mmcirvin | Scrolling off the bottom

Scrolling off the bottom

On a blog, comment threads are usually attached to blog posts, which are usually listed in reverse chronological order. As a post scrolls down the front page and eventually disappears off the bottom (or off the reader's LJ friends list or RSS aggregator), people become much less likely to keep commenting (even if the thread doesn't have a built-in expiration time). That is an automatic damping force that tends to keep threads from spinning on forever.

In a Web discussion forum using phpBB or something analogous, and on Usenet, the thread structure is more self-organizing; the currency of threads is determined by their activity. That may make it more likely that the posters will organize spontaneously into a real community, but also means that there is no natural damper for endless flamewars.

When people think about this difference, they usually seem to decide that the blog structure is a defect, because it makes it hard to see when new activity is going on in an old thread. But I think it's at least partly a feature, because it also discourages certain types of bad activity (e.g. endless flamewars) from going on forever in an old thread.

I think this is part of why political blogs are more popular than political discussion forums ever were: while comment boards on the blogs can get extremely nasty (especially if the blog itself is nasty), they can get all the nastier if threads don't have this built-in property of expiration through burial in the archives. So the blog format may lend itself more readily to conversation on extremely contentious issues without everything spinning completely out of control.

The damping effect is strongest when the blog is frequently updated. How frequent that has to be depends on how popular the blog is. The Comics Curmudgeon mentioned a consequence of this effect in a recent podcast interview: when a popular blogger goes missing for a few weeks, the comment boards can spontaneously switch to discussion-forum-like behavior in the interim. In the Curmudgeon's case, it resulted in a stronger community spontaneously forming among the comment-board regulars. On a different blog, it could just as easily have led to an apocalyptic flamewar (and really dead blogs are famous for being colonized by spammers).

I've been thinking about this lately because the authors of several webcomics I read either have switched, or are thinking of switching, from a blog-like comment board format to a separate Web discussion forum. There seems to be an idea that this is naturally what you do when the commenter community scales up, that a phpBB board is the big-time version of a comment board. But I'm not so sure that's true. The discussion forum is a qualitatively different thing that is more likely to get out of the author's direct control and away from talking about the comic (which will also make the conversation more inside and less accessible to newcomers). It's also more prone to long-running flamewars. My feeling is that a viable discussion forum probably requires a heavier hand from the core people running it than a comment board does, because the invisible moderating force of the blog-like comment thread organization isn't operating. All this does not necessarily make discussion forums bad, but it's worth considering when making the decision.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I hate phpBB. Its thread model encourages the wrong behaviour, its user documentation is so useless that the kludge of forcing designated threads to always appear at the top of the thread view to contain local rules has become standard practice, it enforces its own bizarro brand of almost-html, it doesn't support offline readers, and its terminology has replaced the perfectly good terminology we already had ("forum" for "BBS", "post" for "thread", etc.). Seems like a real step backward in forum technology.

If you have LJ comments forwarded through e-mail, and if that feature is currently working in a timely way, the participants in a thread will naturally keep it up to date. However, if the blogger/journalist posts a new entry on a related topic, people tend to wrap up the old conversation and start anew.

Google now has RSS feeds in gmail... I haven't looked into that feature but maybe integrating blogs and e-mail could change discussion patterns.

LJ also has the unusual property that most people inside the gates are reading it through the equivalent of an aggregator, so posts can actually get pushed down by other people's posts.

I've never seen a thread go on for longer than I could read it, but I wanted to chip in in favor of moderation. You didn't note that we all moderate our own comments section. If a troll makes a comment, they can be deleted by the owner of an LJ. That counts for something.

I don't check the email address that feeds new comments to me that often. Maybe I should change it.

That's true, though usually the amount of moderation that is needed is pretty light. (At least as compared to the Usenet forum I used to moderate, in which every post had to be vetted in advance by a moderator and then relayed to the Usenet stream through occult and ramshackle technical means.)

In blog comments in general, the fact that the blogger is undisputed monarch of the blog also helps a little; if you object to the moderation policy you can get your own damn blog (though some people do complain anyway, particularly when getting into "my comments policy is more enlightened than yours" fights).

In the left political world, flaming seems to be rampant. Well, it used to be. And that's not to speak of crazy people (not an exaggeration-- I mean actual people with mental health problems).

Speaking of which, one of the people who I complained about being left-nasty sortof apologized to me, after an experience as a decisionmaker where she got attacked (before the decision, in anticipation by both sides that she wouldn't decide "their"way). She seemed much more open than she was a few weeks ago that maybe we need to build a culture of dialog, bridge-building and persuasion over shouting.

On the political blogs there's some participants flaming each other, especially on the group blogs, but what I see more of is the sort of venting jeremiad in which the author flames everybody and everything in the country, often in an implicit "present company excepted" sense. If they're called on the more intemperate statements they'll often say they were venting, and argue that venting is a legitimate form of political expression. It's certainly an understandable form in the current national situation. Where I get into trouble is that I too often try to take these things seriously.

(I also think that Hunter S. Thompson did a lot to legitimize hyperbolic venting throughout his career. I've remarked before that the jeremiads often seem to be consciously or unconsciously imitating Thompson's style.)

Whereas on the right, it's more likely that the author will say a bunch of ugly or threatening things about more specific groups of people and then claim to have been joking—the Ann Coulter dodge.

Discussion forums are horrible because there is no true threading; there are "subjects" and then there are replies to the subject.

The weblog's reverse-chronological order is anathema. If i were going to set up my own weblog, i would set up a cookie thing so it can keep track of when your last access was, and display all entries in actual posting order from that time. And, hell, while i'm wishing, i'd set up an NNTP backend. Why mess with success?

Actually, threading is a very bad idea on anything but Usenet, or something else that keeps track of read articles. This is for the simple reason that threading hides new articles. Slashdot has large discussions in threaded format, but did you ever try reading a Slashdot discussion again to find new posts? It's pretty much hopeless.

Threading is fairly good for reading a snapshot of an entire discussion that is over and done. It is not a good format for actually participating in a discussion.

This is a good point. Old comments can be "folded", like the way LJ folds comments when there's too many of them. Again, cookies.

Now here is a subject I feel very strongly about, what with having implemented discussion board software. Sooner or later I will write a long rant on the subject, but for now I'll limit myself to some quick comments.

First and foremost: I really don't think it is a good idea to design a system based on the assumption that people will abuse it. Of course you should take abuse into account, but saying that you need to put a damper on discussion because people might start flame wars is pretty much throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You want to encourage discussion first, and deal with abuse second.

And blogs are horrible for discussion for this reason. Hell, I'm responding to this a few days late, and I doubt anyone but you will actually read it. There will be no discussion between different people about what I said in here. Blogs create interesting topics of discussion by the dozen, only to instantly kill all discussion. This is what I really hate the most about blogs. Bumping topics is of outmost importance in order to keep discussion alive.

phpBB is horrible, too. It emphasizes stupid signatures and avatars and cliques above actual discussion. The default look drowns out the actual text in millions of superflous distractions. It also hides all discussions behind extra mouse clicks, making you unlikely to check out the overall discussion on a board unless you really are the kind of person who obsessively clicks and reads everything.

My current favourite model for discussion comes from the Japanese 2channel. It is, by far, the biggest BBS in the world at the moment, even though almost only Japanese people post. It is gigantic and nearly unfathomably popular, spawning books, magazines, TV series and movies.

And how does it work? It essentially just display simple text replies in simple threads, aggregating the latest posts from the latest threads on a front page for each board. Threads are bumped to the top every time some posts, unless they specify that it shouldn't (this is accomplished by setting your email address to the keyword "sage" - a strange quirk, but immensely popular). It is starkly minimalist - no avatars, no signatures, no fancy formatting, no user accounts, and mostly no names whatsoever - the vast majority of people post anonymously.

Most people seem to think that anonymous posting only breeds trolling and flamewars. And while there is a lot of that on 2channel, it is still the most popular BBS ever. And people still choose to post anonymously all the time. There are some more opinion on anonymous posting here, written by a friend who's also been making 2ch-style board software.

In summary, I think a lot of people are far too afraid of "trolls" and "flamewars" and try to restrict their users to the point where discussion suffers. Discussion freed of restraints is almost always much more interesting and full of life.

I totally agree with your sentiments on abuse.

I forgot to mention that phpBB is also horrible because it's insecure as fuck, both on its own and because it uses PHP, which requires real smarts and work to nail down.

You want to encourage discussion first, and deal with abuse second.

I don't know, I guess years of bumming around on the Internet and seeing the worst it has to offer has given me a sort of Hobbesian cynicism about this... I get the feeling that there are forums in which you want to encourage discussion and forums in which some kind of abuse will probably be the dominant mode of discourse (in which case maybe they shouldn't exist at all).

There's still the fact that the most popular forum on the planet has pretty much no such limitations whatsoever. I've observed a bit of a trend along the lines that if you try and protect people from flamewars, off-topic discussions, and unpopular opinions, they will become much more sensitized to them, and demand more protection. If you leave them on their own, they learn to ignore troublemakers and take care of themselves.

FOr the record, LJ isn't quite as bad. For one,

mmcirvin linked to this post from a more recent one.

Also, largely thanks to email notifications when I respond in other journals, I've continued discussions for a while, though only up to about a week. Even absent notifications, I've checked back on a post where I really really wanted to know where the discussion went, and you can even add watches to any post now. Useful when someone posts they'd like to have a group dinner but don't know where. It's not quite what 2ch's bumping system is though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Scrolling off the bottom

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject