The best way to have complex discussions?
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This was basically solved in Usenet, more specifically, in news reader software. You had a clearly arranged threaded view (you could see the thread structure of as many as 50 postings on a single screen), with unread threads and unread postings highlighted, and pressing Tab jumped to the next unread posting. Unread status was per posting/comment, not by time. Many more conveniences for quick navigation, filtering, and so on.
All newer discussion platforms have been a step back in terms of efficiency of use and ability for deep, long running discussions. Initially due to web browser limitations (though nowadays that shouldn’t be much of a problem anymore), and later due to mobile touch interfaces (still poses some difficulties).
In fact, many organizations had (and some still may have) inhouse groups, often prefixed "local." e.g. "local.events", "local.jokes" etc.
Advantage: threaded discussions, open standard (many existing open source readers e.g. Emacs: M-x gnus)
Doesn't that make Usenet unfit for complex public discussions, at least?
I haven’t seen the lack of voting to be a major problem in newsgroups or traditional web forums. But I’ve come to despise the prevalent dynamics of liking/voting in newer platforms.
But if the truth-seeking you're thinking of is being a culture war truther, that'd certainly explain the woes.
It can be difficult to discuss inside an enterprise because everyone’s already so committed to a particular solution.
People have very strong opinions about crypto, SPAs, and CDNs.
The words they used are social liability, not merely controversial. It's a pretty high bar for how wrong a discussion in an enterprise has to go that it turns into a social liability.
Anyway, you don't have to go all the way there for knowledge to become a social liability. The more you understand about the universe and the human world - hell, the more permission to think you give yourself - the more you realize just how much utter bullshit regular people believe about everything. Homeopathy, weird coaching stuff, fitness and dieting and cosmetics. This supplement will help your health, that fruit will stop some ailment, looking at a microwave when it's cooking will ruin your eyes, etc. Most of this bullshit is fed by content marketers, through magazines, shows, radio, podcasts, and social media.
I have a whole rant about ethics of advertising, but that's for another day; point here is: it doesn't take much truth-seeking before it gets incredibly cringe to talk with most people. You either let them keep believing in bullshit and suffer inside, or speak up and end up being pushed out of the group.
> More generally, while a few people are willing to pay for access to a discussion service, most aren't
Agreed.
Usenet was one of the first systems of its kind, and it's no wonder people look back on it wistfully. It was wild, being able to talk (or argue, or flame, or troll) people all around the world at every hour of the day. Usenet was amazing. So was the Sony Vaio. You wouldn't want to use it today, though.
Usenet is the best forum system out there; everything web thing is just a ghetto/silo.
Where is the equivalent of the Usenet three-month-long thread?
The karma points are not transferable, which ticks off the checkbox under the silo column.
Usenet and e-mail are closely related; there is a reason for Usenet to exist.
There exist gateways between usenet and mailing lists, too.
If you join a new mailing list, your only option for "back issue" content is to go through an archive. Either a web archive, or else mbox files.
Usenet has a pull model. You connect your client to a server that stores articles going back whatever: months, years. You're not subscribed to receive anything spontaneously; if you want to quit Usenet, just exit the program, and that's it.
Numerous newsgroups are available in one place; you can search through them in your client and take a look. Mailing list archives tend to be scattered all over the place. GNU mailing lists here, BSD mailing lists there ...
On Usenet, you never have to use an identity with a real, working e-mail. Not so with mailing lists; they don't work without a reachable e-mail address.
Usenet has spam and so do mailing lists. But mailing lists have actual e-mail spam. Not only are lists sometimes the targets of spam, but spammers harvest addresses.
So, when I subscribe to mailing lists, I use throw-away addresses, unique for each list. This is a dance I do not have to do with Usenet.
When you use different addresses for subscribing to different mailing lists, you have to be careful to also use the matching addresses as your posting identity! (If you use your principal e-mail address by accident, it could get harvested. Or, something else: the posting might not go through to the list at all, due to that address not being a member.)
When a throw-away mailing list identity receives spam and you replace it with a new one, your old identity still exists in ongoing discussions and will be CC:'d in new postings.
You can use a working e-mail address in your Usenet From: header, if you choose to do so, so that you can be privately contacted. Getting a private e-mail reply from a Usenet posting is rare. If that address starts getting spam, it's pretty easy to change, just in your NNTP client setup. The address is not the basis of your NNTP identity, and so changing it doesn't break threads.
It doesn't involve your mailbox in any way. You don't have to register. "Subscribing" to a newsgroup is purely a local configuration, and you don't have to do that to post to it.
When you sum it all up, Usenet is easier to use and more casual than mailing lists. That gives it a different flavor.
Your experience was largely dependent on the server and client you happened to use. I mainly ended up reading threads on Deja News (later Google Groups) because you could at least search for messages that were outside of the retention period of most servers.
At some point a thrrad becomes irrelevant because of parallel discussions in other threads, being able to easily redirect to a specific point in another thread helps a lot. But that requires an URL, and messages ids weren't used for that purpose.
I only sent like 3 messages, but it was awfully slow. Didn't come away with a good impression.
I ask because we have a known issue in Zulip that the first minute or two of using the product is quite slow for folks with 100K for unread messages because it the web app's client-side data fetching system ends up fetching them all in order to make clicking around the app afterwards extremely snappy.
We've reworked that system over the last few months, and it'll be deployed to Zulip Cloud next week if all goes well. But if you don't have a lot of unread messages, I'd very much like to understand why -- I'd love for you to stop by chat.zulip.org and debug with us a bit if you can spare a bit of time.
(It could be that the Lean community Zulip involves rendering a LOT of LaTeX, for example)
You are right. Lean community had about 3K unread messages for me. After I marked a whole bunch read, and clicked around a bit, speed is now good.
Thanks for making me check.
My only other feedback would be that there is a new user "tutorial" or rather the interface highlights certain aspects of the UI for the new user. The bubbles that pop up for this, are too small and not noticeable on a dark theme. Make them bigger and different color.
Just to clarify for anyone here reading, Zulip can be scaled out, but largely our philosophy is that you should only scale out if you need to, since it comes with extra fiddly operational headaches and is expensive in dollars. We've designed Zulip with an efficient data model and well-indexes queries, and are constantly working as we add new features to maintain the property that only multi-tenant installations like Zulip Cloud should need to scale it out.
In particular, Zulip on a single server with 16GB of RAM can handle 10,000s of users, thousands of which are concurrently active. (That's what we use for chat.zulip.org, for example, and the machine is usually about 96% idle with only half its memory used).
(Keep in mind that Zulip's public access option means you don't need every user to create an account in order to access content).
I don't know your context, so I can't comment on whether zulip would be suitable. But there are very few communities today having complex conversations involving 100K+ people in a single organization/workspace, so I would expect it to be quite rare that autoscaling would be relevant. (Certainly there are Discords with over a million users, like the Midjourney one, but most of those users are just users the product, not having discussions at all; the company famously made the unusual decision to only offer a Discord bot as UI for their product).
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/requiremen... has some basic guidelines on Zulip's scalability for a single-instance deployment, but those are fairly conservative -- the goal is for folks to be able to deploy with those settings and be safe even if their load profile per user is fairly heavy for whatever reason.
That site shows quite different UX for same logical structure as you said.
I would say backend core logic is almost same as usenet reader or mail client for mailing list.
But the real value is quite different.
More often than not, nobody will reply, so all threads are just one or two levels deep. Or in the rare case someone actually replies to an interesting point, it's usually not the original poster. Probably because they had no idea that anyone had even followed up on their post.
Requests for elaboration mostly go unanswered, and comments are made expecting no replies. So people just shoot ideas into the void, with interesting interactions only happening when someone famous comments.
Text: Mutt, Alpine, and emacs's mailer off the top of my head. There's a listing of other clients here: <https://www.tecmint.com/best-commandline-email-clients-for-l...>
GUI: Sylpheed, Thunderbird, KMail (KDE's Kontact suite still strikes me as one of the best I've encountered), Evolution, and Clawsmail.
My own strong preference remains mutt, and the ability to process huge amounts of complex email reasonably well is still utterly unmatched.
And some additional sources:
https://www.dennisc.net/writing/tech/gmail-aerc
https://www.julioloayzam.com/guides/email-with-aerc/
My simple config and binds that are a little bit more "vim-like":
Technically we could be all writing in a giant Notepad file, and adhere to any discussion format.
(My experience is more than 10 years old, though)
In email, top-posting began when Microsoft’s first email client placed cursor and signature at the top of the quoted email instead, and didn’t provide commands to reflow partial quotes, or any of the features mentioned above. It also had no threaded view, which is what makes it practical to only partially quote instead of fully.
Culture is important, but technology can influence it heavily.
Reddit, and the even worse lesser forums, loses pretty much all of that. Browsing reddit, for me, feels more like watching a mix of a river with flotsam drifting by, a busy traffic street, uncoordinated fireworks, and a tornado ripping through a midwestern city. There are no tools to track what you have and haven't read already, or what new comments have appeared. You cannot sort and filter the posts properly, the best you get is a "do you feel lucky?" search, which often shows that "no, you weren't lucky today". On low-traffic subreddits, it IS possible to track new stuff, but you have to do so manually. I offer no solutions, I don't know how to effectively do highquality discussions for 6 or 7 billion people.
That's both a matter of design and scale. Forums larger than ~10^2 -- 10^3 participants aren't really discussions so much as a compilation of hit-and-run pieces. For very large subs (10^5 -- 10^6), discussion is effectively over within a day, if not hours.
A strong contrast are the now-defunct Google+ and (at certain points in its evolution) Ello, and the not-quite-dead-yet Diaspora*, all of which had or have a "notifications" pane in which recent discussions are presented in full, and to which all or most prior participants (so long as they've not muted the discussion) see not only direct responses but new comments. I've seen specific conversations continued for days, weeks, months, and even years, productively, and it's a really good way to noodle at an idea (particularly with a good post moderator) over time.
There are other factors about that which also contribute. All three of these platforms are post-and-comment style (HN can be somewhat like this), where the post author is the moderator of that post (HN is NOT like this). I consider the post author a "host", and think of this as a "salon-style" network. Barring blocking actions (which can have a pretty profound impact, TBH), everyone is mostly seeing the same discussion.[1] All three platforms also showed comments to posts in strict, flat, chronological order. As a long-time user of threaded interfaces (tin, mutt, /., Reddit, HN, etc.) this grated strongly on me for quite a while, but I eventually came to see the model as useful and with merits. It's an option and a tool in the box, though I'll still say it's not appropriate in all cases.
I'll also note that G+, Ello, and Diaspora* all have relatively small limits on discussion, with a post permitting up to 500 comments, so while the platform sizes could be large (G+ claimed over 4 billion "accounts", though highly actives were ~10 million or so), individual discussions tended to be fairly small. I'll also note that the salon-style engagement was fairly rare, many people (and institutional/organisational profiles) treated the platforms as post-only or broadcast, and my experience may well be niche. That said, there were some awesome discussions on all three of these which simply don't seem to gell elsewhere: Reddit, HN, and the Fediverse come particularly to mind.
Specific to HN: it's ... close. Discussions are threaded and moderated (both by mods and members, though by different mechanisms). There's no notification of follow-ups and it's hard to tell when a conversation's really died, or if it's still active. Participation quality is ... mixed, but there are some occasional gems. I do regret that there aren't better tools to surface really-high-quality comments or threads, though there've been some manual processes in the past ("best of" lists). That effort's largely been dropped, for understandable reasons of time and scale.
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Notes:
1. Some day I really should write up my thoughts on blocking. Effectively, it seems to create a geography or topography of the social network, which combined with follows and inter-participant links gives paths of greater and lesser propagation. Blocking by highly-linked nodes in particular can be devastating to reach, particularly in a simple chronological timeline. I'm a fan of the mental-hygiene aspects of blocks,[2] but have to admit that being on the receiving end can occasionally hurt. But beyond that, the effects on how following and blocking shape the overall network and activity dynamics is simply fascinating to me.
I vehemently disagree that Reddit is in any way even approaching equivalent, much less better, than Usenet was.
There's something about the text area, vs an email-like posting box, which encourages low-thought short replies.
I think worshipping Usenet is just a simple case of rose-tinted glasses. Like people telling how awesome old OSs and applications were in the 90s ;)
I'd had my first tastes in the late 1980s, where some uniformity of tools, platforms, and cultures (tin, Unix, and largely uni-based participants) tended to cohere. I've cited on HN Brian Reid's Usenet activity surveys (from John Quarterman's The Matrix,[1] an early exploration of what we'd now consider social networks) several times on HN[2]. As of 1988, there were 381 newsgrous, 1,933 articles/day, 4.4 MiB/day of traffic, 7,800 hosts, and 141,000 readers. That's ... tiny by contemporary standards.
Cultural norms broke down rapidly as Usenet spread first to corporate networks (Lotus Notes email formats remain a massive annoyance etched in my brain), and then the general public. By the mid-1990s, Usenet though far more active and reaching far more people was a pale shadow of its former self in terms of culture and relevance.
The fundamental technical presentation along with the original posting culture was fairly effective. That unfortunately didn't scale. One of my concerns as I look at decentralised networks with multiple clients and server implementations (e.g., the Fediverse) is that a diversity of tools will inevitably result in a broken set of standards and practices. In the case of the Fediverse, the baseline is fairly low, though there are implementations and/or instances which offer some fairly narrowly-supported capabilities, notably raw HTML or Markdown formatting, and equations support (as with ColinWright's Mathstodon).
I'm not arguing against your experience, FWIW. I am arguing that your experience is probably highly time-dependent on when you participated in Usenet, and the era from 1979--1992 is markedly different from that of 1993 onward, though cracks were already starting to show.
I've also noted that HN has survived longer than Usenet's golden age, and with remarkably stable quality. It's not all it could be, but it's not the worst of what's online either, and by a long shot. Despite some frustrations, I still find it useful.
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Notes:
1. <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/page/24...>
2. Search shows most, excepting where I've brainfarted "Eric" for "Brian": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Each post has a unique ID, and you can insert links to other posts in the text of your post. Then each post is given a set of back-links showing all posts that quote it. In this way, posts form a hyperlinked network that you can traverse relatively easily, while also being displayed in chronological order.
I've found this quite effective for long-form discussion. My only complaint would be that structure is needlessly limited. It would be better if posts simply formed a connected graph of content which you could ask the website to present in arbitrary ways.
This project reminds me a lot of Xanadu in its layout. I don't really think this complex of an interface is necessary. In fact, it might get in the way of productive discussion. I find that the constraints on other mediums (character limits, reply depth, etc.) often aid clarity. The transmission of information between people is fundamentally linear, and so you are pretty much always just going to be composing short essays and exchanging them as the basis of any real discussion. Complicated features seem like they would obstruct this.
it basically takes the task of organizing and just turns it into a format
Years, ago, back when I worked at EA, I convinced some people to spin up an Reddit instance to use for internal discussions. I figured it would be much better than email chains which are easily lost and don't support threading well. It was fun for a while. I have no idea if it stuck around. I left shortly after.
Just run a private instance if you want.
They're rarely "nice" places though (lain is fairly pleasant).
How could it be improved? I say embrace the DAG nature of the beast and allow for selecting a specific set of parent nodes a comment is in reply to, and, importantly, make that set editable so when some other person comes in and replies to a comment with a topic that has already been discussed, you can link your earlier replay to that new parent without needing a “see my reply here” comment.
OTOH I'm not sure that cycles are even a huge problem.
> And your DAG ends up A'->B->A
A' would be in response to A.
For these with high level of engagement you often get distinct subtrees of threads which have little to do with each other.
For the latter the linear structure is awful.
But I'm not sure you can get an automated map from comments to ideas, no matter what data structure you use...
(Perhaps you could edit in a circular quote of this... :)
Maybe it wouldn’t work for internet chats, but for discussing complex topics as a team? Yes!
Because when you read enough of the common things people debate, like whether dynamically typed languages are a very bad idea, or how we should address global warming, or stuff like that, you quickly realize there's only a few clusters of arguments which can probably be summarized in a few words each. If you know those clusters, it becomes increasingly hard to add anything different to the discussion... but most people have already heard each of the cluster arguments but did not accept it, which is why the topic remains unresolved - despite the fact that, if everyone agreed on the factual nature of each claim, there would be a mathematically optimal answer. I think the problem is not finding the answer, but accepting the arguments - which you can't get people to do in any case where some judgement is needed.
Wish this could work, but my experience is that getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people.
IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse.
The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.
I've found that as well. I wonder why that is--many times I've been working with someone who is extremely intelligent and methodical as an individual, but structured communication totally breaks down as soon threads enter the picture.
Interestingly, this sometimes even happens verbally (at work, when doing tech support on either side of the phone, at feedback discussions with artists/writers, when talking with friends): some folks really do not like "zeroing in" on specific sub-discussion items, talking them out, then moving on or going back to the bigger picture. Instead, they like to jump around or "chroot" the discussion to whatever the most recent topic of interest is. Anecdotally, it's very much a "two kinds of people" situation, but I don't know what the common factor is (and again, I don't think this is a skill/bad-faith issue; these are smart and reasonable people. They just ... don't think in trees or stacks).
As for online, I think the idea of threads is obviously antithetical to the concept of linear discussion. When you organise things as a tree, you present the many branches as though each is a valid target for a new entry. If you want things to be discussed linearly, you must present that discussion linearly. This linear discussion is feasible only in text, as you have time to think something over before verbalising it.
I liked the old Joel on Software boards. No threads, messages posted sequentially as they are created. If you want to quote, do it manually. I feel like discussion stayed on topic or at least evolved sensibly, there were no deep tangents on pedantic matters that pushed the rest of the messages off the bottom of the page.
Edit: here's a post where Joel talks about the design of his forums.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti...
I think there's a lot of good sense in there, if you are too young to remember, the JoS forums were the "Hacker News" of their time, a place where programmers and other people involved in software businesses had online discussions about a number of interesting things. Those forums were even simpler than HN is -- no threads, no replies to individual posts. You could read comments in linear order, and post your comment after scrolling to the bottom. That's it.
If the 'Message #whatever' input was hidden behind '+ New post' then there would be a much clearer push into threads. In my experience (and my own doing) threads are more likely to be used if there's other conversation happening too, or another unrelated message has already followed; otherwise if it's quiet people are quite likely to reply at top-level and I don't think anyone can blame them.
(I don't even really have a problem with it personally, as long as someone doesn't then reply in thread ignoring the top-level discussion about it, which does confuse things.)
Self-censorship, preference and knowledge falsification come to mind. People behave differently when there is no expectation of privacy, when they know they're observed. Apart from employment consequences, social alienation and mental health impact, panopticism may negatively affect creativity and innovation, when people behave less impulsive and more agreeable.
In my practical experience, (local) transcription also tends to be anything, but instant, if you don't allocate significant compute to the task. So your summary may not be available for some time after the call ended. You may need to cognitively backtrack quite a bit to confirm plausibility/"correctness" of the AI production.
Management will love it, everyone else will grow to hate it.
For me, at least, private personal talks/calls are the last bastion of interpersonal bonding and social relief in the modern (remote) work environment.
It might feel paradoxal, but as there's little context on each other's private life in the first place, private talk stays limited and trite (basically close to grocery lane small talk)
For instance imagine having a call for reworking a service and the other side starts asking what you did during the weekend, which happens to be medical follow up for your kids on the spectrum. Either you start explaining all your life, or you just cut it down and deal with the purpose of the meeting.
There's of course a ton of personal preference, some people thrive in grocery lane talks. I just wouldn't expect most people to be so.
I presume the vast majority of humans needs and enjoys social warmth, and a personal connection. You can escalate almost any conversation out of grocery lane talk with one or two questions, so your experience is maybe a bit on you, too. Also don't shun chitchat, there is subtext, belonging and trust building encoded. It's an offer and a compliment.
Apart from basic needs, this also creates an environment more resilient to worker exploitation.
Yes, definitely, though people going the full-remote route tend to get enough of it to not seek more in the work environment. It's the first time I've ever been in a team where half the people are either actively parenting (taking the kids to school etc.) or fully engaged in a different activity circle (side gigs are ok).
Discussions are fun during offline events/retreats, just not during the meetings.
> resilient to worker exploitation.
Thanks, this is an important angle I didn't consider. I wouldn't drop that kind of inquiry in a casual discussion, but it's something that needs its time and place to check on.
We already naturally adjust our behavior depending on whether we're with friends, family, coworkers, or supervisors. If your boss is having an affair with the receptionist, you're not going to bring that up in a team meeting. That's self-censorship at play, without any need for surveillance or written records.
Regarding the mental health impact of workplace surveillance, I've never encountered someone explicitly linking their stress or burnout to call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries. Many complaints I've heard about mental health tend to focus on these issues:
* Excessive workloads from bosses or coworkers with no recognition.
* Transfer to toxic work environments engineered to make you quit a year before retirement.
* Invasive management that gets too involved in your personal life, knowing details you never told them.
* Boss sharing personal (sometimes even health) information with coworkers.
* Being called into work even when on vacation.
* Soul-crushing jobs with high stress, like call centers.
* An imbalanced work-life dynamic, leaving no time for family or personal care.
* Persistent crunch time with no relief.
* Office politics with gossip and backstabbing.
* Workplace mobbing.
* A number of personal issues that I'm not going to list here.
These are some reasons employees face burnout and dissatisfaction at work. While I'm open to hearing more about the potential mental health impact of call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries, it's not something that appears in the complaints I've come across.
It's like a skill we take for granted. When you see people with certain mental disabilities who can't regulate their words, it quickly makes you realize why self-censorship matters. It's a critical tool for keeping things from descending into chaos.
The question isn't whether self-censorship is necessary, but rather, how much is appropriate. I shared the example of someone who revealed a boss's affair during a team meeting. It was a moment of impulsiveness that led to serious career consequences, to put it mildly.
That ability goes out the window once all communication is written down verbatim because now people can point fingers and have a grudge with each others for years.
Now, that affair with the receptionist is really HR's problem, and it's just great for one's prospects at the company to inconsiderately flame on the boss' way of doing things (not!). But somehow it should be possible to criticize things without having to join management at the golf club or at pub crawl...
It reads to me like it is.
Arguably five to six of the issues in your list are exacerbated (if not enabled) by constant surveillance. Call transcripts are one more thing that adds to that feeling of surveillance.
The issue then isn't about communication but decision making.
Complex topics, for the reasons listed in the linked blog post, should not end up in "let's settle this over a talk".
I personally, to this date, consider moderated vBulletin/phpBB-like forums the highest form of long term communication online.
There are active discussion threads on many forums I follow that are decades old.
Partly a UX problem. In slack and discord, the default is to send unstructured message to the whole chat - with a big text box and send button at the bottom. The reply-to-break-out-a-thread option is more obscure.
This could be solved by simple UX rearrangement and emphasis. Creating a new thread could have some more friction, for instance, by requiring a title or simply having a button to open the text box.
Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.
This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.
Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.
I think I'd prefer Discourse's current linear format, where all new replies are stacked at the bottom (but ideally with a quoted snippet for context). It makes catching up on updates easier, since you just keep scrolling and reading like any other document.
IMO it often isn't super useful to go through each individual comment piecemeal unless you're working on a document together (ie tracking changes and commenting on them). Otherwise, being able to read through several comments at once and THEN replying to the whole of them in a summary can save everyone time.
It's the infinite back and forth on every minor point that makes long form discussion impossible to track. That's the sort of thing that probably IS better dealt with in real time, over Slack or a call, and then summarized briefly back in the main convo. You don't need to have every sentence recorded in the main convo, just something like "Re: point 4, after talking it through with Joe and Jane, we all agreed it would be best to use blah blah".
This was my first impression as well. The summary tree of replies to a thread seems like a possible improvement over Google Docs but the basic interaction workflow seems the same as Google Docs.
Perhaps there is more innovation to be had by looking at the various specs for webpage annotation systems that have been proposed over the years?
Well, that certainly does look deeply complex, so I have no reason to think it wouldn't create deeply complex discussions.
Kidding aside, one thing I like about it is that it makes discussions start around specific snippets of a source text. That is to say, you begin a thread by selecting a piece of text. I am always very skeptical of top-level comments on HN that don't begin with a quote from the article being discussed—more often than not, I am suspicious that the person even read the text before commenting.
That doesn't address how you'd have conversations around anything except a block of text. Videos, pictures, games or applications, etc.
And they don't solve the toughest UX problem with this kind of pattern, which is how you treat overlapping excerpts: are they part of the same thread, or a new thread, and how do you define the boundary?
But to me, if a top level comment doesn't address a single thing in the parent article, it may not be necessary to post it in a thread about that article in the first place. Occasionally I see interesting, novel comments by people who probably haven't read the article, but the most common case is that I see tired retreads of ongoing culture wars, or warmed-over, extremely basic opinions. It's much more interesting to me when HN sometimes engages with a particular text rather than just opening the window and lets the rest of the (godforsaken) internet fly in.
Or, that the commenter gives an opinion about something which is directly addressed in the article. Or, that the commenter has clearly misunderstood the point of the article because they've only read the headline, so they are wasting time arguing about something totally unrelated to it.
This is very interesting and something we're still exploring.
What you are describing is also a cultural more than a framework issue.
People should not fear retribution for voicing their doubts and I'm lucky enough that none of my latest clients or previous employer had such an environment.
I'm currently feeling out a little research project around the use of AI in improving group decision-making, specifically with the hope of improving our political systems. There are so few IRL case studies, it'd be great to have more intuition for this!
(I'm @dch on twitter if you'd prefer to DM)
All the mentioned alternatives tie comments to a particular user and relate comments (responses) to other comments. Instead, the conversation could be focused on the topic of discussion, which is often best described as a set of visuals describing the concept. Rather than responding to comments, you could organize comments around the associated component of the problem as it is described visually. This would allow multiple individuals to support a concept, rather than just amplifying or criticizing a particular user's comment. This might even help avoid defensive behavior since the problem is the focus rather than a particular person's comment.
I envision a UI where people type their comment into a text box, that comment is sent to the server which is constantly updating the "visuals that describe the idea". Each client updates their UI with the new visuals along with providing some way of attaching all the comments to the visual images/videos/diagrams. IOW, the AI-generated visuals are the center of the client UI, rather than just a scrolling tape of comments. Clients can then navigate the discussion by diving into different components of the discussion. Maybe there's even an AI-generated summary of some sort. Essentially, the AI is playing the role of a Designer drawing pictures in a side channel and a smart assistant who is constantly updating a summary abstract.
Please reply back if you find anything interesting about Wave, it was pretty interesting at the time.
> Rather than responding to comments, you could organize comments around the associated component of the problem as it is described visually.
> This might even help avoid defensive behavior since the problem is the focus rather than a particular person's comment.
These comments echo my feelings exactly. I think that building a structure that represents the concepts being discussed is critical to improving how we discuss and improve our understanding of complex issues.
I'm working on a tool[1] that hopes to make it easier for people to build and work with such a structure, though it's focused specifically in the context of solving problems, and it's still missing some important features for collaborative usage (comments are particularly relevant here, they're coming soon^TM). The core ideas[2] seem to align with your comments, though the tool further distinguishes auxiliary concepts (questions, facts, sources) from primary ones (problems, causes, effects, tradeoffs, solutions, etc).
[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/docs/getting-started/core-ideas
There is no technical solution that solves that.
I'd love to see something like this that works more generally. I suspect it might need a more graph-like structure akin to mind maps.
Esp interesting the part where you can start threads from quotes.
Kudos.
I'd like to point out the issue with these kinds of threaded discussions for non-complex discussions, including the simpler nodes of complex discussions. And that is that people often have a hard time figuring out which thread node to reply to in a more complicated discussion system.
For the most part it's easy for engineer types, but most normies often find them confusing.
But I really like the effort to highlight leaf nodes that you haven't read/seen etc.
Discovery will probably be the hardest part when revisiting other people's discussions. When you are trying to find out what the most interesting relevant node of a discussion is.
Really curious to see where this goes.
Examples: https://www.noemamag.com/tomorrows-democracy-is-open-source/
and
decidim.org
But I don't think the web has the right structure for an app like this. (Decidim seems to be a web app. It's hard to find information about this "Open Insight" thing they're talking about, presumably it is too?)
If you're using the web, somebody controls the server and the others have to trust that person to not abuse their role. It's not exactly primed for democracy.
Blockchains aren't quite right either. You solve the untrustworthy admin problem but you've got this really strong notion of THE official record, which only some people are going to have the ability to update, and that will be used by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
Whatever the right structure is, I think it's partition tolerant. Any party needs to be able to disconnect themselves from any other party such that:
- everything not reliant on that trust edge still works (the web would struggle with this)
- the untrusted party has no ability to censor the revoker, even if they're well trusted by the others (blockchains will struggle with this)
I've been tossing around ideas for what the ideal protocol would look like. SSB is the closest thing I can think of to compare it to, but nothing about it feels very solid yet.
https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid
DEF CON 31 - The Internals of Veilid, a New Decentralized Application Framework - DilDog, Medus4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ
An Introduction to Veilid, by Christien Rioux - Rust Linz November 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h288gZTjJOM
There’s also Willow Protocol, which is sometimes compared to SSB and Veilid, but I don’t know as much about it.
Comparison to Other Protocols
https://willowprotocol.org/more/compare/index.html#willow_co...
Edit:
Veilid, So easy a Teenager Can Do It! - Bianca Lewis
I'm starting with something that's familiar but not structurally aligned with what I want to do (git+ssh). I intend to make the "backend" pluggable so I can use the same app to evaluate different distributed frameworks (Veilid, IPFS/Ceramic, IPFS/OrbitDB, Holepunch, IPv8, ...)
Otherwise I'll just spend my life tinkering with distributed frameworks and never end up with a distributed app.
Willow Protocol
429 points by todsacerdoti
3 months ago | 123 comments
> The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,”
> The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simpl...
So Pol.is sounds to be the opposite of bubbles-forming social media (especially Twitter where it's hard to see past the previous/next post ?), on the contrary, it encourages consensus-building thanks to deliberately showing what people agree about ?
One thing I wonder is how this can best be extended to argumentative discourses where much of the discussion is a dispute of facts. Of course you could do that with this, but it won't be clear looking at the comment tree whether people agree on what facts, if any, are correct.
I wonder if this could be extended (or have a mode) that requires consensus on whether a thread is concluded (instead of one person deciding), which could be as simple as keeping the current UI but allowing the people the option to re-open threads; and the ability to attach summary statements to threads which percolate up to the thread's branch point.
This is what I always think about when the topic of structured argument/discussion comes up, but everyone wants to focus on aspects of the threading.
We are still totally missing a n obvious layer or organization, such as splitting sub comments into categories like disputes-parent and supports-parent and asks-clarification and elaborates-parent. We’re missing flags for ad-hom and logical fallacies and all the nuance of discussion has degenerated into up/down votes . And we are missing the ability to collapse or zip up any finished meandering paths once there is consensus/clarity on the subtopic.
Since all we do is debate bullshit on the internet it’s surprising that we’re still so disorganized and ineffective at it!
There’s definitely a sweet spot somewhere between this baby talk that we’re all engaged in and the rigors of things like lawyery jargon / math / Loglan. But we’re not even close yet.
I never fully grasped just how hard it is to understand and respond to what other people say until I got smoked by people who do it competitively.
This is not merely an IQ thing, but also requires self-control, empathy, effort and good technique in communication.
Users that have those qualities can get by with a regular forum. The only marginal situation is users that almost fit this description, where better UX such as what this or Google Wave, can make a difference.
I've noticed that we have started migrating more often than previously. Slashdot, some subreddits, now hackernews... It's becoming increasingly harder to identify any particular platform with potentially more interesting discussions.
Moderation is not an anti-pattern, but trying to do it at scale without robust tools and strong identity management is destined to fail. The real anti-pattern in communication is allowing destructive behaviour to undermine the discussion.
So, to re-state your point: The only way to have good online conversations is to restrict participation to people who are actively willing to discuss, to learn, and to commit to making a constructive contribution.
This implies strong identity management and moderation.
What about:
It's a difficult but important problem to solve and we need more people in this space.
Some personal thoughts:
1. I would like to be able to see all the comments from selected people (myself by default).
2. I would like to be able to un-conclude a thread for the fat-fingered among us.
3. As I hover over the document, if there are comments, I would love to see the comment count to judge the activity (or something to show hotspots -- now or over time).
4. I would like to be able to start a discussion with an external markdown file.
5. An API to access updates (including real-time changes) would be excellent.
I've also dropped these in the Github comments.
Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.
I think the problem it suffered from, besides being a little too "out there" for the average user, was that it required to much careful attention to how you used it. Where to fork the discussions, where to spilt them off into their own wave leaving only a link in their place, etc. It just doesn't work for people for whom the "reply all" button seems a sensible solution....
I had such hope for it though. The technical side seems pretty well solved at this point, it seems like that we need is a crack team of psychologists and UX people to have a go at the problem.
This paradigm is alive and well at www.cix.co.uk - which predated Wave by 20yrs. HN looks based on it.
I agree. Its way beyond what today's average user wants.
Zulip has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, with similar results in utilization.
I like learning and exploring new tools, but if there's one thing I've learned about building them is that most people are only interested in using your tool to the barest minimum to get the result they need. See (without citation) how many software engineers you know don't "understand" Git beyond add / commit / push.
What that means is that if you have a dedicated group of people that is interested in exploring a new tool and understanding it, then great! Those people are going to love the tool and take the time to learn it. But the demands of society / work / time limits means that most of the time, they don't want to spend that time investment. It might be a "waste" of time, it might not solve the right problem, other people also have to invest the time, etc.
That friction is huge. That's why Slack took off at first, and then Discord blew it away in the consumer world. Discord removed those internal silos, had a lot of the same chrome on it that Slack did for IRC, and then they've continued to make certain things very easy to do within their platform (jumping into voice chats, for instance). But, if you see the newest way they've tried to have threads act as forum messages or posts, there's no consensus on how to use them effectively and I haven't seen them used much, as a result.
Anyway, one day we'll get Wave again and hopefully it won't be killed before its time, for those few of us that really loved it.
That being said, people will voluntarily learn new features if it creates tangible benefits for them. But the learning curve can't be too steep—it has to be intuitive on top of what they already know with consistently increasing rewards.
But the issue with threads is always that people who aren't involved the side-discussion generally never read them. I think it might be nice to have every thread "concluded" with a "result" (summary, outcome, to-do list, etc) which is then injected back into the parent where everybody will see it. It could be manual, or it could be semi-automated with a LLM - I'm not generally a fan but this seems like a reasonable use case. I'd ideally like all the nested threads to naturally turn into a single linear summary of everything important that was decided.
The CQ2 thing also looks a bit too document-oriented, might be a good fit for a wiki or something like that but I think being able to open a thread for every single word is too fine-grained for a typical discussion.
See how the button changes the comment box (but yes, need to improve it)
> I'm one of those strange people who would like infinitely nested threads in Slack too
You're not alone!
> I think it might be nice to have every thread "concluded" with a "result" (summary, outcome, to-do list, etc) which is then injected back into the parent where everybody will see it
Maybe instead of injecting into the parent, we could show it in the info box on hovering the text?
> I'd ideally like all the nested threads to naturally turn into a single linear summary of everything important that was decided
That would be beautiful!
> a thread for every single word is too fine-grained
We've seen threads being created out of two words
Oh, I see, all the way down there! I really expected some sort of modal dialog or similar, but it actually does work, you're right.
> You're not alone!
I liked Google Wave too :(
> Maybe instead of injecting into the parent, we could show it in the info box on hovering the text?
Yeah, that'd definitely work with how the UI currently behaves. There's still a discoverability issue with a mouseover though, not to mention the usual problem with touch interfaces - when you get to supporting phones & tablets.
> > a thread for every single word is too fine-grained > We've seen threads being created out of two words
Oh, I'm sure you have! But was that a good thing to be doing? I feel like opening a discussion on a word or two is perfect for a document review tool, but for a conversation a sentence or even a paragraph would be the right unit. Then those thread summaries could appear inline too.
If I think about the work related conversations I have, I'm literally the only person who posts a multi-paragraph essay I've composed outside slack/etc and checked/edited a few times. If other people were like me, this CQ2 approach would be great. However everybody else posts a sentence or two at a time as individual comments in a stream-of-consciousness manner, there's an immediate back-and-forth between 2-3 people in order to establish what's even really being talked about, and threads usually only appear when the main conversation has switched topics so people aren't chatting over each-other. There may be an element of "meeting people where they are" necessary with the product. :)
Yep, that would be better
> for a conversation a sentence or even a paragraph would be the right unit
Interesting thought, will explore more, thanks!
Comments-upon-comments makes it hard to get an idea of what the overall consensus is. You pretty much need to read all of it and explore every comment thread to understand what are the generally agreed parts and what are the more controversial takes(?).
Maybe some hybrid between this and Wikipedia?
Having the ability to differentiate between a resolved, useful thread and a resolved but ultimately unnecessary thread might also help avoid noise.
Then there also needs to be a mechanism for working towards succinctness.
1 loaded question though: who should have the rights for concluding threads? And a sub-question: should concluded threads be locked into read-only state? Or the other party should be able to continue the argument?
> who should have the rights for concluding threads?
Not sure, but I guess it could either be anyone or the person who created the thread or the person who was quoted or a specific moderator?. So probably a setting, depending on the team.
> should concluded threads be locked into read-only state?
That sounds a setting too.
I must (because I'm not a fan of Reddit as a company) say that Reddit is solving a similar problem already, but I think there's room for a more focused tool like this.
CQ2 is not optimized for mobile use. Please try on a desktop or laptop. Go back to homepage
It will hurt their initial adoption, but might help the product.
HN would certainly benefit from this.
Perhaps CQ2 could do with a toggle to switch between the new views (like https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments vs looking at HN threads), with some transition to help you keep your place when you toggle between them.
One may argue that Facebook has threads, but I don't actually think people know how to use them. They simply click reply, say their piece, and then it's lost forever. They have no concept of structure.
I've always wanted something that is more like a graph structure, where you can reply to multiple comments. So a node can have multiple parents.
If the meta-pun was incidental, apologies.
This is why HN discourages puns or insubstantial jokes, as it impedes the benefit of doubt when attempting good faith discussions.
One shortcoming of debates is assuming that there are only two positions. I get that it’s a simplification to help us manage our thoughts but in many complex discussions the answer is usually a combination of both sides.
Quip has almost exactly the same feature set as google docs — which part of quip were you referring to?
In other words, ideal for dueling essayists, technical RFC documents, or professional/academic debates.
I see there as being 1-2 additional tricky problems to solve for something like this (other than ironing out UX kinks in the implementation, of which there are many--e.g. visual signifiers for overlapping thread sources outside of tree mode; a tree mode that allows users to browse responses without manually expanding things; making "conclude" meaningful):
The first is optional, but I think it would be valuable: in many contexts, discussion and collaborative writing overlap substantially--often more than they don't. It would be interesting to see how the notion of addressing/concluding threads could be tied to changes in the document. E.g. a thread for "I'm onboard with this proposal if we alter the paragraph this is rooted at to contain X because Y" -> "If it gets you onboard, I'm happy to make this change, how about <proposed rephrase>" -> approval/conclusion causes the document to be updated and the thread archived. While that's technically not hard to add, the question is whether bringing in those aspects of mutation/collaborative editing would dilute the utility of the discussion layer, resulting in a shitty Google Docs/shitty Discourse combo, rather than a single-purpose Discourse-but-better application.
The second problem I see isn't optional: thread topology needs to be mutable somehow. In addition to all the valid criticisms of forum/Slack/email-thread discussion formats, any significantly-sized discussion of a complex root document inevitably develops redundancies. You end up with Slack (or whatever) threads cross-linking to other threads ("as I said over here, <content that either may be invalidated with time or which breaks user flow to navigate to another discussion location>"). That leads to significant confusion, and more than a few cases of people making decisions based on stale information as the cross-references get more complicated. Sure, ideally everyone would root discussions at the single most relevant point of their parent content, and new contributors would carefully browse the existing tree to ensure that their contributions were on both the freshest and most germane leaf. But that's never going to happen in practice, so a tool like CQ2 needs some way to rearrange (or embed-with-live-updating, or make rooted at multiple sources rather than one, or something...) discussion trees.
I have no idea what this would look like UX-wise. The 4chan model solves the replies-that-are-relevant-to-multiple-places issue, but doesn't help with re-parenting/consolodation after the fact to make future readers' lives easier, nor does it deal with staleness issues caused by replies linking to intermediate posts on threads which changed consensus later on. Regardless, I think functionality like this (even if it were used infrequently, by curators or administrators) would make the difference between things like CQ2 being useful only for short-to-medium-lifespan discussions with small numbers of participants, and being useful for discussions that stand as long-lived artifacts on their own.
Complex things are only for apple kids :(
https://jkorpela.fi/usenet/laws.html
Most of the best discussions I've had online followed those rules.
(OTOH, those rules are written tongue-in-cheek and not likely to be understood well by most newcomers.)
What I'm trying to say is, that within a team with a good discussion culture, it will work, regardless of what tools you use. Even when the discussion is held in person.
When your team has a bad discussion culture though, it doesn't really matter what tool or tech or discussion structure you use - you'll struggle with straw man arguments, fanboy logic, going in circles, people not listening/understanding each other, etc.
To teach and foster a good discussion culture, you first and foremost need a genuine willingness of all participants to honestly try to improve. And this is a very interpersonal and soft-skill dependent thing to achieve.
Some piece of software might help insofar, as that the change of format can help people to change their discussion style as well. It's easier to fall back into bad habits when discussion are "as usual". Shaking things up a bit, can make it easier for willing people to adopt new behavior...
It's very useful for personal capture (with digressions etc) but also handles the "multi-player" case if needed.
Hopefully c) would discourage people from reposting the same points, b) might give people alternative perspectives, and a) is just good information or insight.
I think quality discussion will come down to having less redundant discussion and rage posting.
I'd rather have a moderated linear discussion with quotes/references.
I guess what im saying is its a system very much built around the analog practicalities of speaking with physical people in a physical room. I think we can do better with the internet
One thing I’d add is specific prompting for a participant’s intent in discussion. _Why_ are you making this point? Is it to correct factual errors in someone else’s post? To convince someone to adopt your point of view? To seek better understanding of what the other person is saying? Just to show off? This is rarely stated explicitly, to a detriment in the quality of the discussion.
Anyone else unable to scroll the website on mobile?
>couldn't* care less
>my..."troll metric" / rage bait/"le reddit quantification", formalized as a response's comment's conversational entropy divided by parent comment length, this is a fantastic comment.
>
>Pure, distilled, thought provocation.There should be more than one dimensionality to ranking a comment just like slashdot had.
Downvoting a comment to disagree with it is such a ingrained unfortunate consequence that down votes should actually count more than up votes and all ranking of comments should be by "controversial".
Spam is spam, including "le reddit" humor.
A rank of a comment should be at least somewhat indicative of the the substance of the comment in relation to a point being made... Not whether or not an uncontributing lurker thinks a comment is funny or politically agreeable.
There used to be a unspoken rule that you don't downvote without at least mentioning why. We all know why that went away and we can't say why, But we can think of how to prevent it for the next intellectual chamber we would like inhabit to prevent from it echoing so much we can no longer hear the new ideas.
My (personally) most "provoking" of a comment was:
>Whataboutism is whataboutism
I fear these near-obvious improvements are features, not bugs.