If anything, that opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models actually survive on the internet. If you look at ten plus year old forum communities virtually none of them have or offer threaded discussions of any kind. Flat all the way down.
I gotta think this is Darwinism in action: threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive.
I think there are some narrow, limited, specialized use cases for threaded discussion that are valid. I’ll outline the pros and cons again soon, but I wanted to solicit discussion:
Do you believe threaded discussions are superior to flat? Why, specifically? Cite examples.
Can you name any examples of 10+ year old discussion forums that use threading, which are still active today?
What about hybrids? If you had to build a new forum, what aspects of flat or threaded discussion would you incorporate, and specifically how?
Wouldn’t reddit essentially count as a threaded forum? It isn’t 10 years old, but it’s pretty close and hugely successful. Not that it’s really a great place for an actual discussion.
My knee-jerk reaction is that this is a mental model problem, not a problem of back-end architecture. Nor web usability, which has improved drastically in the past 10+ years. Given an interface that inherently supports both discussion models, I’d like to see if there is a preference among users – and I’m guessing that users will tend toward the flat discussion model because otherwise it’s just too much crap to keep track of in your head.
It’s like when someone organizes your files for you on your standard hierarchical file system. If you do it yourself, you know where all your files are. You have a method, a system, that you have created for yourself and that is basically unique to you. You can’t sit down at someone else’s computer and quickly locate that TPS report unless you share an organizational structure and thus a mental model of file organization.
Getting thousands of Internet goofballs to share a mental model is basically impossible, so it’s best to reduce the complexity and keep things flat.
My $0.02. Feel free to PM me – especially if any user studies are in order.
Threaded discussions seem to work best where the topics naturally drift off into a whole bunch of different tangents, which is why it probably works well for places like Slashdot and Reddit. They also have userbases large enough that following a flat discussion would be rather difficult when the post you’re responding to is already 10 pages back by the time you’ve finished writing your reply.
Edit: Although they’re now gone, the PoE forums were fairly long-lived and also used a threaded model, but it was rather annoying to follow discussions over time when new posts kept popping up nearly everywhere in the middle of the big reply tree.
I’ve never liked threaded discussions, but maybe that’s just because I’m more used to the other kind. I like the idea that a whole conversation takes place in a single ‘room’ and people can quote and respond as they desire.
I feel like the problem with threaded discussions is that, aside from usually being ugly in implementation, they’re terribly awkward to read the entire conversation.
The Web 2.0 model would probably be to treat the thread as a “visibility tag” of sorts, so you can view the whole thing as a flat format, or click on a thread to only display the posts in that thread.
The problem with a hybrid like that, I would guess, is that because the entire thing isn’t explicitly threaded, you’re going to naturally lose some relevant posts using the threaded view. But it might work nonetheless.
Well, I think one thing is that flat models aren’t purely flat. This board has a mandatory two level structure (sub forum and thread).
I think there is something there about forcing a certain amount of segregation between topics without allowing groups to arbitrarily splinter conversations easily. There’s a larger barrier to splintering a topic further.
If you have a large group people at a party or conference or something, normally you’ll see them break down into smaller fairly static groups discussing a general topic for a while with people shifting between groups. You don’t normally see these groups break down further into small specific conversations. If a spontaneous football conversation starts up with 5 people at a party we’ll all stay together and wander through sports discussions instead of two people going off to talk about the monday night game specifically because they saw that one and the other three discussing a different game or whatever.
A forum laid out like this one allows you to do the equivalent of walking around the room to overhear what to topics various groups are discussing and then integrate into whichever one you want to.
Arbitrarily threaded forums also seem to encourage a lot more back and forth sniping in my experience, but I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it doesn’t seem as much like interrupting and annoying everyone else since it’s theoretically a splintered conversation easy to ignore. Could just be a sample size type thing.
There are lots of implementation issues, too. For example, Gawker is an astonishingly terrible example of threading in their comments. I still have trouble believing they not only pushed it to production but haven’t fixed it in the past several months since release. I find it literally unusable-- I haven’t read any gawker (read: gizmodo) comments since the change. It is legendarily bad.
Reddit’s threading works fine, but it’s more about posting a pithy or cute comment than actually holding a conversation. Flat works better for conversations. It constrains them, to be sure. But that’s not necessarily negative.
Oh yeah, kinja is abysmal. The only thing we can figure is that they wanted to turn off comments entirely without saying they did so. That’s all it successfully does: suppress comments. Kind of a black ops ninja mission there.
Reddit’s threading works fine, but it’s more about posting a pithy or cute comment than actually holding a conversation. Flat works better for conversations. It constrains them, to be sure. But that’s not necessarily negative.
The ultimate and final end point of all reddit “discussion” is a meme image. It happens on every reddit except those that are extremely strictly moderated – and Reddit is a libertarian system, it was never really designed with moderation in mind, though moderation is always necessary to scale community without it falling apart . e.g.
I think I’ve done enough work just clicking on the thread. After that all I should need to do is scroll down(or swipe down).
The last thing I want to have to do is collapse or expand threaded portions of a thread I’ve already clicked on. Those little tangents aren’t so important as to be worth that much effort, despite what the people posting them might think.
Those Gawker hub threads are a perfect example of that nonsense. Click here to read 20 comments about this article, the first comment has 5 subcomments about the reply to the article, the subcomments each have one or two subcomments to the reply to the reply of the article. No you can’t just scroll down to continue reading the thread.
I think it depends on what you’re discussing. remember the threaded model evolved on Usenet. Anyone who thinks, say, c.s.i.p.g was easier to read without something like turn is utterly insane. however, the main purpose of threads in that context is solved here by starting anew post topic. (Which is, essentially, a 0 level heirarchical thread.)
For conversations where the discussion is on topic (ish) flat is fine. There are plenty of threads on this board, though, where you have a 10 page diversion in the middle of a thread which will drive out all but the most invested. That’s okay when the discussion is informal and non-technical ( so the thread is essentially non-informative). It mimics a conversation at a party or such. It’s fairly lousy for actual conveyance of information and storage of that information for retrieval. (For a technical forum, say.). The latter model may be a lot less important with wikis around, though this certainly isn’t the case in my technical field. (Computational chemistry.)
I find the stack exchange model okay, but it’s not really a discussion among peers type of model, either.
I do think /reddit is a counterexample of a sort given how insanely popular it is. If you browse heavily moderated forum like /askscience the discussion can be good.
I think I might prefer if reddit was a hybrid and each top level comment was flat on further replies.
Don’t reddit and slashdot both sort of get around it by having the upvote/downvote thing, so that you can basically go in and only look at the top comments to a topic?
My three favourite forums is this place, BF, and Shacknews, so two flat and one threaded. The thing with Shacknews is that it has all the recent discussions displayed (potentially) in full and doesn’t have separate pages for separate topics, so it’s a bit chattier than a place for forum discussion.
