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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

Re: Github Discussions

Preface: I don't think this resolves the issue completely by any means.

It's seemed clear to me for awhile that Github discussions need threading, badly. The 200 comments on one of those issues probably amounts to about 40 actual discussion topics. Many of them are the original poster adding follow-up comments to their original comment, or back-and-forth discussions about one single comment. It's especially noticeable on contentious discussion topics.

Basic conversation threads wouldn't completely alleviate the problem--200 threads is much better than 1000 comments, but probably still an intractable amount for the maintainers. Still, it might mean you're able to scan 75% of the discussion instead of 25%.

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The hidden benefit might be that, with the existence of nested subthreads, many of those comments could be obviated, since it's easier to see which concerns have already been raised and which questions have already been asked/answered.

Indeed to take a terrible example from the Scala community, what about this:

https://github.com/scala/slip/pull/28

That is nearly the exemplar of a conversation gone off the rails. At least to some extent, threading would help. And, since so many of those people keep getting sidetracked, it would be useful to the moderator to be able to break off a section of that debate and make it a separate conversation.

The only thing that I could imagine approaching a "complete" solution would be to have a dedicated secretary who manually writes comprehensive summaries every few days.

Since that's not going to happen, I don't see any better solutions than yours.

I've often wondered how much more productive GitHub discussion threads would be if you could set them to be rate-limited: Each user can only comment X times per day and each comment may only have up to Y characters of text.

Right now, it's too easy for people to blast out unedited words and consume the attention of readers. If they had an attention budget, maybe they would spend it more wisely.

You'd have to stop people editing their comments, too. Or people end up responding to subsequent comments by editing previous comments and doing the whole:

"On subject foo:.... (insert four paragraphs of blather here)

On subject bar: .... (more blather)

In response to your point .... (yada yada)"

thing, and it gets even more unreadable.

I find any serious, meaningful creative discussion almost impossible without proper threads. I have this same problem in Slack, where interesting, significant, discussions sit in a thread spawned from some innocuous comment and there's no way of highlighting it to say "this is significant.

I hate to say it, but old-school, early-internet forums did solve this problem really well.

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