’s, Nathan’s questions were respectful and on-point, and I get the distinct impression that your dismissive responses may have irked him a bit. None of my business, but they irked me too. You don’t have to please me to keep this gig, obviously. If Rob and Jason and Mark and Cory et al like what you’re doing, then you’re fulfilling your mandate. But dude, if you’re in a public beta and you’re actively soliciting feedback, then please don’t denigrate such feedback, even if it does bring up ideas you’ve long since considered and dismissed.

Could be a prominently displayed FAQ is in order for BBS.

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https://twitter.com/beschizza/status/307177031106453504

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Huh. Well, that answers that, I suppose, except now the trolls (such as they are) are a click away. As are such insightful, constructive, entertaining, and mellifluous voices as yours and mine, for that matter. ;^)

Seems an odd compromise between not having comments at all (if the trolls were that bad) and whatever free-for-all it was that so bugged the Powers-That-Be before the change.

Well, anyway. If it’s working for them, huzzah for that. I miss a lot of the old voices that have gone silent, but there are still some good conversations to be had around here, and I don’t find the interface so inconvenient as to keep me away. So I don my shinguards (hee hee) and carry on as usual.

Thanks for the insight!

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32

I wonder how hard it would be to write an IFTT recipe to automatically post the contents of a BB post to the associated BBS thread.

33

The comments you refer to were not directed at @wrybread, they were directed at @NathanHornby, who said:

Hey man, If you’re going to start throwing elbows, I’m not above throwing a few back myself – that’s how we play the forum game. No hard feelings either way. I don’t hold grudges… long.

Anyway, as @NathanHornby correctly pointed out, the crux of his issue wasn’t about threading, and the title of the topic certainly makes that clear. It is, however, the only part of his original topic I can answer decisively, a part that I designed in from the beginning.

We are looking at a change that will suppress entries in the stream below once expanded above, but this also requires action buttons on the expanded replies – because once suppressed, how would you reply to them? All in good time.

To be honest with you, a lot of the friction has to do with the abrupt switch from a strongly threaded system to a strongly flat system. There are certain interaction modes that certain people have gotten used to under a threaded regime that simply don’t work well in a flat one.

For example this kind of stuff is endemic in any strongly threaded discussion software (and I’d argue it is 99.5% of what Reddit is nowadays):

  • funny one liner
    • funny one liner response
      • even funnier one liner response
        - hee-larious one liner response
        • chortlicious one-liner response

… repeat ad nauseam until you’re way over to the right side of your monitor.

That sort of thing just isn’t going to work well in a flat discussion system. The onus is on the poster to carry context with them, to explain enough of what they’re talking about, either with selective quoting, or with a few extra words in the text of the response itself, so that anyone reading it can understand the point they are making without needing to claw their way up the last 5 chains in the response first.

And I would argue, violently and at some length, that flat is a fundamentally much stronger discussion model, one that teaches people to write coherent standalone pieces that don’t force the reader to painfully slog through a half dozen previous posts of context before making their point.

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No, I was careful in my attribution. Your responses to wrybread struck me as brusque and dismissive.[quote=“wrybread, post:9, topic:8634”]
Have you considered an option to show replies inline? Could be a button at the top or something? I know we can currently click the “reply” button below a comment, but a) that’s a lot of extra work when you’re reading a busy topic, and b) you still see those replies farther down, which totally throws off the narrative
[/quote]
And you responded with [quote=“codinghorror, post:10, topic:8634”]
How is it any more work than manually collapsing all the noisy threaded conversations you don’t care about? There is a narrative: chronological.

Discourse is a primarily flat system with some mildly threaded hybridization. That hybridization is subject to improvement, of course, but nobody should be operating under the delusion that Discourse will one day become a Fully Threaded System.
[/quote]

Informative, yes. To the point, certainly. But it’s dismissive of wrybread’s opinion of the user experience, implies that anyone who hopes threaded structure might eventually be incorporated is “delusional” rather than just simply “bound to be disappointed,” and when you add this: [quote=“codinghorror, post:10, topic:8634”]
Well, I beg to differ. I find a simple chronological narrative much easier to follow than a thousand-headed conversational hydra where responses can come at any place or time, and the software evidence of surviving social software says the world does too.
[/quote]
The end result comes off as “I’m right since I’ve obviously spent more time thinking about this than you have and the world agrees with me so there.” And I know that’s not the tone you’re trying for here. But that’s the attitude that seemed to return when it came to Nathan’s questions. I’ve read the earlier threads about threaded-vs-flat and I could tell that wrybread and Nathan hadn’t seen them yet, so I knew what the answers to their questions would likely be. But I just felt that the answers were delivered a bit… well, rudely. Nathan may have been a tad snippy in the comments you just quoted, but that was after you said: [quote=“codinghorror, post:15, topic:8634”]
How happy do you expect to be, exactly?
[/quote]

And that doesn’t sound like a friendly question regarding user feedback. It’s more akin to “whaddaya want from me? Do I need to hold yer hand?” And again, I know that tone wasn’t your intent, but I feel it does come off that way.

Okay, maybe I’m too sensitive. My office just had our annual harassment seminar yesterday, and I simply could not quite doze off during it. I should recalibrate and let other people squawk if they get their feelers hurt.

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Perhaps you should read my article on the Smackdown Learning Model.

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Well, I did, along with the article it quoted. And it didn’t strike me as entirely relevant. Maybe it would if you had some other person (maybe Sam, or even some handpicked strawman, not that I think you’d do such a thing) try to defend threaded forums on an actual threaded vs flat smackdown. But you don’t. You just present your conclusions as a linked post that enumerates your reasons for thinking as you do, without presenting the Rowdy Roddy Piper defense of threaded discussion. I’ve also noticed, as an aside, that the Flat By Design post mentions that “Stack Exchange is not a discussion system.” And it seems to me that BBS here kinda is a discussion system; that’s sort of the point of it. That’s its history, and that’s why so many older users seem to miss the threaded construction.

But anyway. I’m not opposed to a good spirited argument, especially one where no hard feelings are intended and no serious offense is taken, and I take your point: this is all in good fun. I just felt a wee bit more courtesy might be desirable in this context. We’re still getting to know one another. And we don’t always get a chance to express niceties. I was touched by what you said about my parenting the other day, and typed up a heartfelt thanks, which I then attempted to post… precisely two minutes after the thread auto-closed. I should have forwarded it to you personally, but I didn’t. So… a belated thanks for your kind words.

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And yet, if you look at the broadest swath of forum culture, the vast, vast majority of it is flat as a pancake and always has been. If anything, Disqus is the outlier – and note that even in Disqus, full-threading is a mode, not necessarily the default.

http://www.forum-software.org/forum-software-timeline-from-1994-to-today

Another example; one of the great innovations of GMail was its flatness. I can’t even recall the last time I saw a threaded email client any more.

38

Let me lay out another example for you:

  • Subject post
  • Reply
    • reply to reply
      • Moving off topic now
        - Stuff I’m not interested in because it has no relevance to my knowledge of the original topic
        - Stuff I know I can ignore because I’m out of my depth or simply not interested
  • Ooh here’s something interesting which under discourse could be in position 4 so I MUST read every single comment to see if its of interest to me

If you honestly feel that adding a horizontal scroll would destroy the universe then so be it, but really, with the amount of other flashy interactive stuff you have going on, I’m sure you could make it so that it wouldn’t be too intrusive

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39

Oh, no doubt. I know you’ve done your homework about forums in general. But the BoingBoing history, at least for the mere 2 or 3 years I’ve been a part of it, has been heavily threaded. And the users would discuss the hell out of everything, sometimes going into considerable depth far beyond what the original blog post might have suggested. Sometimes the rightward squish would be an irritant, but we’d work around it. Just like we work around the relative flatness here. Those that can’t take it go away. Those that simply need to join the discussion will, even if we’re scribbling on Post-Its stuck to a tree stump.

Again, I’m not trying to change your mind about the threaded-vs-flat thing. I’m just trying to illustrate why you keep bumping into resistance to flatness hereabouts.

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Threaded vs. Flat is an irreconcilable religious issue, no different than Israel vs. Palestine. No illustration needed, any more so than I need someone to explain to me why Israel vs. Palestine will be argued over in the exact same way by my great-grandchildren.

It is what it is.