The existence of conversational attractors is why I think any discussion tool needs to be hierarchical—so any new topic can instantly be “quarantined” in its own space.
The LW comment system does this in theory—every new comment can be the root of a new discussion—but apparently in practice some of the same “problem behaviors” (as we say here in the High Energy Children Research Laboratory) still take place.
Moreover, I don’t understand why it still happens. If you see the conversation going off in directions that aren’t interesting (however popular they may be), can’t you just press the little [-] icon to make that subthread disappear? I haven’t encountered this problem here myself, so I don’t know if there might be some reason that this doesn’t work for that purpose.
Just now I tried using that icon—not because I didn’t like the thread, but just to see what happened—and it very nicely collapsed the whole thing into a single line showing the commenter’s name, timestamp, karma points, and how many “children” the comment has. What would be nice, perhaps, is if it showed the first line of content—or even a summary which I could add to remind myself why I closed the branch. That doesn’t seem crucial, however.
The existence of conversational attractors is why I think any discussion tool needs to be hierarchical—so any new topic can instantly be “quarantined” in its own space.
The LW comment system does this in theory—every new comment can be the root of a new discussion—but apparently in practice some of the same “problem behaviors” (as we say here in the High Energy Children Research Laboratory) still take place.
Moreover, I don’t understand why it still happens. If you see the conversation going off in directions that aren’t interesting (however popular they may be), can’t you just press the little [-] icon to make that subthread disappear? I haven’t encountered this problem here myself, so I don’t know if there might be some reason that this doesn’t work for that purpose.
Just now I tried using that icon—not because I didn’t like the thread, but just to see what happened—and it very nicely collapsed the whole thing into a single line showing the commenter’s name, timestamp, karma points, and how many “children” the comment has. What would be nice, perhaps, is if it showed the first line of content—or even a summary which I could add to remind myself why I closed the branch. That doesn’t seem crucial, however.