Ask HN: We are looking to rethink discussion platforms. Your suggestions?
We are working to re-think discussion platform.<p>What are the improvements you would like in Hacker News or Reddit, etc?
What is your fav discussion platform? Why?
Or in other words: Re-invent NNTP.
Yes, NNTP has its problems, too, and could possibly use some additional features, but it's silly when you look at how easily you could/can follow huge discussions using slrn, and how badly current online discussion technology stacks up against that. It's all shinier now, but the usability is absolute crap for the most part.
In one of the discussion on building the structure, I was amazed to find that people do not think in terms of API.
As for me, I have always thought of having 3 different layers/servers independent of each other. Front-end, Back-end and Database
An API approach is the best approach. Later it can always be opened to public.
Every time I see attempts to use Twitter et al. as a "platform", I end up thinking how much better something NNTP-like would fill the role, if only it still had significant penetration.
Don't treat users like their contributions are equal. Some users make better decisions than others. Reward them.
I think the Slashdot FAQ should be required reading before developing a comment system. There are a lot of lessons they learned ahead of the rest of the internet, problems others still have not solved. Something history, doomed to repeat.
Community moderation is quite a nice concept. Slashdot has indeed implemented it quite intelligently.
They have rethought it and implemented it quite well.
however, one problem which we always face is following thru the comments on HN or reddit .. once the comments cross 100 ... or even 50
Discourse does not solve that either ... Is that a problem for others?
I may be contradicting myself here, but somehow i do like HN's UI too. It has a tree, but pretty neat. Though the levels can be a little ambiguous at times.
So what solutions are you guys thinking of? Or is this just one of those "Hey! let's make a discussion platform! I wonder what's wrong with the current ones... let's ask!"
We are having a few things in mind. One of them being applying categories or tags to comments, along with the nested comments.
We believe, each discussion essentially has multiple parallel threads running, and each thread should have its own structure.
The other thought is about users able to post as anonymous, but with certain restrictions.
Tags/categories may seem like a fair idea, but what i don't like in UI's is information overload. So keeping info on a discussion would be pretty cool, but make sure i don't see it if i don't WANT to see it. it should be available, but not "in-my-face".
Also, what do you think people will react to having to type tags or subjects for their posts?
You know what would be super amazing? A discussion visualization/organizing tool. That could perform an analysis on the comments and perhaps group them together by relevance/chaining/sentiment. Would be cool if i open a 200+ comment page on HN or anywhere an immediately see a visual representation of what's going on. What aspects are being discussed and in what sentiment. Like someone posts a Product Landing page. I open the comments and see a lot of discussion about "UI" or "security" or "usability" or "heath risk" or "privacy" , each marked with +ve or -ve sentiments. Now THAT is something worth working on.
EDIT: the tool could do something as simple as marking keywords and giving posts a red or green BG with varying shades based on the sentiment...
We are already having thoughts on the automation of tagging, grouping or categorization of comments. However, before we start working on it, we are validating on how important or necessary this feature would be.
What if, we spend a few days making an awesome automation to do what you mentioned, but no one really gives a st about it. :)
http://meta.discourse.org/t/feedback-improved-topic-summary-...
It's encrypted, distributed, open-source. It has chat, messaging, file sharing, forums, etc.
What more do you want? If anything, why not just write a plug-in for it or otherwise contribute?
BTW, what do you generally like in food discussions? Is it good pics of food dishes, or recipes or something else?
I guess I got too immersed in thinking about discussions only. :D
How often do you like to follow/friend/private message interesting people you may find on a particular discussion?
How important is notification for an effective discussion platform?
When was the last time that a company offered you to notify you by (snail) mail when there was a letter available for you to pick up at their headquarters?
It's a workaround for having to poll multiple event (posting) sources. Which only arises because we have multiple event sources. Which is completely unnecessary, technically. (I am talking about the user interface here, of course - it's perfectly fine to have the software poll multiple sources, or, even better, to have some protocol-level notification/push mechanism, of course, but the user should not ever have to deal with it.)
That also does not mean that integrating with email, say, is necessarily a bad idea - but not in order to tell a human that they should poll some event source, but as an interface medium for the actual discussion (that is, essentially as a mailing list). e-mail supports much of the necessary basic functionality, and it's also an existing infrastructure that give the user one UI of their choice for all communication partners.
But it also gives you a sense of optional anonymity as your HN account doesn't have to necessarily link with the rest of your web presence. No one can find you in the real world just from you HN account if you don't want them too. And still, the option to provide further information gives you the OPTION to present your credentials and connect "who you are" with the HN account.
I find it really interesting how sometimes VERY simple features are solving relatively complex problems
Quora on the other hand, has this feature of being able to ask or answer questions as anonymous, and this has resulted in an avalanche of stupid questions and unrelated answers.
We are somewhere in between, while we like to give a real identity like Quora has, we also believe, anonymity is an important feature to have, for many different reasons.
People/usernames are brands in online discussion, so the way we generally weigh people's opinion is affected by those brands, which is kind of a function of their comment history and any IRL connections. Say, if the username is 'pg', even if it's a hit-and-run comment with not much thought put into it, you view it differently.
However, with the anonymous feature to ask question, I have seen a rapid degradation of the quality of questions coming on Quora. I am not the only one who has felt this way. We can find a lot of people complaining about the quality of questions of late.
"A good design is something which takes care of both extreme users, and not just a center large portion."
The user feature of a website should be such that, they should feel to interact either as real identity (gets them social karma) or as an anonymous user (without any concerns)
A dialectic platform - when two users disagree someone should write a third post that both agree with.
It remains to be seen if two users are actually agreeing to the third person, or still continue to argue with their points
4chan maybe a ton of bad things, but what it truly nails, is a simple-to-use and effective UI.
(Legend has it that whenever you speak of 4chan, moot makes an appearance. Wonder if it'll happen this time)
As about moot, lets see if that happens?
The original idea for a better discussion platform came after using fb group for 2.5 years and feeling the pain. We had started the Bangalore Startups group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/blrstartups/)...
Although we keep getting new users fairly well, control and structuring discussions is completely missing..
Re-show comment karma in order to restore trust, in the wake of awareness of rankbanning, since that will provide transparency in comment placement.
Hacker News still has a community advantage. (I'll take HN's irritating-- but at least book-smart-- libertarian naifs over the actual idiots of most forums any day). The moderation could use some work, though.
This point does give me an idea on how to handle the moderation a bit better though. Let me polish the idea, before telling more about it.