Web Discussions: Flat by Design

Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design. Threaded's not great, but completely flat comments scale really poorly -- I can't imagine scanning a page with ~100 unthreaded comments, but I do that all the time at HN. A lot of the points seem like they could be improved a lot with a little javascript (ie, nuking unproductive threads), but, as the quotation below indicates, those changes probably aren't going to be made here.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html</a> (4 paragraphs from the end, "But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

&#62; Poems about trees are indeed lovely, as Joyce Kilmer promised us, but data of any kind represented as a tree … isn't.<p>If you don't see tree data structures as "lovely", then I have to wonder if you even understand them. Putting data into trees can make difficult problems easier to solve in an elegant way: searches, file systems, space partitioning, and so on.<p>&#62; Rigid hierarchy is generally not how the human mind works...<p>That's why we keep creating ontologies to explain the world? Ask any 10-year-old, and they'll tell you that tigers are cats, which are mammals, which are animals, etc.

By the way, if you have trouble finding which comments are new, I highly recommend the HNCommentTracker[0] extension for Chrome. It will tell you which discussions have new comments on the front page, and will highlight new comments on the discussion pages. I couldn't imagine using Hacker News without it! (By the way, I did <i>not</i> create it. I can't give you support for it!)<p>[0] <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hncommenttracker/imeeonmdbakdmilnnccaddiplgjjhbog" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hncommenttracker/i...</a>

Jeff seems to have had a rather different experience with threaded commenting systems than I have.<p><pre><code> there's always this looming existential crisis of where the heck am I? </code></pre> Threaded comments aren't some expansive, complex network I have to navigate like a city. I don't find my way to some place, then find my way back. Most of my time in comment systems is spend reading linearly, where the only thing that matters is what I'm reading now. "Where am I?" only matters if you care to answer it relative to the wider context, which I find unnecessary.<p><pre><code> You're talking to everyone </code></pre> Of course! You're commenting on a public web site! Threaded comments aren't for any semblance of privacy, they're an organizational mechanism. That organization is a key enabler for in-depth discussions- discussing a complex subject in any depth becomes tricky in a flat environment- it's hard to keep up with what topics are even being discussed, and who's quoting whom, for any serious discussion in a flat comment system- <i>much</i> harder than keeping track of stuff in a threaded comment system.<p>However, threaded comment systems do have their faults, as Jeff points out: keeping abreast of all discussion as it evolves is difficult, and lack of a nesting level cap can make things look awkward (however, I don't see a whole lot of discussions progress to the point that the "far right" problem actually becomes a <i>problem</i>).<p>Jeff's idea of capping comments at a single reply level is a sensible compromise; it allows a rudimentary sense of organization without introducing most of the problems Jeff criticizes.

Am I the only one who thinks twitter is terrible for conversations? "@somebody @somebody shortened url ..." That does not stand alone. And every flat comment system now includes people using @previous-poster to compensate for a lack of threading, but without the proper context.

Ugh.<p>I don't know where this hate of threaded forums comes from, but these arguments are obviously based on something emotional rather than rational. If you don't know where the heck you are in a threaded forum, where sub-threads often have changed subjects and you can quickly navigate up and down in that subthread(!), how would you know where you are in a flat discussion where people just quote some bits and just pretend they are in a subthread (they are discussing a sub-topic, the context for the post you're reading is spread over 2-3 other posts somewhere on the past ~10 pages on typical boards)?<p>New replies can easily be found through a special display of new (unread or recent) posts, in our forum we just display the subject in bold or green (if it is a reply to your post), it works fine.<p>One of the best implementation of threaded discussions is slashdot, where you can find the interesting stuff quickly even when there are more than 1000 posts. Please show me a comparable flat forum.<p>It's terrible that the crappy flat forums (you know, that widespread PHP-written stuff that is regularly exploited) broke threaded discussions for so many people, because they decided to go "guestbook style" (that's what it is - a guestbook, not a discussion, despite the lame attempts of some people to quote each other so they could pretend to stick to a topic) and never look back. I can only conclude that flat forums are preferred by people who don't really like discussions, they like Q&#38;A (like SO) or guestbooks, or perhaps a maximum of ~10 replies on any subject. That works fine as a flat list. For the rest of us, threaded forums have worked fine since the BBS and Usenet times.

I'd just like to note that vBulletin, used on on many of the largest web forums on the internet, historically, and presently, has for some time supported a dual flat and threaded view. Most sites will default to the flat, but there is a setting to set it per user to threaded. That's why every post has their own reply link/button - to maintain the threading.

If conversations aren't nested, how are you supposed to know what the replies are referencing? There's no effective way to talk to each other and have a real discussion.<p>All of the 'problems' of nested comments are trivial in comparison to that. There are certainly good use cases for flat comments, and I think Stack Overflow is a good example, but there is a reason why all of the biggest discussion sites use nested comments. There might be more sites with flat comments overall, but that's only because they're much easier to implement.

There are problems with the threaded model, but they're not the same problems that Jeff is saying that there are. The real problems are:<p>1. When ranking threaded comments, often times a low-ranked comment attached to a high-ranked comment will be read before a more highly ranked top-posted comment.<p>2. Two diverging branches of the tree can result in the same discussion occurring at two different points in the thread.<p>3. It's very easy for niche discussions to become the focal point of the conversation, which, while good for discussion, detracts from the subject matter.<p>I don't think any threaded discussion system has solved all of these - Slashdot has its threshold filters, reddit compresses large threads with a similar threshold, HN is more simple but I find the text dimming effect to be valuable. Facebook doesn't really need to be concerned with these things as much, because the discussions are usually more personal and shorter. Stack Exchange is obviously an outlier here, but I feel that if its mods weren't so jackbooted it would have devolved into a similar discussion system long ago.<p>I think the biggest problem with our current discussion systems is that they are inefficient. Sometimes experts will avoid a conversation because they can't quickly and easily reply on all points. Multiple conversations can happen on the same topic (or in the case of the news sites mentioned, across different posts entirely). People get karma for being snarky but that's different than the karma given for being wise, being analytical, or doing the legwork (finding references, etc) so that others don't have to.<p>If you then consider the extreme - a contextual tag-based karma system with threads combined based on their subject matter, you quickly realize that no one will do anything with that because it's too complex.<p>What we need is curated discussion - not the Steve Jobs kind, but rather the kind you get when you go to a dinner party and the host introduces you to someone that you really wish you had met years ago. Unfortunately, that kind of discussion can only happen currently in more intimate settings, or, in the case of a site like reddit, if we have limited AIs that can actually determine the context and sentiment of a discussion, and alter the structure of the thread tree based on that.<p>Unfortunately, you're never going to get something like that in an ad-driven Internet.

One piece of evidence that flat discussions don't work well at all: on general news sites which have numbered flat comments, I often see comments that start with 'reply to number 4...'. Users are actively trying to make up for the lack of threads. Of course, such discussions quickly become unreadable.<p>The article points out some valid criticisms of threaded discussions (like excessive indentation), while ignoring the giant mess that flat discussions tend to become. The funny thing is that it's a false dichotomy. Even the article mentions the possibility of having just one level of reply, and yet in the last sentence it just reverts to 'Always favor simple, flat discussions instead.'

I remember what it used to be like on random forums across the internet, and it wasn't pretty. The fact that discussions on reddit can still be easy enough to follow in spite of the tens of millions of visitors, and thousands of comments speaks more for how good the system actually is. Living before threaded comments like HN and reddit was like living in the stone age. Every system has it's flaws of course, as mentioned in the article.

You know the model I wish web discussion would follow? Interleaved email replies. Text only, interleaved email replies is the ideal format for multi-person discussion and it's been around forever. Too bad everyone is trying to figure out a way to fix email, instead of learning how to use it properly and taking those lessons into almost every other ,odel for discussion.

I very often will find a post on HN where the conversation forked in numerous unrelated directions: one thread taking about the politics, one talking about the economics, one talking about the font used on the website, and another angry that the post got enough upvotes to be on the front page in the first place.<p>I consider it of immense value that I can skip most of the content I am not interested, and concentrate on the parts in which I am. Further, I will contend that it would be impossible to even have that many interesting discussions were every participant forced to struggle through all the other parts in a massive flat discussion.<p>Of course, you can then argue "let's have multiple flat discussions", at which point you start to see something more like a typical web forum: with categories, forums/topics (I will maintain "topic" going forward; to be clear, by "categories" I mean the section headings on the list of topics you often see), specific threads, and then linear posts within the thread.<p>But, if you think about how that maps to a site like HN, you find that the part with the flat posts isn't analogous to the comments on an article: the are more akin to individual thread trees, each one diverting off to talk about the politics, economics, etc. of the overall topic (the link). Now, the article does seem to realize this, as it explicitly is mentioned that capping the thread depth has value, but doesn't seem to understand that that's the world that most of the systems that he's operating in already have.<p>Take StackOverflow as an example: he says there is one level, but there are actually a bunch, from the site as a whole, to the individual interest areas, to the level of individual subjects (which are modelled as a DAG due to being structured with tags, but are of course used in the field as the next level in the tree, as that's how humans can conceptualize it) to questions to answers to individual comments on answers (where it stops).<p>That's a lot of levels of depth, and it lets the site help you weed out all of the stuff you care about from the stuff you don't. That depth was important: if you came to the site and you saw all of the questions at the same time, you'd be frustrated; if you came to the site and saw all of the comments, it would be worthless.<p>Now, go back to HN and attempt to remap that kind of depth: we have links, but there really are lots of sub areas that people like to talk about with regards to those links; as I mentioned: politics, morality, design, alternatives... and each of these is really a fairly high-level goal that tends to get rapidly paired down to "what you actually wanted to discuss".<p>It doesn't <i>feel</i> like these levels are occurring if you concentrate on the schema, but if you examine how the site is used they are clearly there; the exact boundaries, though, tend to get blurred depending on how many people are participating, what kind of article it is, etc.: there isn't a hard/fast set of rules like on StackOverflow, but the site serves a wider set of purposes.<p>Of course, when you get down in the trenches, things can get confusing. That's the only place this article has any meat: however, to turn this into a David v. Goliath "Discussions: Flat or Threaded?" kind of topic, claiming "Web Discussions: Flat by Design" misses the essential complexity of this field, throwing out all of the fascinating parts of discussion communities and bordering on linkbait :(.<p>Further, it then ignores the ways in which Hacker News attempts to do this (the reply delay limit that kicks in the deeper you get down in a discussion tree), and doesn't offer any enlightening solutions. That said, this is the same author (Jeff Atwood) who wrote a massive tirade about discussion systems in 2009 called "The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong" without realizing that HN actually supported downvotes, so I'm not certain what I should expect here.<p>(Oh, and the idea that Twitter somehow makes it easy to follow conversations because it attempts to group replies back/forth is kind of ludicrous if you've attempted to dig back through a conversation on the site that involved more than four people after the fact: the mechanism often doesn't work, and it fails to deal with how Twitter is actually insanely NON-linear to the point where there is often a cacophony of discussion going in every direction at once by people who may or may not even be following other people who are involved in the same discussion... how that model--the least linear model in existence today--somehow proves that any linearity at all is valuable is confusing to me ;P.)

The Twitter example was terrible, mainly because it <i>does</i> have a tree structure to the discussions, 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.<p>For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072</a>

I think the better solution is to just hide the "discussion" part from the content by default. If you are in a comment section, you are looking for one of two things - information on the topic (usually restricted to the top 2 levels of a comment thread) or discussion (the deep trees Jeff complains about).<p>Making that discussion flat doesn't make people want to read it, get involved in it, or understand the exchange. Comments / forum threads are trying to serve two distinct purposes.<p>My solution would be to have the comment tree hidden by default.(tangentially, I wonder if a system where comments move to the right relative to their time posted, not just in order, since that is why we are moving comments rightward anyway - that way a comment thread would map the post times out rightward. Since replies could only come to already posted content, the flow still moves right, but the active discussions still show themselves off) If people want to see the discussion on top level comments, it should be a very obvious and very apparent mechanism to reveal a discussion tree, but otherwise, let people browse the top level first (with a ranking system, not just by time) and find discussions they are interested in. That is my biggest problem with all the reddit-esque sites where discussions take up tons of my vertical space by default even if I don't actively seek to engage in them.

There's Polish site wykop.pl, it's a digg (now reddit) analogue. They use capped level system (article -&#62; comment -&#62; reply) with special formatting for &#62; quotes and @nicks so people can refer to each other in the comments, and the discussion doesn't differ much in structure from the one on reddit, from what I noticed. It's rather large site, often there's around 300 comments on one article, but it is easy to read (easier than reddit, at least for me).

I've mentioned this on here before, but the live-updating approach taken by SBNation sites (I'd guess The Verge, too, but I don't have an account there to know for sure) solves a lot of the issues, including the big ones of "where's the new content?" and "I just want to scroll down" (cause now you're using keyboard shortcuts to navigate to the new stuff).<p>Since I haven't seen the live-updating-with-keyboard-control threaded model on other sites, and haven't seen anyone else on HN comment on their model, I'm curious if there just isn't much overlap between HN and SBNation—though since the launch of The Verge, I would've expected more HNers to have seen it.<p>The complaints about stuff getting pinned to the far right are specious; a flat discussion thread is equally prone to getting hijacked over by two people having a fight. And when it happens on a flat discussion thread, it's not sequestered off to the side by itself, it's constantly being reinserted into the main flow where other people are talking too.

Overall I think its amazing that an unstructured discussion involving dozens or even hundreds of people can be possible at all. It's not possible in person.<p>Whatever the format (threaded, non threaded, threaded with limitations) it's going to run into some limitations. They're all imperfect and I think that which one is right depends on the number of participants and velocity of comments. This threaded format seems to work well for 10-50 participants.<p>Stackoverflow is different in that every "topic" has a predefined structure an hierarchy of importance: a question, answers &#38; comments. In a way, it's not tackling the same problem as HN, reddit, forums, disquss, etc.. These are trying to allow discussion regardless of the topic &#38; structure. They are also different in that they place high importance on being accessible to casual future readers.<p>Unstructured "discussions" hundreds or thousands of participants is largely a problem that twitter tackled. That's why celebrities and high profile people like it.

"How do you know if there are new replies? Where do you find them?"<p>This is solvable in a very obvious way. Just visually highlight the new comments since your last visit. E.g. like this: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/MXjNZ.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/MXjNZ.png</a> (new comments are yellow).

"precious few threaded discussion models survive on the web."<p>Citation needed. Seriously, you can't just casually throw out a phrase like that and not expect to back it up. HN seems to be going fine. Reddit seems to be going fine. Facebook has threads now I've noticed and it hasn't exploded in a ball of threading-related fire. I can't think of a website that has died because it uses threads, nor can I think of a website that is overly popular because it doesn't use threads.<p>Anyway. let's talk about his arguments a little:<p>1) It's a tree. His argument seems to be it's unnatural and confusing to read. This is sometimes true. What's even more confusing though, is when people wish to reply to one particular post, but since it's flat it all gets smushed together into some kind of massive confusing shouting match.<p>2) Where did that reply go?<p>- "How do you know if there are new replies?" Yep, that sucks, no question there.<p>- "reply at the wrong level" I'd argue that occasionally getting your reply wrong is better than <i>constantly</i> replying into a shouting match and never being heard.<p>- "responses buried somewhere in the middle" that kind of thing is lame totally, but it can be "fixed" (to a point obviously, imo, ymmv etc) with a upvote system<p>3) It pushes discussion off your screen. Aka "indentation is ugly". That is certainly true, but it can be mitigated (at least in terms of wasted vertical screen space) with expand / collapse buttons. In terms of horizontal space, I think that's an UI issue waiting for someone to solve it (I don't think it's a fundamental failure).<p>4) You're talking to everyone. Not sure what he's really talking about here, I don't think anyone thinks a reply to a comment is private-- you reply to an existing comment when you want to comment on the comment, not talk to the person who wrote the comment. Otherwise "polluting the tree with these massive narrow branches" seems to be #3 again.<p>5) I just want to scroll down. Basically, he finds it too hard to navigate in tree-space. The problem with this is that everyone else wants to <i>reply</i> in tree space, so even if your site has flat comments people still going to use @originalCommenter at the top of their comment, or if you're lucky quote the originalCommentor's post. And then originalCommentor will quote back, and so on and so on until, surprise!, you have threaded comments again, except this time it's adhock, ugly and with no collapse button.<p>I'm also confused as to why Jeff includes a couple of paragraphs implying that Stack Exchange is a good commenting system and then says "but remember: Stack Exchange is not a discussion system.". So then why bring it up? It not being a discussion system implies that perhaps the techniques used there may not actually translate into something that <i>is</i> a discussion system.<p>In the end, I understand that there are elements of threaded discussions that are frustrating, of course there are, nothing is perfect. But I would argue that flat discussions are, for certain types of conversations (specifically those had on HN and Reddit), far more detrimental. I'd go so far as to say that Reddit would not be even <i>remotely</i> as popular if it had a flat discussion system.

Flat discussions can be implemented without much extra thought, just the comments below eachother and you're done, and it'll work as well as the next flat comment system.<p>Threaded discussions require a bit more thought. If you just make a basic "reply-to" tree style discussion, you get something unwieldy quick. It <i>can</i> work, if you happen to catch the right community, but it'll be fragile.<p>So you need clever things like voting, sorting and collapsing/pruning.<p>Now for some reason, the article's first example was HN, which gets almost all of these things quite wrong. The voting/sorting algorithm makes threads stagnant and rigid (top voted comment will stay on top, even if it's off-topic) and there is <i>no</i> collapsing/pruning going on whatsoever.<p>His other example is his own site that he says is not a discussion platform.<p>And then there's Reddit, which he passingly mentions. I know HN doesn't like Reddit much, and whatever you may dislike the community but there is one thing: Not only is it one of the <i>largest</i> discussion sites on the web, it is one of the very few sites that get threaded discussion really <i>right</i>. Comments are collapsible and do so automatically at smart places, but the interface to expand/collapse them yourself is responsive enough to be pleasant to navigate. The sorting algo almost always gets it right, and (especially for top-level comments) I hardly see an interesting comment buried to obscurity by a most top-voted one (something that happens on HN threads all the time).<p>Well. I didn't really intend for this post to come off as so much critique on HN's discussion system. But if you're talking about flat vs threaded discussions, then HN just isn't a very important example. Also not for "why threaded doesn't work" (not with all the other low-hanging fruit).<p>So yeah, if you just want quick comments/discussion, go flat. But threaded can be done right. Especially if you want to stimulate "discussion" vs "comments". But it's not set-and-forget, you need to tweak it for the community, and the style of discussion. Flat is easier. Or maybe I should say it's easier to do threaded wrong :)

I have <i>never</i> liked the threaded model, largely for the reasons pointed out in the link. Threaded discussion is nice when you first read something, but becomes a total pain in the ass instantly afterwards if you want to participate in the discussion and/or actively follow it (oh hey, there were 85 comments in the last refresh. Now there's 89. Time to go comment hunting, since they could be <i>literally anywhere!</i>). One of the most annoying cases I've seen is Techdirt - it offers both flat and threaded view, but everyone seems to assume that everyone is using the threaded view and doesn't properly quote the posts they are replying to, which essentially makes the flat view completely useless for trying to follow the discussion. And in threaded view, you can end up with ridiculously thin posts where they're practically unreadable. <i>Oh dear.</i><p>This is why a strong quote system is <i>absolutely essential</i> for a great flat discussion model. I personally consider 4chan (powered with an userscript like 4chan X or with the inline extension introduced a while back) to be a fantastic example of this. With simple quote links, backlinks to replies, hover previews and inline quote expansion, you can follow discussion within a thread incredibly easily and even do basically on-demand threading! Allow me to demonstrate it with this image: <a href="http://i.imgbox.com/adss6lfu.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgbox.com/adss6lfu.png</a> (functionality and style in this case provided by 4chan X[1] and OneeChan[2] with a slightly customized Photon theme)<p>[1] <a href="http://mayhemydg.github.com/4chan-x/" rel="nofollow">http://mayhemydg.github.com/4chan-x/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://seaweedchan.github.com/OneeChan/" rel="nofollow">http://seaweedchan.github.com/OneeChan/</a><p>Also, in regards to HN, a while back I thought about writing a userscript to turn the comment view to flat (with some sort of auto-quote links), but turns out it's not really possible because there's no way to get the accurate post times for comments due to the "X minutes/hours/days ago" - though this could be easily solved if the relative timestamp was wrapped in a &#60;time&#62; element (or heck, even a &#60;span&#62; with the accurate timestamp in a title attribute or something, <i>anything</i>).

The only time I've ever seen flat comments work is when there is essentially no discussion (stack overflow) or where there is an obvious mechanism to indicate (and link too, ideally) the comment you're replying to.<p>Threaded comments allow for more in-depth discussion, while making it obvious where the current thread finishes, so that skimming through is possible.<p>Adding thread collapsing, or have threads auto-collapse at a certain point with a separate page for that thread solves the "super long tree" issue, since the really long comment threads are hidden away if you don't want them, but still there if you want to read them.

Having participated in in-depth discussion on both threaded and flat systems, I can't stress enough how much more comfortable I find threaded fora. It allows multiple digressions without them getting in the way of each other, which can be problematic in some narrow contexts where you need to keep everyone on the same page, but is such a tremendous win when you're exploring ideas where you need to collectively pin down all sorts of pieces of the problem.

As the article itself points out (though in a specific rather than general mode), what you are trying to accomplish and facilitate matters a great deal. When I approach a place on the Internet in which a discussion can take place, my primary concern is that I be able to participate in many different threads of discussion at once. How could a flat structure accomodate this?<p>I can get by in IRC just fine, talking to 20 people about as many different topics all at once, and keep it straight (I am a very engaged conversationalist, I consider discussion one of the sublime joys in life), which is fine so long as I restrict it to private message boxes. Any time I carry on a conversation with 3 or more people simultaenously on different topics in a main channel, most people have a breakdown and can't cope.<p>If you make your discussion format flat, I will not alter my habit. I will break your discussion format. I will write 10 replies in a row, directed to different recipients at different points in a discussion on different subjects. And you'll see them all as one big block (or maybe 10 blocks nested to the same level).<p>I spend a lot of time in Reddit comment threads. The only hierarchy I have EVER expanded was comments downvoted into collapse. Not once have I ever collapsed a part of the tree. Why would I? I can, exactly as the author said they wanted to, just scroll down. There's even a straight line for your eye to follow as you scroll down so you don't get lost in the indent!

I agree that I don't like trees, but in HN just go to your user in the upper-right, and click on comments. Problem solved! Still a tree, but no more clutter.<p>Looking at flat comments for an involved discussion is sometimes confusing because you have to scroll around even more to see who is replying to what.<p>Maybe PG would provide an option in user config to view comments in a list rather than a tree if we asked.

I've always found unthreaded/single threaded conversations to be better when you want the discussion to remain civil and focused. For example, on MetaFilter or Edward Tufte's board.<p>I wish/hope someone puts some effort into studying the difference one day though because it might just be confirmation bias on my part.

Incidentally, here's an alternative UI for HN that lets each comment stand on its own: <a href="http://hackerstream.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackerstream.com</a>. It's a hobby project I built with a friend.

I was wondering today if someone could create a great way of reading threaded discussions, a little like how Flipboard provide a different way of viewing paged content?

Please reply here

Amazingly ironic that he uses StackOverflow's (very basic, lame and restrictive and, yes, I have several Ks rep there) commenting system in a blog post title "Web discussions" when, years after years, they kept repeating:<p>"StackOverflow is not a place to get interesting discussions because StackOverfow is not a place to get discussions at all"<p>It's not very honest to use SO as an example of a good way to do "discussions" correctly.

4chan gets this right.