

The Threaded discussion as a visual design pattern - samaparicio
http://blog.aparicio.org/2009/12/08/the-threaded-view-as-a-visual-design-pattern/

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mixmax
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.

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sofal
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?

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samaparicio
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.

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sofal
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.

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

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pie
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?

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steerpike
You could promote some discussion on it at the social design patterns wiki:
[http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...](http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)

The 'threaded comments' page is here:
[http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...](http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Threaded_Comments)

