Curious how you see Chapp compared to Reddit. Is Chapp meant for real-time discussions as opposed to the more message-board pace of Reddit? Is it aiming to solve a different problem? For example, you mention discussing Game of Thrones or the Stanley Cup playoffs. What advantage would Chapp have over following the discussions on r/GameOfThrones or r/NHL?
I'm not sure that I can properly answer this question.
Reddit seems to work just fine, and I find it a good way to find new stories and fun content.
That said, I also find the overall structure sort of difficult to navigate/process. (This is my personal reaction—others might feel completely different.)
I'm not so sure that Chapp is really going up against Reddit. That said, I think we're trying to approach this in a somewhat (visually) simpler fashion.
Additionally, I think Reddit comes from a more granular standpoint of "here's a thing; discuss," which for the most part seems probably better than the vague nature of channel driven discussions. But, I think the notion of a broad topic with less focused conversation might have certain advantages as well.
I suppose this isn't that clear of a response. (Perhaps I should blame this on a long day and a couple of glasses of wine.) I think, though, that these are just sort of different things, even if they seem similar on the surface. I suppose in time we'll see if that's actually the case.
Thanks for the response. I suppose my concern is simply that chat room conversation around a topic doesn't seem to scale well without some sort of structure for organizing input. What impresses me about Reddit is the scaffold it provides for growing communities. Subreddits organize at the "broad topic" level, with smaller topics of discussion voted on to surface the best ones. Then you have the comment section itself, which is basically the "chat room" of Reddit, but with branching and voting dynamics allowing a million diverging conversations to occur without overwhelming the user.
Chat rooms have a place for small communities, but I fear that they simply don't work for larger ones without more internal structure. But maybe you don't intend Chapp to be a tool for discussions at that scale. Regardless, good luck with your project.
Yep—it could get tricky, particularly as volume increases. I also agree that Reddit's approach works quite well—in part by having the starting post be so specific in nature that it directs the conversation, whereas, Chapp discussions (already) tend to wander off track from the channel topic.
Frankly, you could be very right about our approach potentially getting jammed-up just due to the lack of structure. We're still not clear on what's going to happen here, and do consider it an experiment. Although Chapp isn't in any way groundbreaking (it's closely informed by many other formats) we see it as something that could perhaps be a bit of a "new twist."
Of course, in building something you don't entirely understand, yet, it's hard to say if you're making the right choices. For example, I would have thought Twitter's 140 character limit was an obstacle, but I think it actually worked to their advantage by allowing for faster, easier interaction for those with something to say but not enough discipline to create longer-format content.
From what we've seen during our first week, I think we might be on to something. Early users seem to like the simplicity of the approach, and a few are really taking to it. That said, we could be misreading this entirely. If nothing else, though, it's been fun so far, and we're curious about where it goes from here.
