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

Seconded!

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

I'd like to be able to 'Like This.'

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

The one downside of threading is that it encourages people to spin off conversations and splinter discussion into a myriad of subthreads. That's appropriate for a discussion board, but if there's an option to take the conversation private (e.g. email), I'm less convinced that threading should be supported, as any remaining comments should be germane to the original subject. Admittedly, this results in the hacks like Twitter of doing @person to indicate who you are responding to.

I guess the question is, are the comments meant to enable communication among the commenters, or to provide feedback on an original piece (a news story or blog post). If the former, then threading. If the latter, maybe not.

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I've yet to find a web forum with an interface as useful as any random Usenet client (say, trn in its ncurses goodness). And really, that's just three features (I'll give a pass on things like killfiles) -- pick a subject you want to read, navigate threads, and don't show messages I already read (unless I ask for them). Most forums do feature 1. Some do feature 2, though often awkwardly. Why the hell is feature 3 so hard that nobody does it?

I hope Google Wave comes out well. It has all three features and may even be able to impose them on sites which don't offer #3.

[kung-fu-monkey.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I miss how *hot* you are when you're bossy. Go put those boots on, mister...

[kev-bot.livejournal.com]

Threaded comments also make people feel better about themselves, if they're all about letting the internet determine their self-worth!

[dpolicar]

Actually, I think you're thinking too small here.

I mean, if you're going to invoke your dom!Beemer Aspect, it might as well be for all the marbles, right?

Screw threading. Comments should be hyperlinked. With the ability to create a target point within the thing you're linking to as part of the link.

Because sometimes you're responding to more than one comment.
And sometimes you're responding to the seventeenth paragraph in a twenty-five paragraph comment.
And sometimes you're not really responding to a comment at all, but you want to refer to it anyway.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I'll get right on that. Is it something I can do with sticky notes?

[detailbear.livejournal.com]

You're just OLD!

Or that's what they tell me when I complain. ;-)