Discourse and our reaction to it
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And he decided to try it out here, of all places?
If he can make it here, he can make it anywhere.Filed under: New York, New York
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The only thing that will solve that is an intelligent post organization structure that can identify responses to conversations and deliver them to the user on demand before they post their answer.
And.... stack overflow does that. Imagine that.
Stack Overflow isn't discussion, it is the opposite of discussion. Directed Q&A works because we explicitly suppress discussion. Here's a 60 minute presentation (video + audio + slides) I gave that covers this in some detail.Infinite scrolling won't make lazy people read more to figure out if their reply has already been thought out.
As I said in The End of Pagination, next page buttons are a barrier to reading. If you "turn a page", aka "scroll down", this strongly implies you want more to read. So why not pre-load it on scroll?Reading (and Scrolling) is Fundamental. You want to do everything you can to make it effortless to read, with gravity pulling you inexorably down the page, falling into the pit of success. And yeah, it's fine to skim posts, but you keep reading, instead of getting interrupted every 5 minutes to hunt for an arbitrarily tiny 20 x 50 pixel "next page" button.
Threading is a different discussion. The more the status quo is "talk about anything you like, for as long as you like, regardless of the title of the topic", the stronger the case for threading. Still lots of downsides, though.
(Aside: one problem with threading is that any sane threaded model demands active collapse actions for threads you don't want to read. I dislike this "make me click on things I don't like" pattern of UI.)
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As I said in The End of Pagination, next page buttons are a barrier to reading.
You keep saying that, and saying that you said it, but that doesn't make it true.
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next page buttons are a barrier to reading
At the very least please admit that, at least in this company, you are in a tiny minority.
So does this mean that you are a true visionary and that the rest of us simply don't get it? And that if you keep on and keep on repeating this, that eventually we will?
Or... could it mean that the minority (again, in this company) are wrong?
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You keep saying that, and saying that you said it, but that doesn't make it true.
I only say statements which are true. I said page buttons are a barrier to reading.
"Page buttons are a barrier to reading," must be a true statement. QED
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I only say statements which are true.
I prefer to only say statements which are false. Especially among philosophy undergrads.
Filed under: i
discourse
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@error said:
I only say statements which are true.
I prefer to only say statements which are false.Wanna guard some doors?
Filed under: Behind two are goats.
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I have been a several year lurker, this'll be my first post and so I am not representative of the TDWFT community, but I must say, while I found Discourse totally mind boggling at first, it grew on me. By the 100th post, I was using the nav buttons, expanding quotes, and a bunch of other features that I hadn't even imagined before. Interestingly, I found the lack of pagination to be a non-factor; the organisation structure of Discourse (all the nav buttons) made chunking irrelevant. The information I wanted was always easy to find. That said, I have yet to try using formatting and pretty much everything else, but so far, the experience has been quite pleasant.
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Discourse is explicitly designed to encourage, if not actually impose, @codinghorror's vision of "civilized" discourse on the Internet.
We're being held hostage because we, as users, don't read (too many posts to absorb, irrelevant posts, etc...). If only Jeff could find an article about how Users Don't Read, and learn some of the lessons from it.
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You keep saying that, and saying that you said it, but that doesn't make it true.
Massive DOM manipulation and AJAX-happy operations are a barrier to reading.
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Massive DOM manipulation and AJAX-happy operations are a barrier to reading.
Agree that performance can be a barrier to reading, for the record the DOM manipulation and AJAX are a tiny factor in any perf issues that remain. In general the 2 biggest factors are object hydration (turning JSON into Ember bindable objects) and Ember rendering (turning objects into strings that will be displayed on a page)
Those two are easily taking up 90% of the client time which is the majority of perf bottlenecks. You can profile it yourself with Chrome devtools flame charts to get a good picture.
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Feature request: [sarcasm] tags
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Feature request: [sarcasm] tags
Apparently, after a quick google, ⸮ is a thing (amongst others) I should be using.
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Apparently, after a quick google, ⸮ is a thing (amongst others) I should be using.
Ok, heading on over to the Unicode thread...
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Apparently, after a quick google, ⸮ is a thing (amongst others) I should be using.
Unfortunately, at least some commonly used fonts (e.g., Arial) lack a glyph for that character.
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Bugger...
Feature request to replace percontations, interrobangs et alia with pngs perhaps?
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!? sarcasm demarcation !?
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some men just want to watch the world kern
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¡ I have native® keyboard™ input© for these !
¿ Why døn't ‽ ⸘ yøu ?
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Hey - mine too:
AltGr-?-!
‽
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Apparently, after a quick google, ⸮ is a thing (amongst others) I should be using.
Should you be using it for this post?
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Not for the one you're talking about. I had genuinely learnt something.
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Hey - mine too:
AltGr-?-! ‽
is that the keyboard shortcut for showing super-hidden keyboard shortcuts?
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I use UniChars, it's been very nice (use it at work to "macro" our ERMS)
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There are two classes of feedback:
This car needs power windows.
This car needs a truck bed.I am all for a better car. But I'm not so much a fan of the Subaru Brat..
That is not the case here. For an accurate metaphor, let's look at it this way:
This truck needs power windows.
Truck beds on trucks are a barrier to hauling cargo.
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Mobile view is still terrible, with my cancel post feature putting a non scrollable modal over the page, but yes is halfway off on the left so all I see it no and I can't even cancel the post without page navigation.
Clicking the notification area won't hide when you click on the page, and doesn't close when you hit the button on android for close/back.
Some of my newer gripes.
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Using Discourage on mobile is very nearly impossible for me. My phone and tablet just choke on all of the horrible Javascript. Scroll, wait, scroll, wait a long time, scroll...all of this seems to be a huge barrier to reading.
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To summarize the reasons why @codinghorror and @sam are mistaken about infinite scrolling:
- The scrollbar had semantic meanings which it no longer has. Even in composing this reply I went, "hey, am I logged in-- I don't see my username at the top of the screen" so I tried to jump to the top of the page with the scrollbar. Discourse says, NOPE. (Discourse cannot even stay on the post that I navigated to when I grab the block in the middle of the scroll bar and drag it up near the top -- the autoload shoves some data elsewhere.) You guys should probably deliberately disable browser scroll bars with CSS, as little frustrations like that will continue to plague you -- you're reinventing the way people scroll so you'd better CSS your own scroll bar. I mean
- Pagination provided a history stack which Discourse no longer has. You could see that before you posted, you were on page 39 -- you didn't have to remember that number, mind you; the browser remembered it for you, in terms of the back button. It sounds like a lot of people are struggling with a replacement for this history stack. If I hit the "up arrow" to someone's post then I am taken away from the post I was reading, to read the parent. (I might just want a little more context for a quoted passage!) How do I get back to the post I interrupted? Well, I have to read the N replies to that post, single out the one that I had come from, and hit the down arrow again. Tedious when compared to hitting the "back" button, which would work if you just used #anchors. You'll probably need to push stuff on the history stack because people will try to use their back button and it won't work and they will be frustrated, whether you want it or not. Alternatively, go back to the 1990s and open Discourse in a new window without a navigation bar.
- Pagination, roughly, is an array of arrays approach. Discourse prefers something closer to a doubly-linked list. The array-of-arrays gives you a little more flexibility to jump around once you know that you're in one of the sub-arrays; you have for example had to reinvent the ctrl-F shortcut because if you ctrl-F on an ordinary page the boundaries of what the browser will search will change. Clear boundaries mean that at least when something is failing you know how it is failing and why it is failing.
- Infinite scrolling is solving the wrong problem. The arbitrary boundaries are not a huge problem as long as they're much higher than the unengaged attention span -- if someone has read 50 posts then they are engaged with the software and you don't really care whether they use other pages. The right problem is that conversations are a directed acyclic graph, while web pages are linear. Tree-based formats used to be (and in some places still are) popular; these ignore the problem of replying to multiple posts at once and encourage a depth-first order to reading articles, which happens to be disorienting. Discourse inherits the phpBB solution -- chronological order -- which works well for LOLsites without deep discussions but discourages in-depth conversations. BUT Discourse has the right idea in their handling of replies: breadth-first tree traversal. It's actually as simple as a tree view where everything is automatically collapsed to start with.
- The religion metaphor. No, really, I think it's pertinent. @codinghorror said that the "religions should coexist" but then, when somebody suggested "this forum for this community does not need or want infinite scrolling," he characterized that as "my religion exists so that yours may be destroyed" and dismissed it. Notice that this same person had been the one to advocate actual coexistence: viz. a user-configurable preference to paginate or not. Atwood refuses coexistence on the matter (for what appears to be a good reason -- "too much cost") and then blames others for the lack of coexistence (for no reason whatsoever). The religion metaphor identifies the question as being about "what you take for granted about how forum software should be organized." If you want these different approaches to eventually coexist, you need to add the implementation of those approaches to your issue tracker, filed under "wishlist". Anything else is, "we will never coexist and you will have to do it my way." The fact that other religions exist is stating that this approach isn't right for eveyone. Coexistence is the same as optional pagination.
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I gave up on Discourse, and follow this forum through e-mail only. The only time I come to the site is when I want to post/respond to something (and I wouldn't even do that if replying by e-mail worked).
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I've seen people reply by email (or at least, report a bug about incorrect link parsing on submitting posts via email), so it should theoretically work for some interpretation.
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I have had it work very intermittently.
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This is a reply by e-mail (text above quote).
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This is a reply by e-mail (text above quote).
Quoting barely works on the main board. I wouldn't recommend trying to quote via email.
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As you can see, it only works kinda sorta. The entire message that I sent was:
This is a reply by e-mail (text above quote). On 25. julij 2014, 23:09:02, Matches wrote: > I've seen people reply by email (or at least, report a bug about > incorrect link parsing on submitting posts via email), so it should > theoretically work for some interpretation. This is a reply by e-mail (text under quote).
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Discourse cannot even stay on the post that I navigated to when I grab the block in the middle of the scroll bar and drag it up near the top
That's no longer a legal action. You must be mentally challenged to even think you should be able to use the scrollbar for scrolling.
Pagination provided a history stack which Discourse no longer has.
sure it does, dicsourse happily spams your url bar and history with the last post you read for youPagination, roughly, is an array of arrays approach. Discourse prefers something closer to a doubly-linked list.
clearly doubly-linked is better, i mean what part of DOUBLY don't you understand?!The religion metaphor. No, really, I think it's pertinent. @codinghorror said that the "religions should coexist" but then, when somebody suggested "this forum for this community does not need or want infinite scrolling,"
He meant that in the same way as everyone means it when they say real religions should coexist. It should coexist and acknowledge the my religion is clearly the correct one so keep your religion to yourself or we will ostracize you for it.
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He meant that in the same way as everyone means it when they say real religions should coexist. It should coexist and acknowledge the my religion is clearly the correct one so keep your religion to yourself or we will ostracize you for it.
Except he actually used a car analogy. Of course.
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Except he actually used a car analogy. Of course.
Using a car analogy is the Mazda Miata of using analogies. Sure, you can stick a Ford V8 in it and make it really fast, but it's still a Miata.
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Using a car analogy is the Mazda Miata of using analogies.
The Mazda Miata car analogy is the Hyundai Excel of car analogies. It'll get you where you need to go but you have to climb in through the passenger door.
Filed under: Worth necroing for this?!?, It's been a long day, Links courtesy of my open tabs
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I'll give up my Hyundai Pony when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
There was a problem showing this webinar
Irony punctuation - Wikipedia
