But conversations are nested anyway. In real life you rarely have discussions with more than ten people at once. Even when you do, it's frustrating as you have to switch between topics instead of following the "threads" of the conversation. (And inevitably someone doesn't shut up and derails the conversation in a particular way.)
So what do current systems do?
* Go for broke, go full threading (eg. HN, Reddit, Usenet).
* Ignore it (eg. phpBB). Just like real life, everything gets muddied, but you have far more people in the conversation that would be practical in reality.
* Track it but try to hide it (eg. Twitter). Discussions have tree structures, but you can only have a flat view of them. You have to manually sift through replies to find the branching points and then trace it from there.
For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter:
Ours is essentially the twitter model, with a few tweaks. I think a hybrid approach -- flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context -- is best.
A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed.
Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.
The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off
We have the technology, we can do both!
The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets.
The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me.
The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years...
What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".
> The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off
False.
In the early days, browser designers took care to use different link colors for visited/unvisited links (gasp!). Nowdays, in the age of fancy JS gimmicks and contrast-less design, we are overriding this functionality because it apparently looks better (if you don't see the extra information).
Forums with diffent link colors for visited/unvisited posts and threading work pretty well. It's not to hard to implement something like this with JS (unless one wants all posts to be open/visible as default).
You can only show new comments, highlight them, even view them in flat mode. Threaded forum naturally separates subtopics while flat forum is just a big mess. Also old subthreads naturally die so the new stuff is usually in the new nodes. And you can also just view subtrees to follow certain discussion.
In my experience, I've found that a linear forum works great when its strictly moderated. No off-topic posts, sometimes not even something tangentially related. The community also plays a huge role in maintaining the quality.
I find it a very different experience and have no trouble following discussions in linear threads. I find linear gets you more substantial discussions with multiple contributors all aware of one another.
I don't care for nesting much either. While it may be more like real life one-on-one conversations, I find it more difficult to follow an entire thread and very hard to scan through. I can enjoy a segment, but that's one of the problems I see: it segments a conversation greatly. I think things stay more on topic with a flat discussion, and I discover things I would have missed in a threaded one.
I'd love to see some innovation in the forums space, it's been a while. I still don't see it, but I'm hopeful.
