Note that low-effort is one side of this. Low-interruption-of-comment-stream is far more important to me. Threading on LW is not great, and having short, lightweight reactive comments inline with substantive ones can be quite distracting.
It’s about on par with other sites. Conversational threading has never worked well on websites, AFAIK. trn did fairly well on Usenet, there have been some e-mail clients (none currently, AFAIK) that do a fairly good job. LW (and other reddit-like sites) does well for topics with comment trees that are bushy for the first level or two, and narrow below that.
The killer feature that nobody’s been able to replicate is zoom/filter to one unread path down the reply tree, and then to advance to the next branch which contains an unread reply from a followed ancestor. Basically depth-first reading of new comments (with an option to go up to ancestors for context). All web comment systems I know of show breadth-first, including both read and unread comments (or with context loss when switching between all and unread).
I presume nobody’s been able to replicate it because the idea of a conversational tree AS A NAVIGATION TREE is too complicated and techie for the vast majority of modern participants. It might actually work on LW, but it’s different enough that there’s not much reusable stuff out there and it’d be a lot of work.
Note that low-effort is one side of this. Low-interruption-of-comment-stream is far more important to me. Threading on LW is not great, and having short, lightweight reactive comments inline with substantive ones can be quite distracting.
Is this compared to other sites, or do you just think threading in general has some problems?
It’s about on par with other sites. Conversational threading has never worked well on websites, AFAIK. trn did fairly well on Usenet, there have been some e-mail clients (none currently, AFAIK) that do a fairly good job. LW (and other reddit-like sites) does well for topics with comment trees that are bushy for the first level or two, and narrow below that.
The killer feature that nobody’s been able to replicate is zoom/filter to one unread path down the reply tree, and then to advance to the next branch which contains an unread reply from a followed ancestor. Basically depth-first reading of new comments (with an option to go up to ancestors for context). All web comment systems I know of show breadth-first, including both read and unread comments (or with context loss when switching between all and unread).
I presume nobody’s been able to replicate it because the idea of a conversational tree AS A NAVIGATION TREE is too complicated and techie for the vast majority of modern participants. It might actually work on LW, but it’s different enough that there’s not much reusable stuff out there and it’d be a lot of work.
Interesting. Do you have any screenshots or more concrete descriptions of how trn works? Or maybe recommendations for other things?