Possible alternatives to comment threading

Thanks for opening this @strypey . 'More threads' in place of sub-threads sounds OK to me, provided that we can avoid scrolling endlessly through generations of threads and . .

• We have access to a super-thread mode of organising - which exists in the Gold version (and not the plain Vanilla version) of Loomio, it's called tags. Available only to coordinators.
• We still can search within a thread, as proposed here. Sometimes there's exploratory reflective (insightful!) discussion rather than linear progress to a goal (!), and it's easy for good thoughts/phrases/instances etc to get lost down in the detail after a few weeks have passed.

Rather than nesting, I'd be happy with chronological listing within-thread if there's another way of systematically and obviously forking. In any case it seems that, broadly, many commenters don't deploy (or notice?) the existing sub-threading option (tiny arrow - respond to comment).

So many options and I don't really know where and thing is.

I also observe that direct responses make it much more likely for threads to devolve into increasingly tense back-and-forth debates between two people, rather than group deliberations. Yes, guilty-as-charged. But in my defence, I think there are psychological reasons why nested comments encourage rather than discourage this kind of discursive drag-racing.

In GH Issues, I might @mention someone, or quote them and respond to this quote, but my comment is implicitly directed at the group, or if it’s a public GH repo, any interested member of the web-using public. The person I’m quoting might choose to respond, but it’s obviously just as valid for anyone else to do so. Any other comments that appear between the original comment and my reply, and between my reply and their comment if they reply to my reply, help to visually remind us that we are talking across a group discussion.

When I make a direction response to a comment on a Loomio thread, the original commenter gets a notification, and may feel put on the spot, and obligated to respond. If they do that by replying to my direct response, that implicitly starts a new pseudo-private discussion (like a whispered side conversation in a F2F meeting). When they reply, I get a notification, and if their reply was a little defensive as a result of feeling put on the spot, I may feel put on the spot. Then I reply a little defensively, rinse, repeat.

Without all the non-verbal cues available in a F2F conversation, unless someone else notices and steps in with a facilitative turn, this can quickly escalate from slightly defensive to raging chest-pounding. But because the nested replies appear in a pseudo-private subthread, rather than chronologically in the main thread, other group members may feel unsure about whether its appropriate to step in. Or, the rest of the group can be carrying on with the main discussion, not even aware that two group members have been left behind in an increasingly sceptic pool of infinitely nested comments.

EDIT: a couple of vaguely relevant talks about language use that is unintentionally "jabby" (I learned a lot from these):
* Gina Likins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWmrlft2FI)%27
* Morgan Gangwere: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-dark-side-of-free-software-communities/

I agree a lot with @strypey : if forums or mailing lists were the right tool to support groups making decisions online, we'd have seen a lot more groups using them with more effective results in the twenty last years. I think Loomio should focus on group organizing and decision making rather than debating. Discussions are a mean to reach a decision, threads are a mean to organize a debate that could work with very disciplined debaters...

In the groups I'm part of (10 to 40 diverse in age and computer/smartphone literacy members that meet in real life around a project), this is why and how we use Loomio:
- sharing info/ideas (including with passive members, works well for the 80% of the members, except for those that haven't accepted the invitation)
- keep info/ideas together and try to make them accessible and well organized for future members or reference (works pretty well, except for the current lack of moving posts option to fix an error from the poster who didn't open a new thread or replied in the wrong thread)
- making sure that any member could :
- share info (in reality, very few people will start a discussion)
- react to shared info (our mileage varies on this)
- allow members to express themselves through decisions/polls (works well to engage with up to 60% of group)

I haven't yet seen examples of structured and constructive debate happening in these groups. It usually stops after one reply to a reaction comment, except if it's a member starting to troll around.

I hope that being able to nudge procrastinating invited members in, improving the writing UX, allowing posters and coordinators to move a comment to a new thread and maybe add a "post as a new discussion" button alongside the "post as a comment" button to help posters make the right decision will help these groups to be more efficient, but I don't expect them to start debating in threads outside of physical meetings, and that's OK!

Groups I'm in use it really well. It encourages participation. I wouldn't choose to go back. We now have the fork button so you can move things to a new thread if you wish (very new, announcement coming soon).

Anyway, It's just a view of the same data as before. We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired - we were just waiting for feedback before doing anything.

We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired - we were just waiting for feedback before doing anything.

I'd strongly prefer if group admins got such customization tools. IMO it's deeply undesirable for the overworked Loomio devs to put such design choices on their plates, when those choices can be distributed to admins and their communities.

We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired

That seems like a good way to enable groups to use whichever works for them. But one setting or another has to be the default, and I guess I'm arguing for nested comments to be an option that group coordinators can turn on, rather than the default.

How about putting this on/off switch a level further down, at the thread-owner level?

@strypey has persuaded me of the evils of too much nesting and the virtues of forking. He's right to remind us of @mentioning as a means of weaving within a thread. I take the point of Strypey and @juliencarnot that decision rather than debate is the distinguishing usefulness of Loomio, but IMHO folks are going to use Loomio as a forum too, no stopping us (and the tech-averse folks I collaborate with are not going to use Discourse AND Loomio). Above, I pointed out that tags (absent from free basic Loomio) provide a super-thread level of organising content. With all these in mind I propose four features to enable greater thread literacy and usefulness:

1 From Strypey . . automatically embed a link to the comment being replied-to. Then we could live without sub-threads, and happily use chronological listing of comments.

2 Make the button big, explicit and orange, on a par with the button (which could be a tad smaller). Even without nested threads, we need to be able to reply to a comment. Folks just don't notice the little grey bent-arrow thing half the time - at hurried times I've hit the wrong button myself, and posted a new comment.

3 Add a button to the options for responding to a comment (only thread-owners have power to fork at present). Big and orange also.

4 Enable content searching within threads, and not just across threads as at present. I have a thread on this here on a topic first raised with James @gdpelican back in January - but no Loomio-team response on this. Elsewhere, I'm in one thread that is 55 comments deep and counting: probably needs forking but the sub-topics are intrinsically hard to distinguish. Given that we do debate and explore here, I do believe we need means for finding useful things that have been said in a thread, even if the wise response is then to fork it.

Nesting comments is one of my favourite features in Loomio. I switched back from VocalEyes when Loomio implemented it. In real life experience for me, big decisions always involve discussions about different details. No way am I making 5 threads to discuss different details relating to one issue.
I'm not finding any issue with load times and navigation is way more intuitive for me, seeing a reply right next to the comment it's connecting to, rather than jumping up and down the screen duplicating text with WhatsApp and Telegram's chronological-only approach.
Given it's purely cosmetic, I guess a feature could be implemented that always made threads already chronological-only, just for you.

I do quite like the apps that highlight new/unseen replies a different colour and you mark them read by tapping on them..hmm.

Hi @lukeflegg I do find it hard to come into a balance over this question. I know what you mean about nesting. When Loomio didn't offer nested subthreads I felt it was essential. Now it does, I note that very often folks new comments rather than and create a sub-thread. So lack of discipline or literacy or just hasty commenting (or unclear UI) are everyday facts of life.

I even found myself ing this comment! 😆 But was able to turn it into a instead, when I noticed :)

When a thread gets more than a few comments, Loomio collapses the display, extra clicks are needed to see hidden content . . and we may not know which is the relevant hidden section to expand. So sometimes, switching to Recent/Chronological seems the only way to quickly discover who's saying what. It can be hard to rediscover the original context within the thread, which a current comment is responding to - it may be months old. So improved really is called for - at comment level. Alongside an automatically embedded link to the replied-to comment.

I do value the tools for making explicit the cross-weaving that occurs . . @mentions, block quotes, explicit forking, cross-links to individual comments. Just a shame there are no hashtags. But in any group, only some of those participating will be working at this level of self-conscious thread-weaving. It takes time and attention.

Given all this, my four suggestions above are focused on providing a fuller set of tools for managing the weaving of topics when writing, assuming the flexibility to use Nested/Chronological and Recent/Unread as required when reading.

It's worth mentioning that nested loading experience could be improved so nested views don't need so many clicks - and recently there was a bug so you had to reload multiple times just to see unread content, which was bad. I think this is something you've experienced as normal behaviour.

I agree hashtags would be a useful tool. And I agree we need to improve search, we used to have comment level search but removed it because we couldn't support it properly at the time.

I'm going to make (chronological vs nested) a user preference some time shortly. So it at least remembers what you like to see.

Actually I'm still seeing broken unread behaviour.. On this thread I had to load it twice to see both pieces of unread content. The intention with the loader code it is displays everything that is new, and it's parent context in one view. I'll look into the bug.

@robertguthrie I had an email exchange with @gdpelican early this year, where he explained the position regarding comment-level search. See my comment here. Glad you agree that a deeper search function is called for :)

Here's two ideas for new, simple comment section mechanisms that could foster more constructive disagreement.

https://medium.com/@leosammallahti/a-simple-comment-rating-mechanism-to-make-online-discussion-more-constructive-b5ab2dc7d17b

https://medium.com/@leosammallahti/echo-chamber-silencer-a-simple-mechanism-to-reduce-group-think-in-online-discussions-a5048b953d07?source=user_profile---------2------------------

I hesitate to suggest it, but if the textbox for top-level commenting were simply always at the top of the thread instead of the bottom right after the most recent reply, all the problems with people thinking of their top-level post as a reply to the last comment will evaporate...

I understand that may not be where some people want it, but it seriously does obliterate this issue - and it's exactly what YouTube currently does. If you see a comment you want to reply to, there's a big reply button that's hard to miss; if someone is mistakenly looking to reply to a comment with a top-level post, that person will feel far less certain that the two are connected by the time they scroll up to the comment box.

An intuition argument can also be made that the textboxes will then always be closer to the thing they're replying to - the reply under the relevant comment, and the top-level post right underneath the main content/title.

As far as desire the supression of back-and-forths, collapsing of nested threads should suffice, no? People can have their conversations without necessarily bothering everyone else.

Way back in this thread I suggested that a proper-sized, orange button, at the bottom of the comment, would help avoid people mistakenly responding to the thread rather than the comment. Instead of the current easy-to-overlook inexplicit back-arrow. Still feel this is a simple useful step to take.

Putting the comment box at the bottom was a conscious design choice, intended to encourage users to read the existing discussion before diving in, and potentially pulling the discussion backwards rather than taking it forwards. I still think that's useful.

BTW @lukeflegg you can still discuss multiple related issues in a chronological thread, but it discourages comments that go off on tangents to the point where they become new issues. In my experience Loomio works best for making decisions when threads are treated as short-term, disposable work spaces, not long-term, open-ended conversations (like a web forum thread).

@mikeh8 Yup, you did. I was agreeing with you. That's a good first step; I was just saying that making the right option more prominent is best complimented with making the wrong/overused option less prominent.

@strypey That's an interesting idea! It makes sense in theory, but do you have any data to suggest it works in practice? I have a feeling it turns out to have negligible effect (i.e., users read if they're gonna read, ignore if they're gonna ignore).

Even if so, perhaps you can at least require tapping a "Reply to Thread" button (to go with the Reply to Post button) to reveal the textbox and start typing - so that one method is not given more prominence than the other. Number of the taps is the same (1), but the visual is more informative.

do you have any data to suggest it works in practice

Well ... the plural of anecdote is not data :) But before threaded comments were introduced, I generally found each comment would proceed from the one immediately before it, maybe with some referring back to earlier comments. So there was one discussion per page. Now I notice people (myself included) tend to respond to the first comment they have something to say about, without reading the rest of the thread.

That said, I agree that making it clear in the UI whether a user is replying to the comment or the thread could reduce confusion. But how does that fit with the idea that the context box would be edited over time to be a summary of the thread so far? I guess it does. Not that this seems to happen very often, sadly ...

Actually, it is!
But it doesn't need to be anecdotes, actually - this is digital technology, after all - we can always collect actual, solid, scientifically valid data on any usage patterns.

Anyway, I was not asking about the idea of getting rid of comment threading (which I would personally consider highly regressive and moot), though I think you were responding as if I was. I was asking about the idea that putting the text box at the bottom makes people read the whole thread above it (rather than merely scroll past it), an assumption you implied but didn't support with evidence. Again, it makes sense that it would do that, and it would certainly be nice, but that doesn't mean it works out that way in practice. Lazy people will be lazy :P

Just following up on a couple of things related to this:

@robertguthrie

We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired

Yes, it's definitely desired. Has it been implemented? I just started a new group, and I want to turn threading off, but I can't see an option to do that.

I'm going to make (chronological vs nested) a user
preference some time shortly. So it at least remembers what you like to see.

Has this been implemented? I'd love to be able set chronological as the default for all the Loomio groups I look at when I'm logged in.

BTW I just noticed the quote from @robertguthrie was about setting the default view that users looking at the group will see. That sounds good to have. But what I want is an option to turn threading off entirely for my group. Ideally, I'd like threading to be an opt-in feature, for reasons discussed in previous comments (encouraging side-discussions, off-topic tangents, super-threads etc).

Linking this conversation back to the developments I'm writing about here: https://www.loomio.org/d/yFf7QjMX/thread-management-comment-nesting-direct-replies-forking-conversations/7