Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs [en]

[fr] J'avoue une préférence marquée pour les conversations linéaires plutôt que hierarchiques (en arbre). Les conversations linéaires génèrent peut-être moins de commentaires, mais elles ont un rapport signal/bruit plus favorable, n'encourageant pas le hors-sujet. Elles sont plus faciles à suivre et me semblent plus adaptées aux blogs.

So, now that Going Solo Lausanne is behind me and I can come back to a slightly more sane pace of life (and blogging here, hopefully), I’m starting to read blogs again, a little. Don’t hold your breath too long though, contrary to popular belief, I’ve never been much of a blog-reader.

Blog commenting

One topic I’ve read about a bit, and which is of particular interest for me, is blog commenting. Aside from the fascinating topic (I’m not kidding) of blog comment ownership, which I touched upon myself more than 18 months ago, there is the age-old debate: threaded vs. non-threaded comments.

On the backdrop of my break-up with coComment (impending, in the process, fresh) and their post about commenter’s rights, I’ve taken a closer look at Disqus. It looks promising, it does some stuff I like, but also stuff I really don’t like, like the dreaded threaded comments.

So, here’s an attempt to try to explain why I think that threaded comments in a blog context are not necessarily a good thing — although popular wisdom would have that they are “better” than normal, flat, conversations.

I did a little research to see if I could find anything solid to back up my claims (if anyone knows of proper research on these issues, let me know), but I didn’t find anything really solid. So, I’ll just have to try to make this logical enough that it can be convincing.

The appeal of threaded conversations

Threaded conversations are as old as the internet itself. Usenet, e-mail discussion list archives. So, they’re nothing new, and have been around a while.

When blogs started including comments — oh yes, there were blogs way before there were comments, and the commenting script I used on this blog was for many years a popular destination — so, when blog started including comments, those comments were not threaded (in the sense that they allowed hierarchy in the comments, or branching off, or a tree-like view).

For many years, all I saw on blogs was linear conversations, as opposed to threaded, tree-like conversations. Most forum software also functions like that.

Then, of course, with some regularity, I’ve heard people asking for plugins to make the conversations on their blogs “threaded”. And I wondered. Why the attraction to hierarchical conversations?

When we have a conversation, be it with a single other person, or around a big table, it flows in one direction: the direction of time. There is before, and there is after. One might say “you said something 10 minutes ago that I’d like to answer” — and we’re quite capable of following this kind of conversation. We do it every day.

If we chat, be it on IRC or on IM, or any other kind of chatroom, we know that there are often multiple intertwined conversations going on at the same time. With a bit of practice, it doesn’t bother us too much. But the important point remains: the conversation is ordered chronologically.

So, be it offline or online, most of the conversations we have are time-ordered.

I think the appeal of threaded hierarchical conversations lies in the fact that they seem more “orderly” than one long stream of posts, ordered not necessarily by the logic of the conversation topic, but by the flow of time in which it takes place. It’s hierarchical. It’s organized. It’s neat, mathematical, logical. Algorithmic. Computer-friendly.

But is it brain-friendly?

Human-friendly conversations

Human beings do not think like computers. Though some human beings who spend lots of time programming or give excessive importance to logico-mathematical thinking might like approaching problems and the rest of life in a binary way, that is simply not how most people function. (Literary backdrop for this paragraph: A Perfect Mess.)

I think people who like threaded conversations like them because they have a higher order of organisation than non-threaded conversations. And better organised should be… better.

You won’t be surprised that I disagree with this. A good conversation online, for me, is one that can be easily followed, caught up with, and participated in. In that respect, a linear suite of comments is much easier to read or catch up with than a huge tree. When it comes to participating, the linear conversation offers only one option: add a comment at the end. In the tree, you first have to decide where in the tree you’re going to post. (Literary backdrop for this paragraph: The Paradox of Choice.)

How the format impacts the conversation

Another way to tackle this is to examine what impact hierarchical and linear comment threads have on the conversations they host.

Hierarchical – Threaded:

  • off-topic comments branch off into separate conversations
  • overall, more comments
  • lots of parallel conversations

Linear:

  • conversation stays reasonably focused
  • less comments
  • limited number of parallel conversations

I personally do not think that “more comments = better”. On a blog post, I like to see the conversation stay reasonably focused on the initial topic. For that reason, I think that linear comments are best on a blog.

More conversation is not always better

Of course, there are always parallel conversations going on. On Twitter, on FriendFeed, in IM windows I’ll never know about. As a blogger, I would like a way to point to these conversations from my post, so that a person reading could then have access easily to all the public conversations going on about what they read. Conversation fragmentation is not something we’re going to get rid of, but we can try to minimize it.

Increasingly, our problem is becoming one of signal-to-noise ratio and chatter. These are subjective notions. My signal is somebody else’s noise, and vice versa. I’m happy that there is chatter and small talk in the world and online (it’s a big part of human interaction and what relationships can be made of), also about what I write. But on my blog, I’d like to keep the chatter somewhat down, even if that means my “number of comments per post” or “conversational index” is not high. I’d rather have less conversation here, and give it a chance to be more interesting and accessible to outsiders, than huge 50+ comment threads that nobody is going to read besides the hardcore die-hard social media types.

More reading and listening

You’ll find some of the links I found on del.icio.us. If you’re into videos, the topic was raised about 6 months ago on Seesmic. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

I’ve also dug up a few quotes I found in some old discussions on MeFi. They’re in my Tumblr, but as Tumblr tumbles along, I’m reproducing them here:

If you’re trying to build community, it is clear that linear, non-threaded discussions are superior. There is a good body of research on this – it’s not new, it’s not a novel idea. For tech support stuff, hierarchical tree structures are better, in general.

Micheal Boyle (mikel)

One of the arguments for adding any feature that is designed to hide noise is that it gives it a permanent home. When Slashdot added moderation and auto-hiding to their threads, they gave the -1 NATALIE PORTMAN’S BOOBS brigade a permanent home on the site.

I checked out digg’s new setup earlier this week and 75% of all the comments were complaining about mod points. I don’t know if that’s an improvement.

Matt Haughey

This place is like a pub.

One does not have threaded conversations in a pub.

five fresh fish

Dear Apple [en]

[fr] Lettre ouverte à Apple. Trois mois et demie depuis la panne de mon ibook et toujours pas de MacBook commandé depuis deux mois, ça commence à suffir.

Dear Apple,

I told you again more than six months ago how much I loved my ibook. Ever since my ibook moved in with me, I’ve become such an enthusiastic Apple user that my dad makes fun of me. I’ve turned my back on over a decade of faithful Windows use and even started recommending you to my friends. Over the last two years, a whole bunch of them have bought ibooks — or are now buying MacBooks.

A bit over a year ago the first cloud interrupted my honeymoon with my ibook. The motherboard died and I spent 6 weeks without it while it got repaired. I was glad I had given in and paid the “Apple Tax” (also known as “AppleCare”), because the motherboard died just about a year after I had bought my shiny new ibook.

Even though this had taken a long time, and there wasn’t any French speech recognition software for OSX, my ibook was pretty, and I still loved it, so I was not shy to let myself be photographed with it to illustrate interviews I gave.

Six months later I had to replace my power cable. But I still loved OSX and my ibook was still pretty, so my dad had many an occasion to continue making fun of me because I was loyal to you. 🙂

This year, though, all hell has broken loose. If I’ve told you the beginning of my story, Apple dear, it’s because I want you to know how enthusiastic a switcher I have been, and that I understand nobody’s perfect and can also forgive that.

In February my beloved ibook started freezing. OK, maybe the hard drive was a bit full. Sometime durin gthe month of March the frightening “failing motherboard” symptoms reappeared, so I gave my favourite Apple retailer my ibook for a transplant. A couple of weeks later, my ibook was back home, but it didn’t take long for things to go really really wrong.

At that point, my darling ibook had worked it’s way through at least 3 motherboards, and the hard drive was going belly-up too. The shop took it back in for repairs, and at the same time I tried to see if I could get an exchange.

Well, things haven’t gone too bad: my ibook was repaired (after you sent the repair shop a defective hard drive, if my memory serves me right), but then there was a problem with the wifi card connection. Around that time it seemed like you were going to accept to replace my broken ibook, even though you would only give me the bottom-line product instead of a customized equivalent to the setup I had.

When you surprised us with the MacBook, the shop agreed that if I ordered one, they would take back the new ibook I would have received and charge me the difference. Seemed like pretty good deal. On May 22nd, I finally ordered my shiny new MacBook through the shop.

Things already seemed to be moving slowly back then, but looking back, the worst was yet to come.

First, one of your representatives finally got in touch to organise the pick-up of my old ibook for the exchange. She insisted that they could only pick up my ibook at my home, during office hours. Excuse me? Apple, I know I’m a teacher (well, I was back then) and that teachers are at home all the time, but I do lead a busy life. Plus, the ibook was still at the shop (had been there for over 6 weeks), so I would have had to go to town during the shop opening hours, pick up my ibook, and then stay at home (?) one day for you to pick it up. Sorry, Apple, but do you really expect your customers to be at home during office hours? Somebody needs to review this exchange process.

Lucky for me, I have a good relationship with the store manager (given the number of hours we spent discussing my ibook problems, it was kind of inevitable). He managed to arrange for the pickup to take place at the shop. Then we lost a week (?) or so because for some reason, nobody came to pick up the ibook once everything had been arranged. Oh well.

Last week, I dropped into the store and was greeted with good news. The replacement MacBook for my ibook had arrived. Neat! But what about my “real” replacement, the customized MacBook we had ordered two months ago? Still nothing.

To this day, the last news I have is “not before next week”. I won’t hold my breath, though. “Not before” isn’t very encouraging.

So you see, Apple, I’ve done my job as an enthusiastic switcher and Apple evangelist amongst my friends, and even in the local press through photographs like this one:

Photoshoot Coopération 6

I’ve been patient through my (many) trials, but this is just starting to be too much. I’ve been without my laptop since April 9th, the day it broke down. Today? July 26th. That’s three months and a half. That’s way too long. Not to mention my dad is really having fun poking at my Apple-love now.

So, dear Apple — I’m aware you’re having trouble delivering customized MacBooks or something, and I know you probably can’t do much in my particular case. But maybe — maybe — you could work a bit on making things a little less painful for faithful AppleCare’d customers?

Thanks for listening. Thanks for caring.

Yours still,

Stephanie

Tag me! [en]

A T-shirt tag idea.

[fr] J'aimerais un site qui permettrait de commander un T-shirt (plus ou moins unique!) sur lequel une série de tags (à  choix) serait imprimée.

Here’s a site I would love (if it already exists, forgive me, and if it doesn’t, all you developpers get to work, please). It would allow me to print a set of tags on a T-shirt and buy the T-shirt. Easy and silly, huh?

Better: it would allow me to directly import my Flickr tags and print those. Or my blog tags. Or my del.icio.us tags. Or it would allow my friends to submit tags for me (“Tag me!” — get it?).

Optional: add the url of a chosen tagspace (Technorati, Flickr public, Flickr user, personal…).

A plea to the Lazyweb…