Internet Forums Reimagined: The Future Of Online Discussions
makeuseof.com
makeuseof.com
* The OP doesn't own the post, the OP is just the person that started the conversation at this time. Every time I open something controversial the first/top-voted reply is a counter-point. Typically a few days later there's a full-fledged counter-point article that (again) gets voted to the top. Instead these should exists in the same space. It should be possible to replace/modify the OP or directly challenge the topic without having to start another thread entirely.
* I want to see the people I'm interested in, topics they start, and topics that interest me. My front page should be custom (and no, I don't mean reddit subscriptions). Reddit subscriptions is a manual approach to what should be a fluid-dynamic system. I might subscribe to "ham-radio" find some people I enjoy talking to and if they subscribe to something else, like "shortwave-radio", then I should start seeing things from "shortwave-radio" that -they- found interesting.
* Bikeshedding should be embraced, there should be the concept of side-conversations. It's a part of our system. The problem with bikeshedding is that it is repeated ad-nauseum and the only current approach to solve it is to delete it and push people to some 300 page/dead/closed thread from 2003. When someone starts to bikeshed, and people begin to respond, they should go into a special area that takes them away from the main group. Really what's happening is a 'side-conversation' that has it's own value to the individuals participating. It's like going to a party and discussing the merits of the Death Star, I'm sure there are wikipedia pages that could answer all questions but sometimes people enjoy debating something.
* Arguments should be embraced, and hidden. When you get into a heated argument with someone there should be a system where slowly the conversation moves away from the main thread and becomes hidden from the rest of the community. Just like bikeshedding, there's no reason to bring people that aren't interested into the conversation. Eventually these threads should be deleted, they don't need to persist forever (you can always choose to do this by taking a screenshot).
None of these are easy problems, some of them would be near impossible given current hardware.
I feel like you could achieve something close to what you're describing (albeit requiring some manual effort) by
A) designing a forum solely around subscriptions (akin to something like twitter followers with a threaded view)
B) giving OP moderation rights within her thread to split posts into a separate topic at will, in order to maintain "on topic" discussions
C) auto thread pruning of split topics
and one or two other things.
Here, for example, is an HN discussion (hopefully what is going on should be self-evident): https://twitter.com/taliesinb/status/338742471574040577/phot...
Another idea that just came to mind from your "bike shedding" topic is the ability to move the entire thread of a side conversation into its own post and have each post link to each other. That way, you don't have to navigate through pages of side conversations you don't care about (like I do here on HN) and instead get a quick list of relevant conversations that the original post spawned. It also makes it easier to find certain conversations. I can't tell you how many times I've searched forums for a specific conversation and found it buried deep in a completely unrelated topic.
Hiding arguments would have to be handled carefully, I think. Some people may derive value from watching two people argue about something. Sometimes, it's not just rhetoric and ad hominem, but actual information being communicated.
A compelling offering would build on netnews, not ignore it. In particular:
- Threading. Real threading, with subtopics, not the impossible to follow simplistic nested comments currently offered.
- State. Remember which comments have been read and only show new content.
- Killfiles. Let the user decide which topics and other participants to read rather than requiring the forum owner to act as a censor.
- Multiple clients. Allow the forum to be accessed by each user's preferred forum client.
Perhaps there is a commercial opportunity for a company to provide the nntp protocol and manage storage for fora that want rich discussion capabilities.
Real threading is possible to an extent with nested comments (hidden until expanded). There are some software that already offer this.
State is also available in some versions. Discourse does this to an extent and I think Vanilla has a plugin for it.
Killfiles alternative would be an ignore list for users and subscribe feature for specific tags which some forums already offer.
I'm not sure if NNTP is up to the task, but a similar massively distributed system with persistent storage would likely be a solution.
There's also the aspect of familiarity. There are better ways to handle discussion, but these would be jarring for someone accustomed to the "worse" way of doing things for the past decade or so.
I also think forums would greatly benefit from having fewer features that are absolutely necessary.
Thinking on it a little further, I don't see why nntp can't be reused. The site would need a web-based Usenet client, hopefully superior to the one offered by Google, storage for the private newsgroup, and an open port 119 on the server.
It's all in the packaging. Damn, I was really hoping to get some real work done this weekend....
Whatever reasons there might be for why forums/discussions aren't getting any better, the existence of Google Groups is not one of them.
By the way, Google Groups used to have a great UI but over the last fre years they've changed around the design and it is horrible now.
Never heard of Branch before and I do find the premise interesting. But the conversations seem too disjointed (a bit like Slashdot threads) with topics going off in every direction. If there's a way to tone down the "subject ad-lib" style tangents, it would be an interesting way to spend an afternoon.
Quora is a plague? How? Could you please elaborate?
Actually, I find few things on Quora very interesting and unique to it.
Like
- You get an answer quickly(answers are mostly relevant), they usually propagate to particular topics and people interested in those topics pick them up.
- Down-voting is not limited to a few cognoscenti, all they did was join a forum quite early.
- You can edit your answer/question and others' too, the latter needs to be approved of course.
- Identities are real(mostly IMHO).
- Again, answering is not a cognoscenti-only, especially for wide acceptance(a good answer is liked) or for the upper crest, unlike on other forums where the gods receive up-votes for an one line quip which doesn't add anything to discussion, nth at all, or didn't make any sense to one either. (this point is a bit of personal observation which is not very very broad)
Quora feels like the next experts-exchange. It allows search engines to index its content but as a user you need to register before you can see it. So Quora pages pop up as the first search results, but are actually useless to the vast majority of people that click on them.
I might be quite opinionated on this as much of my PhD thesis [1] was focused on what could be new ways to interact with people online.
There are several core problems with the way discussions work right now.
1. Too much content means you'll miss a lot. Sorting is usually effectively random, especially in relation to what you'd find interesting. Summary is one approach, but nothing has been executed spectacularly well compared to what could be.
2. The current design is purely a text entry (of only one comment) plus some tiny representation of the poster. In real life, we focus more on the person and what we can ascertain in order to determine credibility, if they're a jerk or someone we want to talk to, etc.
3. We're also making the assumption that keyboard-based text is the best & only way to express ourselves. Video/images in abstract are just as vague -- I'm talking more specialized interactions to build up a "speech act" in some new form/medium. Jeff Heer's sense.us [2] is just one of a million ways that could be done in a more fine-grained goal-oriented fashion.
Plus text is much less interesting to look at than something pretty and graphical.
4. There are varying arguments about the goal of these discussions, but they can at least be seen as
a) correcting some non-participant's information (blog post, paper, link, etc)
b) attempting to determine main/alternative arguments for/against something
c) attempting to reach group consensus
d) normal social interaction for social interaction purposes (which itself is wide ranging)
e) establishing a sense of community, intrinsically linked to (d) but still different
f) sharing general knowledge
g) expressivity to react to something
It's also the case that many are unicorns: attempting to reach group consensus is possible when thinking about software for small sets of people who need it, but fails when you're thinking about something large-scale like say 'answering' political questions in the US. Trying to dissuade people of their existing biases is a loosing battle. And there have been many tries at something like this, mostly in the research community at places like CHI and CSCW.
I personally think #2 is the most exciting, as that's what my PhD was about :) The primary interface doesn't have to be just a huge amount of bottom-up text... if we think more top-down we can gain a sense of a community, discussion, sets of people in a more direct manner. Computational ability is on our side to be able to compress large amounts of data by recognizing varying dimensions in which to navigate. We don't have to just look at 'votes,' but can think about the larger arc of an individual across all of their participation. That as a basis allows us to do what we can't do in real life: segment, shift, and synthesize individuals into groups, style, credibility, cultural position, social position, viewpoints and more.
[1] http://azinman.com/pdfs/aaron_zinman_phd_disstertation.pdf
h) calling someone a NaziI wish there was a legitimately good version of Google Groups out there. At this point, I can't decide which interface (Yahoo Groups versus Google Groups) is worse. It's like trying to decide between SourceForge and LaunchPad... yeah right.
There are already mail2news services that allow you to post to Usenet via email, if for some reason you want to do that (e.g. if you are using anonymous remailers).
"I wish there was a legitimately good version of Google Groups out there."
Usenet?
I'd like to see structured evidence-based discussions that aim for a conclusion without allowing people to talk in circles. Anecdotal evidence would not be allowed. Anything off-topic would not be allowed.
HN gets derailed the whole time by something tangentially related to the original posting, and I guess people like that: but we should also aim for communities where structured discussion is possible.
Something more debate-like perhaps.
Again, my preference: I come to forums for the side-tracks and interesting derailments, most of the time. It's sort of like going to wikipedia. Most of the time my enjoyment of the interaction isn't exactly about the topic, but in what other things interesting people bring to the table that I wouldn't have thought of.
That said, I think there's definitely a place for debate-style forums, but I wonder how much that would be enforced by the tooling so much as by the tooling giving the user-base a lot of leverage and dynamic control in the way of enforcing the culture that is intended by the forum.
In that space, I think a lot of these tools are trying to go down that path.
Discourse has forking and branching for going off topic without derailing, and Vanilla has free form tagging that allows users to vote for things in a way that's consistent with user culture.
I've never used vanilla, but I'm assuming you could also use the gamification aspect to promote users that interact in a way that's consistent with the interaction-style that the culture dictates, and maybe give them the ability to further or more staunchly enforce the culture (points/badges/whatever else for providing good sources, staying on topic, giving notably clear explanations, etc, etc).
I also think that kind of thing gets difficult, and is as much about really being careful about outlining your expectations as anything, as well as adapting as there are new needs. I think of Stackoverflow when I'm talking about this, or on HN, where post titles will be changed sometimes, in a way that seems to adhere to the letter of the rules, but not the spirit, and sometimes seems to remove information that's relevant.
My two cents anyway.
HN topics don't get "derailed" with tangents since threads exist for just that contingency. While other things may get discussed, I think the majority revolve around the topic at hand.
I'm not sure I'd like to participate in your "ideal" discussion forum. It doesn't sound fun at all.
Then you would have a lot of disagreement about whether something was on topic or not.
Reddit sort of does this, at the subreddit level instead of the thread level. But it also sort of isn't a discussion site anymore, it is something else.
I remember this happening a lot in IRC with ban-happy ops and on smaller forums. Eventually either everyone gets fed up and leaves or it just becomes an echo chamber.
I'm coming at it from the perspective that abuse will happen no matter what, so focus on promoting good stuff, etc.
People who are good at even-handed moderation in the pursuit of constructive discussion are actually fairly rare; it's a skill most people don't posses as they let emotion and bias get in the way.
I've seen a number of online communities combust over the years due to either neglect or infighting, the few that remain do so because they have a strong moderation team with a clear common goal.
I think the answer is to separate discussion sites from other sites which have a different goal. Stack overflow is an example of this.
The API documentation for Microcosm is seriously impressive, especially at this stage: http://microcosm-cc.github.io/.
I have my own pet project at http://pony-forum.com, but it’s more of a hobby project at the moment. But I think it’s also too early for non-technical users to use the CMSes listed in the article; they’re more like alpha or beta versions at this point.
Two really new things in our forum software: communities are democratic (no admin "owners") and discussions are summarized (no 20-page comments to read through). We're going to launch public next week and that means anyone will be able to host free feature-full ad-less forums on our platform.
Summation looks like a great idea.
Just from a cynical commercial point of view.
Self-hosted communities are an amazing life blood of the free and open Internet.
If anyone knows how to build an infrastructure for online communities, it's Jeff Atwood.
Answers and participation is of high quality. It's hardly ever overwhelming. Maybe because of relatively less number of (paying/one-time) users.
Doing away with threading somehow kills the flow of discussion and keeping it makes it ugly and difficult to present, especially when they nest quite deep.
All the forums mentioned in the post just seem to be using different templates(visual) for the same system and none of them is doing sth new that is not already existing in other systems.
[1] It's just too ugly and unintuitive.