> Discourse has become such an integral part of our company that we abandoned making decisions in meetings entirely.
That's really impressive and cool.
Being an old Usenet fart, I have some problems with Discoure's linear discussion threads (I don't have that problem with twitter's similar structure though).
But I guess if you can keep people on topic and open up new threads for discussions that get side-tracked, it can be a really cool tool.
Have the Discourse developers ever commented on whether they deliberately didn't support visualization of the thread structure? The software appears to know the thread structure (because there's a specific UI to reply to, and quote, a particular message), but it doesn't do much to show it to a reader -- or provide other thread features that you might find in a news reader, like marking a subthread as read or hiding it.
Do we know if this is something Discourse might support in a future version?
I have read this piece before but I mostly disagree.
"Putting aside Usenet as a relic and artifact of the past, [...]"
I think this is a crucial sentence for the whole post. He brushes aside the probably best example for a threading model. He never asks the questions "why did it work on Usenet?", "why didn't/doesn't it work on the browser?", and "could we make it work in the browser?".
Most of his arguments concern wrong UI designs for a threaded model. For example "you are talking to everyone". The argument that the reply button leads people to reply to the wrong message is completely refuted by reddit. It's just that the location of the reply button has to be carefully chosen and on reddit they have done it right. There's one reply button for the thread and one on every message.
I usually can accept opinionated design decisions but in the case of discourse, they implemented a half-assed solution. You can expand replies in discussions but then you can't drill down and expand the replies to those replies.
The continued success of Reddit (basically wiping out flat by default web forums) and the fact that Facebook has at some point between then and now introduced threading seem to prove it isn't too complex for most users. Only the old vBulletin pagination + threading model was.
Meanwhile you can't have deep discussion on Reddit or HN. When a new submission is made, the peanut gallery storms the top-level. Then a little bit of discussion nests a few levels, but it's pretty much a one-on-one discussion due to the nesting. And since topics can't be bumped, the discussion is ephemeral. And if you have something to say on a topic that's more than 24 hours old, then only the person you're replying to will see it.
Traditional forums have other issues, but longform discussion among multiple people over periods of time is possible.
I feel exactly the opposite. Traditional, non-nested, forums with more than a few users end up with many pages of @author comments that make it difficult to track the course of the conversation. With nested comments I know exactly who someone is replying to and the topic they're discussing. I think the issues you're pointing out (top-level peanut gallery, no bumping, >24 hours old) are more problems with news-driven websites than nesting vs non-nesting. If you had a reddit-style nested private niche-topic forum the pace would be slower and the problems you point out would probably be less of an issue.
The tree structure is pretty useless and incomplete on a traditional forum. The only information you have is when the user explicitly opts in to a quote-reply.
Most replies are written in the quick-reply box (no parent) because they are responding to what is being said in the last X posts. Assuming orphan posts are top-level replies to the topic is nonsensical, and you can verify this by toggling on threaded-view on forums that support it.
The next best thing is to just link the upstream post from a post that quoted/replied to another, which is what Discourse and traditional forums already do.
Of all sites, I have found all the disparate sbnation sites to have the best live, threaded discussion model. They do it threaded like reddit or HN, but new updates show live and unread and there are various shortcuts to jump to next unread, mark all as read, etc. The key to live, threaded discussion is unread message support.
> The key to live, threaded discussion is unread message support.
Exactly. The issue that many discussions on Reddit turn into one-on-one discussion is because of this. You can easily see new replies to your comments but not for other new comments.
The HN has the same issue but it doesn't seem to be so extreme. Maybe many people have site enhancements scripts installed? There are various browser addons for Reddit that highlight new comments since the last visit but it would of course be much better, if this were a standard feature.
That's really impressive and cool.
Being an old Usenet fart, I have some problems with Discoure's linear discussion threads (I don't have that problem with twitter's similar structure though).
But I guess if you can keep people on topic and open up new threads for discussions that get side-tracked, it can be a really cool tool.