Would love to hear your reasoning why!
Personally, I like the possibility of tangents in Reddit BUT I think I prefer the focus of staying on topic from a single thread.
@leroy Grew up with the good ol' forum style but once Reddit came along that made the old style completely obsolete for me.
Nowadays, I can't go back to the old style anymore, and I find the single thread style unreadable.
It is to this day one of the bigger problems I have with Mastodon (and by extension Twitter but I don't use that).
Naturally different conversations break out under a post and the Reddit way is the only way that makes this grouping together possible.
@leroy Yes of course. Worst case scenario, I ask "how do I x" and two people reply the same thing, I'd just thank both and move on.
Or when I keep discussing something with 1 person and the entire post is just one linear thread the Reddit style was still useful and could allow anyone to bud in mid-conversation.
@leroy I am unfamiliar with NodeBB. Is it the same or similar to those older forums we're used to, from 10-15 years ago like vBulletin/PHPBB?
If so, I fail to see the major differences. Both have "forums/subreddits", "threads" and "comments". The only difference that I notice from those types and reddit that I see, is up/downvotes.
If these forums are not similar to vBulletin/PHPBB of the old days, would you mind explaining the differences? Or give me a live site that uses NodeBB so I can experience it before giving my opinion?🤷♂️😅
@BeAware It is exactly like the forums of 10-15 years ago (I’m trying to avoid saying this as there are forums like this today and I don’t want to imply anything negative)
Maybe your experience was different to mine, but I remember these forums have subforms but each post had a single thread of replies. You would have to ‘quote’ if you were referencing something a few posts above to retain context.
Whereas in Reddit you can reply to a reply, creating multi-threaded posts
@leroy@BeAware it does seem like trying to fit a threaded conversation with many branches into a linear view would be an exercise in futility.
However I see this not as a reason to give up but as a challenge to overcome! What if you were able to "focus" on a specific subtree of comments and the other branches were minimized? Then you could still have linear presentation without the noise... 💡
@devnull@BeAware I don’t think it’s an exercise in futility at all, I think it’s a different way of reading data that suits some people. But neither way suits all.
If there is a single thread of replies, it is frustrating in Reddit to see all that indentation. So that is a clear moment where you could have it as a single branch.
But as soon as there is an offshoot, that information is now hidden.
@devnull@BeAware I wonder if you could, by default only show the main branch. And then optionally show the offshoots? But that might hide most information by default as other federated apps may promote threaded replies…
Yeah that's one way that could be achieved. NodeBB does something a little different in that it'll render all of the replies in a linear flow, but allow you to expand the direct replies in a sub-tree upon request.
You quite literally get the best of both worlds there 😃
@leroy@BeAware@multiverseofbadness Out of the box, no, but when my colleague and I were hacking around with it last year, it was actually pretty trivial to make it so you could keep loading nested posts all the way down.
Again, this is not officially supported behaviour (beyond that first level of direct replies), but our backend is pretty flexible, most of the time 😄
@leroy@BeAware@multiverseofbadness Sure, although at this point we're getting into theoreticals. There are additional considerations involved, not the least of which being every time a set of direct replies is loaded, it needs to make a request to the backend, since it is not scalable to load every post into the DOM.
It can be done well, but ultimately that's not where we focused our efforts. It's definitely really fun to think about though!
@devnull@BeAware@multiverseofbadness oh that’s a good point. And pages makes sense for a single thread of replies. But not so much if you keep expanding
@leroy@devnull@multiverseofbadness I feel the same as you. It's good, but it shouldn't be used for a small userbase. Also it definitely shouldn't have the comments sorted by votes as default.
It's historically used to harass people for their opinions.
@BeAware@devnull@multiverseofbadness oh interesting! I imagine the sorting by upvotes is the only positive aspect of it (assuming there isn’t abuse which is a BIG assumption).
I’m thinking places like StackOverflow (and even Reddit), surfacing helpful answers. Although Reddit tends to surface ‘funny’ answers…
But if the goal ISN’T to sort by votes, then is there a purpose to them?
@leroy@BeAware@multiverseofbadness sure, you're indirectly weighing in on the perceived "cultural fit" of the user in that particular forum's environment. You like what you see, you upvote.
But if you're talking literal and objectively, then also yes. #nodebb can be configured so new users with zero rep have their posts queued for approval. If you get one upvote, you clear the hurdle and can post freely.
@leroy@BeAware@multiverseofbadness up and down votes tie somewhat directly to the overall reputation score of the user. Right now it only makes sense from a local context, but it's fairly straightforward to at least translate an upvote into an #ActivityPub "like" and vice versa.
@devnull@BeAware@multiverseofbadness yeah, I would separate the like into its own button to provide clarity. Whereas up/down vote wouldn’t be federated and only change the experience on the site itself
@leroy@BeAware@multiverseofbadness many users tend to consider an upvote and a like as synonymous. This is without even getting into emoji-reactions, which is a whole 'nother ball game.
@devnull@BeAware@multiverseofbadness I may disagree. I don’t think it’s visible we’re communicating in multiple trees (at least for me it’s all appearing in notifications and I just hit ‘reply’.
Maybe it would be clearer if the UI showed it in multiple trees
Add comment