Show HN: A better discussion system. For blogs, forums, perhaps sites like HN. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A better discussion system. For blogs, forums, perhaps sites like HN.

debiki.com

5 pointsKajMagnus7 comments

Hi hackers

I'm the link poster. I'm building a better (I hope) discussion system for blogs and forums, and perhaps (in the future) also for sites like Hacker News.

Here is the homepage: www.debiki.com

Here are possible future features: (so you can read about what might be focused on) http://www.debiki.com/-81101-future-features

What do you think? For example: Do you think the project makes sense? Or do you have any suggestions?

(It's a bit buggy in IE8; IE7 not supported.)

Kind regards, KajMagnus

(My first HN post :-))

Hey Kaj,

Nice work on the interface. It's definitely promising but you'll need a bunch more real life feedback.

You're playing with a lot of variables and I'm pretty sure some of them are interesting improvements, but some of them also don't work well and altogether it's not yet a better solution.

The main practical piece of advice I can give now is that having each new initial comment go horizontally doesn't seem to work well.

The other piece of advice is to keep going. ;) Good UX (which this is all about) is everything these days...

Thanks for your feedback!

What's the reason that having each new initial comment go horizontally doesn't seem to work well?

If you have time, I'd be interested in knowing what things you think are interesting improvements? And about other things, besides having comments go horizontally, that don't work well?

Horizontal comments mean horizontal scrolling and that is generally frowned upon for a number of reasons, such as:

* breaking a lot of existing layouts which assume 100% of the page is 100% of your screen (see your own demo page for example ;)

* users being unaware of it's existence or just not noticing the bar

* lack of hardware support (scroll buttons for most PCs are vertical only)

One quick win I see there is to let a horizontal comment take up very little space if it's completely.

As far as what works well:

* I like the click to improve (although I expect to improve just the area I click on / select)

* I love the click to scroll functionality; never seen that before and yet it feels very natural.

* I like the usage of lines in the comments. It's clear yet simple enough to still be elegant.

* Horizontal scrolling probably works well on mobile as well ;)

Send me an email if you want to stay in touch btw (see my profile) because I'm in a way on a similar path with our startup.

P.S. It might be a bit far out there, but I just ran across the AffectButton from Joost Broekens which might be interesting to use for giving feedback on mobile devices (see the Java applet on http://www.joostbroekens.com/)

Yes horizontal scrolling would break the layout of many blogs and websites — I think this is somewhat niched software.

Making people understand that they can dragscroll rightwards with the mouse is a bit tricky indeed. Right now I'm thinking about a big arrow pointing rightwards, at the right end of the page, that shows a helpful tips on click. — There's actually a popup-dialog-tips already, if you use the horizontal scrollbar, without first having dragscrolled. But people sometimes won't notice that popup-tips-dialog.

Thanks for mentioning what you like, so I can continue improving that. (I also would like to edit only the paragraph I click on.)

I read about the AffectButton, but I haven't yet installed Java plugin (I somewhat fear viruses). Anyway it gave me ideas about using smileys instead of stars, to indicate to what degree a comment is Interesting or Funny, hmm.

(I'll send you an email, tomorrow I suppose, and I've read some about VideoView)

I really like your discussion system - some great thinking here! The arrows are surprisingly clear in directing you to posts and indicating hierarchy. Also, the comments just feel more visible in this layout; it feels quicker to glance through a discussion.

Is it possible for you to import comments from some popular discussion sites to get a sense of what the layout will look like with different numbers of comments? This might be a good way of "stress testing" the layout to see if, under certain circumstances, the design needs tweaking.

I've always assumed that most users treat page after page of comments a bit like search results: they'll look at page one or page two of the comments and then stop (because there are just too many to wade through). Inevitably some of the interesting comments will get buried or overlooked ("Upvoting" and "editor's pick" are two approaches to remedying this). I like many of your suggestions around trying to make it easier to explore discussions.

Here are some questions that came to mind when I looked at your discussion system (I don't have answers to these questions, they're just food for thought :-)

- Horizontal scrolling: this might work well on a tablet (swiping horizontally), but will it feel awkward on a desktop if the layout stretches quite long?

- Will this comment system work equally well with a few comments as well as a few hundred? How long might the horizontal layout become if you have hundreds of comments?

- What might the layout look like if you have mainly single comments (i.e. no threaded replies)? Will a single horizontal line of comments look awkward? (It may well look fine.)

- I notice that each column is of uniform width (which makes perfect sense), but what happens when some comments get lots of replies? As you begin to indent each reply, is there a point where the indentation becomes a problem? (To be honest this is true of all threaded comment systems, but you're working with a much narrower width to begin with.)

- Many blogs sit within a fixed page width rather than stretch to fill the whole browser window. Can this comment system sit well within this type of design? Will it look awkward if it stretches outside the page width? It may be that this design works well for discussion sites and doesn't need to be a one-size-fits-all for every kind of site.

I hope these thoughts don't sound too negative. Commenting feels ripe for more exploration. There is so much commenting on the web, yet not much has changed in the way discussions are displayed. Could interesting visualisations help (or hinder) the way we read discussions? For example, a colour bar or timeline that charts whether comments expressed are negative or positive (would obviously only work for certain types of comment).

I'm impressed by what you've started so far and hope you continue to explore. Good luck :-)

Hi walnut-tree, thanks for your feedback!

Here are some thoughts on the things you mentioned:

- It's currently not possible to import comments. The largest page I've built "manually", is 200 comments; it'd be interesting to import a 3000 comments page from, say, Reddit, and have a look :-)

- The comparison with search engine results is interesting, I hadn't thought about that.

- Re wide pages: On a 50 comments wide page, I think scrolling works fine, partly because if you scroll large distances, the scrolling software (Utterscroll) automatically scrolls faster.

- Re many single comments without replies. — It looks okay visually I think, but it might be easier to "get lost" among all comments (since the page becomes very wide).

- Re: "when some comments get lots of replies", "does the indentation [become] a problem"? — I think that in such cases, 1) deeply nested comments could be collapsed by default. And 2) popular threads could be made wider.

- Re: "Many blogs sit within a fixed page width". Yes, this might deter some people from using Debiki (the software). — I'm thinking that this discussion system is intended for people who think that [showing the readers' comments] is much more imporant than the right hand sidebar. — And it's probably (?) well suited for discussion sites / forums.

Thanks for "Good luck" :-)

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