Improving the experience of reading a thread
One of the things that I'm very interested in improving in the near future is the way Loomio deals with pagination, specifically on the discussion page (which displays a series of comments and other events). I have plans around things like the group page and previous proposals page as well, but am going to start with the thread reading experience, as it's pretty much the primary experience in Loomio.
My current misgivings:
- It's hard to navigate around a thread, like going forward or backward a page
- It's hard to know how long a thread is, or how long it will take to read
- It's hard to 'skim' a thread (ie, start at the beginning and get to the end quickly)
- It's hard to know what the 'big' points of a thread are, say, what was the 'turning point' of the discussion (I think of things like comments with lots of likes, or an important proposal starting, or when a block occurred)
- It's hard to know at a glance what kind of conversation is going on in a thread. (So a thread has 100 unread comments, cool. Does that mean people have been engaging with it a ton in the past week, or discussing at a trickle's pace over the course of a year?)
- It's hard to know who the primary participants of the thread are at a glance. We show the author, but the original thread author may be long gone by now.
We have some potential solutions in our heads for these things, but am more interested in hearing your experience at the moment. What sucks about reading Loomio threads? What would make navigating and digesting conversations on Loomio easier for you?
archiving: an important idea with a history of demand, and a Loomio Roadmap card which can be upvoted.
discussion subthreading: a great tool, but using it effectively (i.e., not making a mess of things) requires cultural awareness and support-- especially in the absence of good content rating/evaluation tools. (Please see "sorting comments by 'likes'" below.) So, I think it'd probably be best to trial the use of discussion subthreading as a Loomio group setting option.
filtering comments can be useful. however, I must focus on your mention of:
sorting comments by 'likes': I think it's socially corrosive, especially in the absence of proper content rating metrics, such as agree/disagree or at least upvote/downvote. (Upvote/downvote is overly simplistic but IMO tends to do more good than harm.)
In the absence of content ratings metrics which could truly improve group deliberation and decision-making, I believe that 'likes' operate constantly as a subtle but corrosive social currency. 'Likes' are usually benign IMO, but they incentivize divisive views which would receive negative feedback if negative feedback were enabled.
BTW Markus, the fact that I consider 'likes' corrosive, at times, is exactly why I haven't 'liked' your extremely valuable comment! I wouldn't want anyone to guess or assume that I like the idea of sorting comments by 'likes'. I believe that communication is fundamentally impaired by such uncertainties and guesswork.
visually displayed metrics: could be quite useful, depending on what's measured. For instance, we lose perspective (well, never have it!) when we can't compare the activity in each thread to the number of people who have viewed each item or comment.
Visual indicators can include some rarely used variables such as scale and opacity.
Oh one more: allow to highlight individual comments in some form, so when the discussion faces a turning point, somebody could recap the previous discussion and/or clarify the new direction, highlight this comment, and then all previous comments would be hidden until the user clicks somewhere to display them.
Too long comments or threads make experience of reading a thread demoralising.
Summarise comment, thread, thread history, display somehow summaries, being able to get the big picture without reading every detail. It's basically a human work but maybe some tools can help or incite.
Set limits to participants (nb of comments, nb of char/comment)
You already have the 'Show more' button on long comments :)
I'm really interested in how the app could better facilitate users to update the context box to serve as a thread summary and evolve with the discussion. That was one of the original intentions for it, and why it's editable by everyone like a wiki.
Some rough ideas:
In an old project we were facing similar problems and implemented some of the above, you can see it in action here (German only unfortunately). Looking at it with fresh eyes it seems a bit cluttered now, but maybe you can find some inspiration in it :)
Also, I think the "Read until here" marker is brilliant!