

Encouraged Commentary (cool use of jQuery to enhance blog commenting) - mojombo
http://donttrustthisguy.com/2009/01/04/encouraged-commentary/

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bdotdub
This is very neat. Makes a lot of sense to me.

However, I think better commenting systems are the real problem here, instead
of hacking current ones. The "threaded" conversations in this post are very
cool, but disqus threaded comments are much more intuitive.

And instead of making just a blockquote, and referring back, github-type line
commenting would be awesome.

The model of post then comments is kind of counter intuitive in terms of real
discussion.

~~~
unalone
The problem with threaded threads is that there's less of a feel of
permanence. When everything is linear, then you've got a very real spatial
sense of where, say, the second comment is on a page. Depending on how
important the blog community is to the blog, linear comments may hurt more
than they help.

Actually, the better model comes from forums, where conversations were
threaded early on and then switched to linear as forums evolved. Linear
threads let you follow the progress of a conversation. Threaded ones lose that
same sense of time.

~~~
iron_ball
Threaded ones let you follow a main conversation, ignoring digressions and
side arguments; you can see the shape of the overall discussion, tracked by
evolving subtopic. I have found that I approve of it; "derails" are rarer.

~~~
unalone
The idea of a linear conversation, though, is that once the topic is set
that's what people talk about. If the conversation branches, somebody starts a
new thread. That's one of the neat things about forum development: you get to
watch what conversations begin, and sometimes your forum becomes something
entirely different from what you thought it would be.

You lose some of that with threaded conversations. I've seen a few threaded
forums, and on the whole you lose a lot of the people. In a linear thread
you're forced to read everybody, which means the community evolves around its
specific members. In a threaded one things are less focused. Conversations
become more private, in a way, as small little conversations form from the big
one, and while that works well on a site like this, there's something lost in
the process.

Look at Reddit versus Hacker News as an example of what's lost. On Reddit, the
most-known people are mainly the trolls. You get 911was_an_inside_job and
Captain_Obvious. Other people don't stay memorable within the community,
unless it's within a particular subreddit. When you look at conversations,
very often a very bad thread (conspiracy theory or pun thread) will be voted
up to the top, which makes community seem either immature or difficult or
worthless. It's got some good communities, but they're the close-to-inactive
ones, almost always. More people means the community breaks apart.

Hacker News _does_ work, but that's because it's got a built-in audience of
people who want to apply to YCombinator - from there it's attracted a like-
minded audience. Here, there's no personality among people, or there's very
little. I remember whether or not I respect a name, and I often disagree with
the same people, but there's still very little personality here. Partly that's
because here, as Reddit, discussion revolves mainly around news stories, but
partly it's because when you're not linear there's no _reason_ to get to know
other people, because you can just skip over their strand of conversation.

So threaded conversations help with some things a lot, not so much with
others. Cirqueti is being designed with a linear user forum in mind, because
we want a very personal forum to go alongside the polished mainpage. I'm
guessing we'll get users on the forum that aren't big on the main site and
vice-versa, and I think that's extremely healthy for a site's community. (As
the SomethingAwful forum credo goes, "There's a _main_ site?")

-

Okay, too much reply there. I'll end by saying that I've never seen a blog
that needs threaded conversation: not enough useful talk goes on in blogs for
it to be worth it. A blog is a single-user-centric community: it's not
_healthy_ for it to have a cloud of responses like threaded offers. It
fractures what minimal community ought to be there. The only blog I've seen
with above-decent comments is Ebert's, and it keeps a linear thread, and
commenters (and Ebert) get to know each other. That's what's missing out with
methods like Disqus's.

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rrwhite
Cool but I don't know if it's a net positive.

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.

Read Joel Spolsky's essay on community software design
([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html))

~~~
cosmo7
I'd quite like a comment system that requires users to solve a series of logic
and verbal reasoning problems before being able to submit.

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qhoxie
This is a really slick setup from the highlighting to the interacting with
previous comments. Ideas like this really can enhance the effectiveness and/or
frequency of commenting.

It reminds me a Jack Slocum's old blog where comments were tagged onto a line
of the article. I think combining these two designs would be great.

~~~
mattmcknight
I like the inline footnoting type approach for some cases. It gets a little
unwieldy at times if there are too many, but you just hide it.

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unalone
Fascinating! This is a modified version of the idea that I'm using for my own
start-up! Glad to see that the highlighting idea is spreading: I've seen
similar ideas used elsewhere before.

The modification that our system uses rather than this one is that it creates
the comment box on the left-hand side, rather than scrolling all the way down.
The idea is that you then make multiple posts as you read down, rather than
one single one that disrupts the reading process, and that they all bundle
together again at the end. (Of course, blog commenting is a little different
than content critiquing, so perhaps merely quoting once is sufficient here.)

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apu
Is there a reason the title of the post is in Flash?

~~~
davecardwell
_Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and
Adobe Flash based technology that enables the replacement of text elements on
HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. It was initially developed by Shaun
Inman and improved by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacemen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement)

<http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr>

<http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/>

~~~
apu
So let me get this straight. In order to make sure everyone sees titles in the
same font, they're rendered using flash. So I have to load the buggy flash
plugin for a page with all text. I can't select the title. I can't resize the
title (nor does it resize with the page zoom). Adblock displays a distracting
"Block" above the title (and I'm assuming a large number of people have
similar flash-blocking/warning plugins).

So why is this better than an image version of the title with alt text? That
seems to be much easier, takes almost no resources, requires neither flash nor
javascript, resizes automatically in Firefox (albeit using nearest neighbor,
which is still better than not resizing at all).

Finally, is the font used for the title _that_ important?

~~~
thomasmallen
sIFR degrades gracefully and is accessible. I recommend that you read up on
sIFR before recoiling in "no, it's FLASH!" horror. And yes, typography is
important in design.

~~~
apu
I never said it wasn't accessible or that it doesn't degrade gracefully. I
_did_ read the links provided on sIFR.

My points remain. An image would degrade just as gracefully and be just as
accessible. And graceful degradation/accessibility seem to be answering the UI
question for older browsers. What about current browsers? Since I have flash
installed, the title is rendered using flash and now I can't resize/select the
title. In this case, the "degraded" version seems like a step up.

Finally, yes, I know that typography is important in design. I was just
wondering at what cost.

~~~
thomasmallen
Yes, the image would work just as well. Now try generating that image on the
fly for 1000 product pages, for instance. sIFR draws content from HTML, making
it far more flexible. I very easily implemented Trajan Pro product titles for
an artist's website for around 400 products, and this would have been
prohibitively tedious if I were using images.

As for your resizing concern, sIFR should only be used for headlines.
Typically, everyone can read text in that size (body copy may require
resizing, but only a fool would run blocks of text through sIFR).

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jgilliam
I can't imagine regular people using this.

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bemmu
This reminds me of all of those services for annotating the web, but as far as
I know none of those have gotten significant traction. Perhaps everyone just
prefers referring to things by using just normal language, instead of a
special tool to select something explicitly. If StumbleUpon included an
annotation feature, maybe it could catch on.

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jwesley
Very nice! Now we just need a plugin that automatically silences troll
commenters.

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mattmcknight
Why is it flickering on my display?

