Discussion: appropriate length for Loomio threads?

On the last point, I was recently unable to drag choices into the right order on my phone in the vote on Threads. I was also unable to cancel my vote on the phone when I realised this problem. I guess it's not a big deal as most of us will have computer access often and maybe it was just my kind of phone. But on this occasion I was traveling and unable to access a computer which I guess could ocasionally affect some people.

@Luke Martell

Do you have thoughts on cultural practices that would make Loomio use more phone-friendly?

Sounds like not relying heavily on ranked-choice polls might be part of that?

@Dynamic To be honest in this case for me it was more a technical issue than a cultural one, I just could not seem to be able to drag and drop the choices into the right order on my phone. If there are people wh regularly do not have computer access and have to use a phone then I guess there is a problem, but assume this is not that common.

@Luke I had the same problem: could not vote on my phone. Attempting to drag the votes would instead cause the window to scroll.

Also, that particular vote design was very confusing, with very long text on each choice which got truncated in such a way as you could not tell the choices apart.

However, I would not want this to in any way discouraged ranked-choice voting. As someone from Ireland where we use a variation of ranked-choice voting in all our elections, I am highly supportive.

However, the ballot design should be reasonable. For example, you could have an introductory question followed by a list of vote options that are just single words or short phrases.

I’ve always found Loomio very difficult to use for these reasons and more.

@Jay

Do you see this as a fundamental problem with Loomio, or do you think there are changes we could make to how we use it that would make it more useful for you?

Ok, so I wrote a whole big thing about Loomio with some options and it just vanished in to thin air, so I'll add this as another negative point to Loomio. I also struggle to keep up with discussions on Loomio not because of their length, but because discussions aren't suitable within Loomio product.

I'm with two other coops (Nubo & Ouvaton) that use Discourse to hold discussions and for voting they use their in-house software.

Discourse is built specifically for conversations and it works perfectly well on desktop and mobile, is in a format that is much easier to follow. In the case of social.coop it could be an option to run Loomio for what it is good at doing (voting) and hold discussions elsewhere (not to say specifically Discourse but really any forum software is still miles ahead of Loomio for this purpose).

@Kévin

That's really interesting. Do you have sense of what the overhead is like (both technical and financial) for maintaining a Discourse community?

I also am very cognizant of the fact that social.coop already has problems with platform fragmentation, and I'm not sure what to do about that.

@Dynamic in terms of moderation I can't really speak on behalf of each of them (since I'm not involved in moderating) but I only have my observations - the software handles Spam for the most part and it tends to be one or two volunteers or a member of the direction who are known to move topics on occasion and respond in an official capacity in threads. Overall considering that they are both technical products and the forums are filled with financially invested cooperative members, the overall need for moderation is low (read : people tend to behave themselves).

In terms of finance, I can't answer that they both appear to self-host (whether this is them directly or that of a participating organisation I can't say for sure) so the cost would be down to the infrastructure they already have in place or that of a separate VPS for the purpose. There isn't anything super obvious in the financials for either that indicate they're paying for the discourse hosted version.

Social.coop's version of this would be whether or not there is the infrastructure available or time to install, or if a decision would be to farm that out to Discourse's hands for 100$ a month.

I do get the fragmentisation of tools, it is always a problem unless you have a self-built solution that does everything you could possibly need, at the same time balancing that with using something that will achieve a goal or fulfill a specific purpose (eg are people not engaging with discussions because the medium to do that is just awful)

@Kévin

Thanks for the information.

I do want to note that self-hosting isn't free either, depending on how much server space the tool requires... though I imagine it's a lot less than somethink like a Mastodon instance. Still, something to think about.

And we need to have technical people with sufficient capacity to make sure the thing is up and running. (It's been noted that we aren't currently paying our TWG people.)

@Kévin

I wrote a whole big thing about Loomio with some options and it just vanished in to thin air, so I'll add this as another negative point to Loomio.

You'll probably find it eventually, in another thread, maybe in another Loomio group (if you're a member of any). This was caused by a bug that was found and fixed almost as soon as it was reported. So while I had the same reaction to it as you when I first noticed it, the speed of the bug triage and fix is worth noting as a positive for Loomio. Many platforms wouldn't respond as quickly, if at all.

I too think that Loomio is unwieldy, and the platform fragmentation that has arisen organically with social.coop confusing. Also, social.coop may have grown too big to be easily manageable, given that only small fraction of the members are actively involved. Perhaps the Fediverse would be stronger and better as a collection of many small instances that are closer in size to the Dunbar number. Though I've never used Discourse, it would be worth trying if the general consensus is that it would better serve the community needs.

I would strongly encourage having discussions at the circle or group level where joint statement or proposals are created and presented for the wider co-op members to sign on to or group up and create their own. I believe this would raise the quality and efficiency of debate and save everyone time.

We are used to free-for-all discussions on modern day social media platforms, but those platforms aren’t designed for democratic consensus making, which I think works best in small groups with statement writing (as you know loomio has a groups feature). I mean, there’s only so many sides of the threads.net debate (although there may be many factors to consider). Was it truly useful and necessary for everyone to share their position when many were saying the same thing? We don’t have to ban co-op wide discussions, but when they get long, I think that should be a signal to group up and create joint statements.

If discussion happens at the circle level and two opposing groups form, they could create joint statements that put forward their main arguments and then create rebuttal statements to responde to the core positions of the opposing group.

I also use and like Discourse, and would be happy to move discussions there and use loomio for voting. But I think 400-post discussions are just too long to be useful for our co-op and mission or anyone’s, for that matter. See my other comment recommending the solution is moving to circle or group discussions and statement writing.

@Matt S - matts

I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think the 400-post discussion in particular could have been usefully split up into about three separate discussions. I had a sinking feeling when I added my proposal to the same thread and in retrospect I wonder if I should have just started a new thread, even though the proposal was on topic.

If we do want co-op wide discussions to remain a core way for us to relate, I think we would be wise to have a more formal or guided process for initiating the discussion.

Perhaps require the use of a template that includes guiding questions to get to the core of the discussion like why it’s important, what’s at stake, and obvious rebuttals.

maybe recommend the discussion starter (or a discussion moderator or committee of moderators) to edit the original post and add a distillation of the main/strongest arguments for and against said proposal.

Again, I prefer a circle/group-based discussion framework (see my other comment), but open discussions can be fruitful with the right process.

For me a key issue is just how many people from social coop are actually on Loomio. Whatever the pros and cons of Loomio or alternatives or thread lengths etc it seems to me a lot of social coop people are not on it in the first place, not great in general but especially not great for a coop democracy instance. Excuse me if I've got this wrong, but I think I saw the numbers for social coop on loomio for the instance were not as high as you would like. I wonder if there is something we can do about this.

@Luke

Thanks for bringing this up. Lack of engagement and voting (whether by choice or because the process is challenging or confusing) definitely presents a challenge for genuinely democratic process.

It's been off my radar for a while, but it's definitely an important consideration.

Hi there. I'm the developer of Loomio.

I'm sorry it's cracking at the 400 or so comment level - I really appreciate social.coop giving Loomio a good thrashing - Unlike discourse we currently are just 1 developer and this group is probably our biggest and most active group.

I've made a bunch of small changes already after joining the group and seeing some of the issues. Particularly around displaying long poll options.

My dream is that Loomio is scalable to many thousands of comments, and I really think that we can improve with a bit of time, feedback and work.

I'm thinking about a couple of approaches.

1. Default to "newest first" view for threads, you could try this out before I make any changes.

2. Modify the thread page so that previously read comments are collapsed behind 'load more', and disable the autoload function in these cases (so it is click to load more). Show only new comments and their parents. This should mean that large threads remain quite tidy if you're an active user. Auto-scolling on load, and auto-loading can exhibit terrible feedback loops and poor performance - particularly on mobile... they work well for some cases, but clearly not these ones.

3. Show a floating nav bar, which allows you to jump to the end, start, unread and latest comments. This would help mobile users navigate more easily.

Thoughts?

@Robert Guthrie

Thank you for chiming in. I think the second option sounds fantastic, with the caveat that I think there really needs to be a way to search through a thread for keywords. Currently, the browser's search function works okay, right up until we start to hit the point of infinite-scroll, and then you can't reliably find anything.

I'm interested to hear that infinite scroll creates problems on mobile, because I only use desktop, and find that infinite scroll is the bane of my existence, nearly everwhere that I encounter it. I'd assumed that the reason it was ubiquitous was because it does nice things for the smartphone experience. I'd love to be able to get away from it.

I'm not sure that I understand the first option you describe. Would this simply invert the order of the thread, or would it break subthread structure as well? There needs to be an intuitive way of understanding the context that a comment is intended for.

On the third option, it isn't clear to me how the experience of a floating nav bar would differ from the current navigation bar on the right.

@Dynamic to understand the first option, try it. You can change it back easily. You'll need to be a group admin though. It's a well used Loomio feature, lots of groups like it.

The first level of comments is reversed, but replies come in normal order. It's great for threads that track 'updates'.

@Robert Guthrie Thanks for creating this great app. I think I'm in favor of #2, although any of them would address the issue. Auto-scrolling does confuse me. I'm 50% mobile 50% desktop.

@Robert Guthrie

Observation: our newer Values thread (https://www.loomio.com/d/taD7sGP9/discussion-values-and-priorities-regarding-threads-net) has only 91 posts, but is showing some of the same functionality problems for me that I saw on the 400-post thread. In particular, it doesn't reliably load to the correct location in the thread when I'm trying to see unread messages.

I don't have perspective on what would be causing this. Recent activity? Nested threading? Two polls? Thought I should share, though.

(BTW, I am not an admin and so have not had a chance to try your suggestion of experimenting with most recent first.)

Thanks for raising this again. It's helpful.

I think it's just a matter of a slight tuning to the loading behaviour that will make it much better.

I've got some time this week, I'll have a go.

@Robert Guthrie

Thank you for your responsive approach to exploring ways to make the platform better <3

@Dynamic thanks for using Loomio - it's really helpful to see these long threads - I can't replicate this kind of usage myself. I consider it a contribution back to the project

Just popping in to say, I'm still working on this. I'm fairly sure I can address most of the issues that the group has identified. I hope to have it released next week.