Newer online forums are worse at conversation | Hacker News Reader

Newer online forums are worse at conversation

robsheldon.com

26 pointsthaumaturgy26 comments

Myself, I think message boards resemble fencing more than upvote-based comment threads. I kind of like that HN/Reddit mitigate the "quote piecemeal, attack piecemeal" back and forth that was the norm on message boards.

(You know what I'm talking about, right? - person A writes long post, B takes issue and responds to A sentence by sentence, often ignoring A's overall point to focus on incorrect minutiae, A, now incensed, refuses to concede that any of the minutiae were incorrect, and writes an individual response to each of B's sentences. I felt that this wasn't a good environment for conversation either - I think talking in person forces you to consider the thrust of another person's argument, since you can't hold all the minutiae in RAM, but my experience was that conversations in message boards degraded to many small parallel quarrels over nitpicking in a way that HN/Reddit comment threads don't (as much).)

I grew up on message boards. In fact, my first experiences with a computer were with message boards.

If there's one thing that I dislike about nested comments, it's that they make the community seem less cohesive. When everyone is commenting in a linear fashion on (roughly) the same topics, it makes for a tighter community. Nested comments, while better organized, just seem like a bunch of people having separate conversations.

Message boards are like a group assembly. One person talks at a time, and everyone listens. Nested comments are like a crowd of people having individual conversations about the guy that just talked.

I think that's a good thing, for larger communities. Threads become unreadable once they're over a certain size, at least with linear comments. With nested comments, you can digest part of a topic and still participate.

Also, I think the "fragmented community" also has its advantages. The community can different aspects of the article at the same time, so parts don't get ignored. While one person may want to mention they love the design on the site, another has a minor nitpick, and a third guy has a comment on similar articles, they can all say their piece without dragging the entire discussion off topic.

However, I do agree with what you said about everyone being heard and the benefit of a cohesive discussion. The recent topic this really comes to mind for is the one about "How to stop HN's decline". There were a number of good ideas, but they were also repeated numerously, and the same counter points were made. If there was a single linear thread for that topic, while the size would be unwieldy, I think the same points would have been made less.

Perhaps the question then becomes: how do we make a large community function like a small one?

One idea: for every new "comment" on a story (that isn't a response) create a new instance of the story on the news feed. Example: I comment on this story, and you reply.

  [Newer online forums are worse at conversation]
  "I grew up on message boards. In fact, my ..."     
  by keiferski | 2 comments

Rinse/repeat for every new comment on the story. It would lead to more instances of the same story on the news feed, but would also lead to more in-depth comments. Of course, it would be very easy to organize (and hide) long lists of comments.

"Nested comments, while better organized, just seem like a bunch of people having separate conversations."

Why "just"? What's wrong with that? Who says our goal is for online discussions to precisely mimic only that one form of conversation the physically world and constraints of human cognition permit? You and the original article seem to accept this as an unspoken assumption of how to rank conversation quality. I don't. The right way to do digital things is rarely "Exactly like the analog case, but with computers." (See also: newspapers, education.)

The sites mentioned are comment sites, who may or may not be subsumed under the forum category. Usually, "forum" signifies a bulletin board.

I think Rob Sheldon just needs to revise his semantics and find out how every format has its advantages and disadvantages.

I, too, don't think comment sites are great for long discussions either. But that's not "new". Try your luck at Something Awful or another niche forum. Preferably one whose activity is so low that every thread doesn't advance with 100 posts every day.

A forum is a place where people come together and talk. The word comes from ancient Romans. Many people still use it with its original meaning, no need to nitpick.

Well one problem is that some users have the power to stop conversations dead. I've had two perfectly good questions 'closed' on stackexchange recently. They both had upvotes and answers already, contained patently useful information, in fact one of them had even been edited by Jeff Atwood for 'improvement' - but 5 dorks voted to 'close' the threads because they seem to view their moderation privileges as some sort of regex that MUST be applied, regardless of the social cost. Newer online forums are worse at conversation because they give power to people who are probably terrible conversationalists.

On a related note, don't know if anyone's noticed this, but I remember people using voice chat on the old XBox so much more than they do now. Not sure why that is.

On a related note, don't know if anyone's noticed this, but I remember people using voice chat on the old XBox so much more than they do now. Not sure why that is.

More people using Live means more people using Live that you don't want to talk to. Just like any other online community, when it is a niche you have a greater chance that the members of the community can appreciate things like civil conversation.

>I remember people using voice chat on the old XBox so much more than they do now. Not sure why that is.

Its the kids and man-children who can't control themselves. Many of my friends either don't use it, or only for group chat because of the prevalence of assholes on live. I enjoy talking on live, I'm the kind of guy who will just be yacking away in the middle of a firefight and even for me, once I encounter an single rude young lady (or at least what sounds like one), I'm done and just toss the headset on the floor. Its not worth it anymore.

It can be such a fun, unique experience. One time as I joke I started singing old rat-pack/crooner standards from the 50s, in the middle of a Halo match. When I stopped, my teammates actually begged me to continue saying it sounded really good and we were playing better while I sang. Literally nobody else has ever complimented me on my vocal talent, lol. Many hilarious situations arise that you could never get in other walks of life. But, yes, the obnoxious players ruin it (yet, it was much worse in Halo 2 IMO, it just didn't stop other people talking).

The best conversations online are those in spaces that model well to how we converse as people: flat and linear in format. From the Well to Metafilter, the best conversation happens on flat sites.

Nesting and threading and sorting all solve conversation problems that don't really exist: we already know how to keep track of digressing conversations, intuitively. In the physical world, we're exceptionally good at branching and merging linear discussion threads, at weeding out noise from signal and at setting community norms. The sites that thrive are those that allow users to engage those skills, not those that try to turn it all into math.

In a lot of places, karma and scoring isn't really about making conversations easier for the participants, it's about making editing easier or hands-off for the moderators. Unfortunately, there's not really any way around the fundamental need for community stewardship and moderation beyond a certain size, and when you hit that size you find you have a site that you need to moderate anyway, but it's one that also has user-hostile conversation display and so it begins, inevitably, to suck.

So maybe the answer is to get better at gatekeeping and selecting members who will contribute to the conversation rather than just troll it?

Not sure i agree with your "linear" point.

Conversations used to be linear in Groupie (forum app i created) and things got completely out of control. Three people would try to have a conversation and someone else would randomly throw in a totally unrelated point. Get a dozen people doing this and all of sudden there's a mess. What happens is that users stop trying to follow along and only read whats immediately in front of them. Anecdotally, threading and nesting dramatically improved the experience of forum-based communities and noticably improved the quality of replies.

Also, another benefit of scoring is that it lends to reputation. Just like in real life, people do what they can to preserve their digital reputations (once they establish them). Last week I saw something rather incredible: several of my users dished out extremely harsh digital justice on one of the most popular (by "fame") users who made some ridiculous statements. When you're among the most influential on a platform, people watch and literally hold you to a higher standard. Anyway just wanted to share this view.

Yes, I agree with you, things can get out of control. That's because the other thing the sites with great conversations have in common is an element of moderation and "etiquette". You can't take a random selection of people and expect their community values to spring from nothing. It has to be tended and moderated and standards have to be established, people have to establish reputation by becoming known among others.

Threading and nesting and numerical reputation have an allure because they seem to allow you to skip all that -- let the math and the tech enforce a lowest-common community value. But, as I think we see time and again, that doesn't really scale and it doesn't engender great conversation on a par with the best of the flat forums.

> When you're among the most influential on a platform, people watch and literally hold you to a higher standard.

Reddit's "celebrity users" have been grumbling publicly about exactly this recently. They feel like they can no longer disagree or behave like other users without being swarmed by people who recognize their username, and it's making them a lot disgruntled. Generally, it's a bad sign when your power users are unhappy, so I don't think that holding certain users to a higher standard than other users is a good idea.

If you dislike your status on a forum, it's easy enough to start a new psuedonym, especially on reddit. I know kleinbl00 has complained about people recognizing him across screennames, but then perhaps it's time for a new one, or a change in writing style.

I think the benefits of a reputation outweigh its negatives though. It won't keep the truly prolific users happy (karmanaut, PDub, kleinbl00, etc), but it will motivate more people overall, I assume.

It is important to have an easy means of becoming anonymous for expressing controversial opinions, however. Perhaps instead of Slashdot's "post as anonymous" checkbox, there could be a "thread psuedonym" button when you want to be anonymous, but hold a coherent discussion.

> If you dislike your status on a forum, it's easy enough to start a new psuedonym, especially on reddit.

Since you mentioned him specifically, I'll mention that kleinbl00 has on several occasions responded to this with varying degrees of, "that's not fair", "I don't want to", "I don't think I should have to", etc. ... of course, he usually puts it a little more colorfully.

> I think the benefits of a reputation outweigh its negatives though.

kleinbl00 has actually put this as well as I could, so I should just let him talk about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/gdig1/everyb...

What you're actually looking for, I think, is accountability: some way for bad behavior to have consequences. Unfortunately, in pseudo-anonymous environments like Reddit (and HackerNews), developing a reputation through score or activity or what-have-you can have downsides for the person with the reputation, and you still don't get the accountability you want. It really is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Likewise, you also say,

> ...but it will motivate more people overall, I assume.

...but in a field where we have relatively few experiments to study, this is one experiment that has already been tried. Reddit already uses this, and the only difference you really get in user behavior is that some of them choose to switch to a new account every once in a while.

That might be a good game, but again, it's poor conversation.

I've thought about this before as well, particularly when I've administered or moderated various forums (frequently related to MMORPGs, which might skew the sample).

Scoring of threads/posts seems like a fairly intuitive solution to the designer. But users / members frequently have a different agenda, which means that the tools won't always work as intended depending on the community.

"Conversation by community" also seems like a feature, not a bug, from where I sit. If enough different people self-organize into nano-parties (in a political sense), then you've really fostered something interesting and useful, or at least potentially so.

Hey Kyle. I was wondering if you would be available to discuss your experience managing various online forums with me (email or phone, whatever works). I recently built a tool that has niche traction in the space and we are considering a more direct step in that direction. I would appreciate speaking with someone who manages these kinds of communities.

leo at groupie dot mobi

I'm on the fence when it comes to the bit on "conversation by community"; I included it because it's unlike traditional in-person group conversation, but I haven't been able to figure out yet if it might be beneficial or harmful to conversation in the long-term, or neither.

I don't look at these comment sections on information rich sites to converse.

I look at them to see curated content that many times is more valuable than the source material being discussed. On the best of them, I get to see what incredibly smart and talented people think on the topic, I get to see their mind work. The value of that cannot be overstated. The social niceties or whatnot of 'conversations' dilute that information, as does removing social feedback mechanisms that bring the most valuable comments to the forefront - that stuff saves me time and energy.

Discussion forums are a different beast.

The original post is about forums, not comments, it's in the title. They're the sites where the conversation is the focus. (And most of them have very little truck with "niceties", don't make the nerd mistake of assuming a degree of chatter isn't valuable or is dilution -- it's sync, feedback and flow-control. Even SMTP says helo.)

That aside, bringing the most valuable comments to the front might save you energy at a glance, but it also brings you comments limited by their hit-and-run nature and costs you energy if you want to later return to a thread and discover what's new, because there's none of the flow and context you need to rejoin a discussion.

On the best forum sites, you get to converse with the incredibly smart and talented people. That's far more valuable than just looking at them in awe.

He says forums, but his example is "places like Reddit and HackerNews and Slashdot" - articles are the focus, he's talking about comments sections.

"Looking at them in awe?" What's wrong with lurking to learn?

You're right that I mixed up the terminology a bit, but as someone else here pointed out, I was using "forum" in the classical sense: a place where people talk.

We now have the "old kind" of forums -- phpBB and its ilk -- and the "new kind" of forums, the comments-oriented sections of Reddit and HackerNews and Slashdot.

And, yes, I get that on these sites, the comments are prompted by new articles. (I'm not sure that I'd agree that articles are the focus, but that might depend on the individual.)

I was just pointing out where comments sites don't do as well in terms of the value of conversation, and why that might be, and comparing it to the older style of forums.

Nothing wrong with lurking to learn; I think that "looking at them in awe" was a bit of hyperbole.

I think there's a reason most free software projects are still developed on mailing lists. It's not just inertia, lists avoid many of these problems and the problems they do have are well-understood by now and mostly easy to deal with.

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