I would argue that scrolling is an extremely natural activity on the Internet, akin to flipping pages in a book – the intrinsic gravity of web pages pulling you down as they have on every web site since the dawn of the web.
Many aspects of threading, on the other hand, are very unnatural. Neither flat nor threaded are perfect models, but threading sure brings a lot of severe cons to the table. You correctly noted one of them – that replies can come anywhere in the tree – but there are many others.
I read your, uh, manifesto on flat vs threaded before. I just don’t happen to agree with it. Part of it stems from what people get used to, and BB was a firmly established and thriving community with a fairly long history of threaded discussion. When that changed, some liked it, some didn’t, and some haven’t come back. No huge tragedy or anything; it’s a boisterous and opinionated and well-populated community, and people have been coming and going all along. If I left tomorrow, the community at large would barely notice (with, I hope, a handful of exceptions), and the dialogue wouldn’t materially improve or decline. It’s resilient that way. Having tried both forms of discussion forum formatting (along with some hybrids), I happen to prefer the imperfect but familiar old threaded BB, not simply because it’s familiar, but because I find it easier to parse. Especially when tangential discussions (which are often much more interesting hereabouts than I think you give them credit for) get lengthy. But I don’t love it so much that I demand its return. I’ll live with the new setup, and I hope you don’t have to keep sending the link to your manifesto to too many more dissatisfied cranks like me before things settle down.
Well, like I said, it’s a religious issue. But GMail, for example, is flat as a pancake too and people love it. (Do they even make threaded email clients any more?) And of course the vast, vast majority of forums out there are flat as well.
Flat is just simpler for our primate brains to process, and in the long run, simple always wins.
Just MHO of course, but I fancy myself a rather astute analyst of what the future Internet will hold.
Mailing lists (and thus, GMail) are primary targets for Discourse. A mailing list is virtually identical to what a forum does – it’s a system of paragraph-based conversations with a group of people. See:
Discourse is the 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
I would disagree. GMail and email in general is exactly what a forum is. The only difference, it’s a discussion between two people which is not public. As pointed out by @codinghorror already. Also, Google Groups supported and is heavily used as mailing lists for example, rather then the discussion thread format it was originally designed for.
I for one dislike it when I have to read back into an email and the responses are threaded and identified 17 levels deep. Having followed Discourse since inception, the flat layout has improved my workflow for reading forums ten fold, and I actually now visit sites that use it actively and regularly. I don’t necessarily interact or post on the forum, but definitely read and follow numerous threads.
I understand it. A lot of it has to do with commitment to content over form.
Personally I may appear as a ‘one liner’ but consider that saying the same thing in paragraph form often just wastes bandwidth and time. If someone wants to disagree or agree, the amount i may put out there seems pretty irrelevant. .
We just have different religious beliefs @AcerPlatanoides; your god is threaded. Mine is flat. Rather than glad-handing people, I tell them what I really believe, because I find that honesty is a better long term foundation for community relationships.
Discourse will continue to evolve, but it will always be a fundamentally flat system by design. If I said otherwise, it would be a lie.
@daneel can you cite any real world examples of this sort of layout? Note that we use the right hand column for lateral navigation, to link topics to each other and offer to start them via “Reply as new topic”.
[quote=“codinghorror, post:25, topic:3090”]
I can’t help it if some people are “astonished” that there are flat forums, and there are threaded forums, and the flat kind are not what they want. This is a religious issue.
What have in Discourse is a hybrid to some extent, but it is 80% flat. Astonishingly enough, that may not be to some people’s tastes.
Indeed, and the vast majority of those forum models are flat as a pancake, for very good reason.[/quote]
…I think you’ve gotten my argument backwards. I might not have stated it clearly. I like flat. My favorite forums are flat. I like Discourse where it’s flat. What I don’t like is where it shoehorns in pseudo-threaded behavior (the replies dropdown) and messes with user expectations when we see something that looks like threaded but doesn’t act like it.
I see. Those are aids/assists for threaded folks. There is no reason to click on the “in reply to” and “replies” expansions unless you want to invoke partially threaded behaviors.
In other words, these functions can be ignored completely, and Discourse then behaves no differently than any other traditional flat forum.
That said, I see no downside to enhancing the “in reply to” expansion to show the entire chain of previous replies in a flat manner. We will get to this soon.
Just out of curiosity, could clicking on the “Replies” button at the bottom of each comment which has received replies then expand either the entire shrubbery of reply branches below, or, failing that, if it just shows the direct replies only to that specific comment (as I believe is the current behavior), could those revealed replies then display their own “Replies” button which could be clicked for further expansion if those replies have replies of their own?
Or would that be too complicated? Seems to me that, if it’s technically workable, you’d then end up with a format that’s perfectly flat by default, but expandable to threaded view click by click on progressive “Replies” buttons, which would then present one with a coherent threaded conversation view without lots of scrolling up and down, for those chuckleheads like me who miss the old threaded view.
That may be too, uh, Redditish for anyone’s taste, but it’s just an idea.
Possibly, but the further down this rabbit hole of expansion on top of expansion we go, the more expanded posts need to have full embedding so you can act on them in some way: like, reply, quote, flag, bookmark, etcetera. *
Right now the replies expansion is sort of like a sneak preview or look-ahead function, it is not really intended as a replacement for, y’know, letting gravity drag you down naturally to read the topic stream.
(* Which I am not opposed to per se, it is just a huge technical undertaking.)
I get ya. And yeah, if it’s, as you say, a huge technical undertaking then it’s not worth the effort. If it’d be easy to implement it’d be cool, but there’s no sense in reinventing from the ground up. Thanks.
