Cool. It does bring a new way of discussion to the table. But was wondering what would normally be an users behaviour? You could selectively reply to it, mute it or mark it as spam. Any trends data you got so far to throw light on this?
Yes, but Jeff's post seems to suggest that there's something special in the design that contributes to more civilized discussion. I'm curious as to what that is. For example, does having a modern interface do that all by itself? Is there something special about the moderation interface? Little tricks isomorphic to the way HN makes you wait before replying to replies, and so on?
Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.
It will be interesting to see how it goes, but I see it more as a way to slow down conversations. I think perhaps we may find that it is best to exponentially delay replies in a thread from the same person. Most comment thread discussions go maybe 2 for each person before losing most value (from my observations) and so it may also find value in adding logic to slow or disable that sort of "noise" as well.
That is a pretty good solution to the relevant tags and spam issues I was worried about. Good thinking there. One half of my issues gone.
The single conversation is still a big problem for me. I really like being able to have conversations within a specific community and get specific angles on a topic. I also like to look at a conversation on the same topic in different subreddits to see how different communities react. It's not to say that one way is inhertly better but more of a personal preference.
This is very neat! The premise (1-1 convos, messages published only on reply) is pretty unique.
It's not at all clear to me how that premise is going to lead to more civil conversations, but I am 100% behind people trying out different online conversation mechanics and seeing what falls out of them.
Stack overflow, 4chan, twitter, every phpBB ever... the communities they developed were all heavily influenced by the mechanics of interacting with them. I strongly believe that there's plenty of solution space left to explore with the problem of "how do we design interaction mechanics to produce the community we want." I applaud anyone exploring that solution space!
The same number of messages are made, why arbitrarily force the discussion to be broken up? Embracing what the users want to do, how they want to us it, is a great way to discover non-obvious uses and to be low friction for them.
Just looked, and on one of the forums I run there's a thread with more than 130K replies https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/133015/ and so long as it loads fast and people are enjoying it, it's fine.
So I understand that you want to facilitate conversations, and Thats exactly what this is doing. By automating out an annoyance, and providing more access to everyone, it allows more people to read and participate in the discussion
I think they're trying to solve the same problems other discussion-related services have by approaching the problems from a different perspective: discussions are private by default, and therefore the participants have greater control of signal:noise. They're trying to build from the bottom up instead of top down and hopefully that solves the problems most people associate with discussion services (e.g., comments), particularly people who abuse the the system in various ways such as trolls, griefers, and spammers.
> Top posting is actually quite useful for context when you've been CC'd on a thread in the middle: you can go back through the previous mails that are embedded at the bottom of the email and reconstruct the chain in your head.
That's a lot of work for someone to establish context, and they have to start at the bottom to read the original message, scroll up to find the second message, read through that, and repeat the process.
What's useful is to provide a summary of what was discussed and then follow up from there. In either case, having some type of forum or newsgroup would be far better in this scenario because anyone subscribed could read any message even if they weren't part of the original discussion.
I've often posted questions, gotten good replies I wanted to follow up on, but didn't realize until weeks later when the thread was stale. I usually take discussions to message boards with basic UX like content notifications.
We use separate channels for different projects and people join/leave as needed. @here is incredibly useful when you have a general question and not sure who might have insight.
It all boils down to how people use the communications channel. I see @here multiple times a week but do not feel like it is a big distraction. At worst it can create a few minutes of distraction from my current workflow and if I'm truly in the middle of a thought process I ignore the message for a little bit or unless a 2nd notification hits.
I like being able to respond to specific bits of what people have to say. While it has the distraction and noisy downside of a conversation occurring linearly in time, to me, that ability makes it better than a linear conversation in that way. Discord is now getting that with threads, though.
I'd be concerned that by making it so easy for users to respond that actual discussion will be stifled because you won't be forced to actually scroll past all the comments to post something.
I do enjoy the 'conversation' view though. It's nice that it will pull in the messages that I sent into a thread, rather than just relying on people quoting the whole message in replies.
I think whats happening here is that discourse that is created by online forum discussions ends up sounding hostile rather than productive. I have experienced this in remote only companies also. In previous generations of open source languages people communicated with email which at least made them think about their argument and rephrase it. Now however (also partly influenced by modern internet culture) people take an adversarial side and then just post it without rephrasing it in a way to sound respectful and constructive.
I do not see an obvious solution to this other the somewhat untenable goal of restricting discussions to email only.
An example: DJB posted something about why crit-bit trees are superior to hashes, I replied asking about cache-issues with crit-bit trees and he responded back with information about how to make crit-bit trees cache aware.
That is a very useful public conversation to have; indeed 20 years ago it could have happened on usenet.
I think the idea is to track discussions through email as threads, rather than just a long list of messages.
That said, you bring up a valid point about reinventing the wheel -- GMail does this already with conversations. So this app would need something more.
One idea off the top of my head is to enable people to participate in a discussion using an account on the site, rather than through email. Maybe also allowing people to comment on public discussions, but giving their comments a lower priority (along the lines of HN's prioritizing of comments).
Instead of nested replies, it encourages "Creating new threads linking back to a post", which I find to be way more orderly than "conversation trees". They're also aiming for feature-parity with mailing lists, allowing people to participate effectively with threads by e-mail alone.
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