re: re:

[dr_tectonic]

Okay, having just been thoroughly confused detangling what was in response to what over yonder on another site, here's the new rule. Pay attention, everybody who might ever develop social software of whatever type:

If you allow comments? Thread them.

Period.

I don't care if it's more work. I don't care if it doesn't play nicely with your infrastructure. When people are saying things, they're usually saying them in response to something else that has been said, and making it easy to see how these things line up with one another is essential to the actual "communication" part of that whole saying stuff thing you're enabling. Otherwise it's all just half a cell-phone conversation in public, which is both useless and annoying.

Comments are threaded. ALWAYS.

I have decreed it! Now make it so!

Comments

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I'm curious what are the "much better mechanisms" you refer to, at least in the online medium. Polls? Feedback forms?

[dpolicar]

If you want people to be able to provide the author with feedback, and you don't want the people providing feedback to interact with one another, the simplest online mechanism for that is email, or some similar 1-to-1 mechanism. It's not a social networking problem, and doesn't need a social networking solution.