I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.
The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.
I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.
Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.
I also think that comment trees are much easier to follow than forum posts. The way Lemmy is right now is pretty great: communities (sub-topics) with threads (posts) which can be sorted but with comment trees that aren’t sorted based on “algo”/votes.
Can you elaborate?
I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.
The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.
I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.
Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.
I also think that comment trees are much easier to follow than forum posts. The way Lemmy is right now is pretty great: communities (sub-topics) with threads (posts) which can be sorted but with comment trees that aren’t sorted based on “algo”/votes.
i’d say lack of long term threads is biggest issue with reddit or twitter-like platforms
even popular threads are supposed to stay at top for only few days at most