Judging from the beta (http://try.discourse.org/) it doesn't seem to provide anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current implementation (it's just an expandable <blockquote> and doesn't really help me understand the context).
What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":
- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.
- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.
- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
Interestingly, as an early users of the software, I got mostly the exact opposite feeling.
Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community
Ember used Discourse for the past several months. We provided a ton of feedback and I like to think that our participation served exactly this purpose: building Discourse for a real community.
Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic
There is also an "aggregated links" view that aggregates all of the outbound links from a thread and shows how many times they have been clicked on.
Discourse has moderator tools for "closing" threads. I would expect that closed threads would work well together with the "Best of" view.
Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
I think this is one of the team's highest priorities. There is some innovation in the way replies work, but it's also possible to "reply as a new thread", with margin links between the threads. I have found this to be a very good compromise, and something that explicitly attempts to tackle your desire here.
In short, I think there's more depth here than you're seeing at first glance, and the things you want to see from Discourse are things the team is actively thinking about.
Following yesterday's discussion on Ember.js / AngularJS (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5168803) I think this is one more item in the "why to give Ember a try" side (Just for the mere fact that SE chose it over other alternatives, used it and open sourced it, and had you somehow involved I assume). Were you consulting them on Ember development aspects? Were you involved in the development somehow? do they use version 1.0?
Were you consulting them on Ember development aspects?
We worked with Robin and Sam as community members over the past few months as they worked on Discourse. Frankly, they're both rock stars, and managed the entire project with surprisingly little direction from us.
Were you involved in the development somehow?
I think the largest extent of direct code collaboration between the Ember team and Discourse was Erik Bryn's work on the `group` helper. Other than that, they asked us questions from time to time and we answered them.
do they use version 1.0?
Yes! I was insanely impressed by Robin's ability to get the (rather large) Discourse codebase ported over to Ember 1.0 pre4 within days of us shipping it. As has been mentioned on other threads, there has been a bunch of churn in the run-up to 1.0, and Robin took it like a champ. The code is largely idiomatic Ember 1.0 code, and reads well to me.
Thanks, very valuable information, was looking for a large v 1 real world implementation to learn from, (endorsed by ember maintainers). This is great. Thanks
As another commenter pointed out, forums tend to serve one of two needs. Either they are a source of information, or they can be a place for casual conversations.
Your list of 'wants' mainly speaks to forums being a source of information. People ask questions, remark on current events, debate and discuss and create a long-term record of thoughtful discussions.
But Discourse appears to be geared more towards the community aspects of a forum. Mentions between members of a community are relevant in this case, since it gets users into threads and posting. Real-time features lower the friction of using the software and increase rapid-fire communication (we call that "banter") between members. Avatars on the topic index make it easy to see which of your friends are posting in which threads, so you can better decide where to go next.
For this group, forums represent a "Third Place"[1] community outside of their home and workplace groups. I've been building forums software similar to Discourse, on my own for the past year, wagering that this second group of users is larger than the first, and that their needs are only accidentally addressed by the current generation of forums software. I'm anxious to see whether Discourse finds traction in this respect.
It does, but the trust metric we use is not very visible on the surface. Which is sort of by design. There is a hint of it on the user page if you know where to look! :)
Probably the main visible entry point is flagging, so try flagging a post or topic.
It's also hard to see the moderation functions from the outside, but I assure you that they're as frictionless as we could make them! For example, multi-selecting posts, splitting topics, merging topics, locking topics, archiving topics, etc.
There's still a lot to do, we have no way of selecting multiple topics at the moment, for example. But I encourage you to try out the Vagrant image if you want to hack on Discourse quickly. It includes a small db, and you'll be a moderator there.
I remember the first time I used threaded comments. I moved from the 1D world to the 2D world, and it felt right. I can't go back to 1D. I feel cramped.
But with 2D comments, there's rarely any actual discussion. It's mostly people stating their opinions and others individually responding to them.
Looking at the demo page, I love how the threads are 1D, but you can still switch to direct replies if you just want to follow the sub-conversation. It's the best of both worlds.
How many individuals have the means to sustain an online conversation? I love threaded conversations because they are so easily branched. However, I do wish there were a visual indication of the flow of discussions between two individuals.
Which brings up an interesting thought: why does a discussion have to be between two individuals? If we are all reading the two current sides to a discussion, are we not all entitled to share our opinion to continue the discussion? It's then a group discussion.
Downsides to conversations with more then two people:
* It is harder to build mental model of opposing view as the number of people on the opposing side increases do to inconsistances in their view points, experience, and reasons.
* It can be harder to judge how much an influence your arguments have the more people who are participating.
* Reinforcement with a peer group. There can be a tendency to not examining a topic closely if there is a peer group that shares the opinion and is holding strong in their opinion.
There are many advantages to one on one conversations that are lost in group discussions. I would love to retain the benefits of one on one conversations but on a forum involving N people. I do not think there is an easy solution though.
The best discussion platform I use is one semi-private one (it's closed), where you have unlimited tree structure and every node is equal whether it's a comment, category or "forum". You can differentiate a bit by using a template (which is just another node in the tree). For example you can view the discussion in 1D if you want.. but there's really no point.
Example: HN in that setting would be just one node, called Hacker News. Each submission would be a post/comment and all the comments from here would be just subcomments under that parent post. If someone posted here about new language for example, that post along with all discussion under it can be become a new "forum". If you move it away from under HN, you can still leave a hardlink there so it won't be lost.
Is the discussion there civilized though? Mostly not.
I find it interesting how Tumblr can frame a reply as a post, a different highlighting of the fractal flow of conversation, though ain't nobody got time for that, imo. I'll stick with plain ol' threaded HN/Reddit (though I think I remember finding a parent post for deep links to HN annoyingly unintuitive).
I like the new UX ideas. I'm wondering if instances will be able to federate, and the 'front page term[/hashtag](s)' for the discussion area of a certain website on a topic could be framed differently.
Some topics are going to get to crazy posting speed. Watching Reddit posts with new set on isn't that fun. An IRC/Jabber MUC format would be good for times, and Facebook autoupdates its newsfeed anyway. An IM system with text (and at least url) post and their replies upvoted, and maybe filtered in some tiling window like fashion?
Agreed. Forums have two powers: 1) being hugely deep sources of information and 2) places where great conversations can persist.
Because of that, your forum thread topic should really have two views (sorts, if you will): Top replies and chronologically (we'll call that the status quo). Either I want to engage in a thread's conversation, or I want to know what the meatiest reply of the conversation is (and its context).
One keeps a thread alive, and one serves to make it useful in a future context. I'm surprised this is completely absent.
Not sure if that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but here's my opinion:
"Best" posts--those which are a good source of information--have a high view-to-interaction ratio. An inflammatory post on a forum or Reddit tends to see more replies than the average. A good reference piece or poignant story seems more likely to stand on its own--it will have more views than most posts, and have a high view/reply ratio.
What separates a good post from an insignificant one is baseline views. If a thread has been opened 10000 times and everyone has read a certain comment, it's likely to be informative or controversial.
The "best of", even within a single topic/thread, is also per-user and temporal. The best-of in a thread to me is no longer a best-of when I've fully internalized it. I really value Reddit's collapse button/link for this reason.
I was looking for it, I suppose in the wrong places.
To answer your question, I'd have to agree with what was already written by eric-hu, except to say that bad or inflammatory posts also create a lot of response (trolls, as it were). I know it's maybe tired or clunky, but I think a forum can have both entertaining and useful replies, and thus should have a voting mechanism to indicate which are which. Yes, interaction can play a role in how important they are, and to maybe help massage ranking, but I think people are happy with and familiar with a system of voting for content.
That said, a token "good post" should be able to stand for itself. I envision a system where the top posts (be they replies to other posts or posts in and of themselves) sit flat among each other, ranked by their usefulness or entertainment value.
I think a forum moderator's real value in this situation is not to mess with the community's decisiveness, but to resolve matters of content relevance (to keep a community focused).
Threaded comments are not too complex. The main thing I want is a bidirectional NNTP gateway, so I can use nice clients to handle updating threads without having to trudge through the stuff that hasn't.
At some point in the future I think technology advances enough to where it makes sense to have fairly beefy client apps for discussions. Modern forums are based off of the idea that basically everyone sees the same views all the time. This is why you have to invent various tricks (like pagination "last read" state, quoting, and threading) to try to manage information density so that conversations don't become unwieldy too quickly. Although most such techniques are only slightly effective compared to the tried and true techniques of the good old days of usenet.
Yeah, I have to agree. Reading his blog post, and then the documentation on the site, I got the image of some great new designs to manage the "Information Architecture" of an online persistent discussion (a thread). But instead when I actually logged in and browsed around, all I got was reddit with nicer formatting.
> Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
Definitely. I basically want a forum that looks like gitk (but flipped, obviously). Clear replies, multiple parents, but sorted chronologically and without indentation. Higher or lower rated posts could be marked typographically.
What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":
- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.
- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.
- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
- Encourage longer responses.
There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...