The Threaded discussion as a visual design pattern | Hacker News Reader

The Threaded discussion as a visual design pattern

blog.aparicio.org

12 pointssamaparicio11 comments

Actuallly HN's threaded forum is the best I've come across yet. It's simple and easy to understand yet very flexible and works well for conversations with many threads because the interesting stuff rises to the top.

It drives me nuts when I visit popular blogs that serve as a place for discussion and yet they have no nesting of comments (three levels does not count). Forcing the linearity of comments does a big disservice to the readers, because inevitably people will go off into tangential conversations where #45 will reply to #15 and #79 will reply to #45. A lot of (but not all) people make up their own informal structure by prefixing their comments with the name or the number of the comment(er) they're replying to. I feel like I'm in the Stone Age when browsing through these conversations after reading through HN. We already have solutions for this crap!

Very few websites seem to be getting this right, and I can't understand why. Someone or something needs to force these people to evolve.

I would love to see a piece of software that analyzed a linear comment stream, inferred the dependencies, and restructured the comments in the browser. Is there anything like this?

HN distills some of the best ideas from its predecessors:

1) Scoring system for stories (Digg) and comments (Slashdot)

2) Community based story submission (Kuro5hin)

3) Infinite indentation (Usenet and Forums)

It's also interesting to note what they didn't include in the design: Subjects for comments

HN's approach is not without challenges

1) Following the conversation gets tougher when there are a lot of levels. Who said what?

2) By reordering the posts according to points the user gets disoriented.

I think that having the ability to expand and collapse comment trees would solve the first challenge. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet.

Probably lack of time. I hear the lead programmer is involved in other ventures that take up much of his time :-)

Also, to belabour a point, lack of a notifications system mean that you have to repeatedly revisit a page to see whether your comment has been replied to.

At least it's a single page: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=AndrewDucker

EDIT: After clicking on the link I posted, I see you've already brought this up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983536

No mention of Reddit?

I have always assumed that the HN comment system was more or less a clone of Reddit's. Maybe I'm wrong though.

There's also the disorientation from the score decay curve -- fresh posts get a big short-lived boost.

I've been meaning to write a greasemonkey script to reorder all comments in chronological order, but preserving the indentation in a minimal form with links to instantiate the parent/siblings/children.

This is an interesting and under-discussed topic (especially among designers), but there isn't a huge amount of insight in the article.

Could anyone point out some good resources on threaded discussion design?

You could promote some discussion on it at the social design patterns wiki: http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...

The 'threaded comments' page is here: http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...

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