Brad Ideas - Why do most online discussion packages suck so badly? - Comments

web boards

Anon Y. Mouse — Wed, 09 May 2007 12:41:49 -0700

I can remember when most Usenet traffic was carried by UUCP,
so this "instantaneous access" seems relatively recent to me.

But yes, web-based discussion boards do suck in comparison to
Usenet tools like trn or Agent. I have seen one good feature
on this board or another on that one, but never have I seen a
single message board that comes close to having it all. I
consider it good fortune if my browser history can track which
messages I've read, but often this breaks down because the
link changes as posts are moved onto other pages or into
archives. I think there are several factors that contribute
to this deficiency in web message systems.

Perhaps the biggest is the stateless nature of HTML. Consider
some of the features you mention: group subscription, thread
watch or elimination, read/unread status, killfiles. Usenet
readers track all this with meta-information stored locally on
your hard drive. Encoding all that information in a generated
link is out of the question, so a web discussion board has to
have users identify themselves via login and then store all
their related data on a server -- which is where the problems
start.

Of course all the data *can* kept on the back-end, but that
makes coding a web board much more work. In the first place,
all the necessary tracking data has to be created, used, and
stored. The data also has to be transformed and carried
forward as new features are developed, or else users would
become annoyed and angered as their state information was lost
with each new version of the software. As noted,
site-specific message boards may be constrained by commercial
interests. Between those limitations and programmer laziness,
there is little motivation to do all the work necessary to
create the features that have become standard in the Usenet
world.

Another factor is the broader audience towards which the
typical web-based board is aimed. I would say the average
Usenet participant is more technically savvy than the average
web surfer. So I suspect that the average web board user is
less likely to understand and use, much less appreciate, the
more sophisticated discussion management features.

Finally, I think it's very possible that many web board
designers and programmers have never used Usenet, or even
heard of it. Consequently, they have never seen an example of
what's possible and have very low expectations about what
constitutes a complete discussion package.

DailyKos is Scoop

brad — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:32:31 -0700

Or at least that's what it says.

DailyKos does seem to consist of mostly very short comments. This is in contrast with USENET and a number of mailing lists that tended to focus on fewer, longer comments. I am not sure which is better. (I guess I would like to have well thought out comments distilled to their essence.)

I think DailyKos has

Jack — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:15:46 -0700

I think DailyKos has outgrown it's site also. It's getting slightly harder to use the more information that is posted.

dailykos

alex goldman — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:44:06 -0700

I think too many people are trying to re-invent the wheel. The wheel, IMO, is dailykos.com. Now, this is not a live discussion software, but it has many web 2.0 features.

My question is why aren't people imitating it?

Features:

1) Access all of your comments by date
2) View everyone who recommended your comments
3) AJAX-based refresh makes a hot thread feel active as new comments arrive every 60 seconds
4) Open and close any comment (slashdot feature missing: view only recommended comments)
. . . and more

I'm sure you can think of other apps that have done one thing very well, but have had those innovations ignored.

(snark: maybe we need a microsoft, a company that will take everybody else's innovations and put them into a single software package. I used to like a word processor called Nisus Writer and I miss some features on the Leading Edge Word Processor.)

You've hit the nail on the head

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:43:32 -0700

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I have spent about a dozen hours a day at a computer, and probably half
of that somewhere on the internet, for the past 15 years. I have a computer job, have computers at home where
everything is run locally, have access to the latest hardware and software, am technically curious. I am also using
the same software for email and news that I used 15 years ago. Why? As you say, it does things better. I think
the commercial aspect is a big one. The internet wasn't commercial in the past. Today, large parts of it are.
Efficient software and advertising just don't go together.

Probably one of the worst innovations is a web-based interface to newsgroups or, worse, discussion groups which
are entirely web-based, with no usenet backend. True, in the old days, the distributed approach was necessary
due to limited bandwidth etc. The main point isn't that, though, but is the interface. I like to subscribe to
a group, see only unseen messages, set a message, an entire thread or an entire group to seen at a keystroke. I
can do that with a newsreader. I can't do that with a web-based interface. As you say, another advantage is the
same interface to all groups, not the case with all the forums out there.

I also use mail and news readers with a character-cell interface. At home, I have a nice terminal or a nice
terminal emulator. However, at almost any internet cafe in the world, I can fire up a DOS fenster, connect to
my home system, and read mail or news with my familiar software. With the most common commands mapped to single
keystrokes, it's very efficient and I don't need a mouse.

By the way, I also have to enter your last name in lower case only to get accepted. Bug or feature?

Why do most online discussion packages suck so badly?

brad — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:36:13 -0700

Yesterday I attended the online community session of Web2Open, a barcamp-like meeting going on within Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo. (The Expo has a huge number of attendees, it’s doing very well.)

I put forward a number of questions I’ve been considering for later posts, but one I want to make here is this: Where has the innovation been in online discussion software? Why are most message boards and blog comment systems so hard to use?

I know this is true because huge numbers of people are still using USENET, and not just for downloading binaries. USENET hasn’t seen much technical innovation since the 80s. As such, it’s aging, but it shouldn’t be simply aging, it should have been superseded long ago. We’ve gone through a period of tremendous online innovation in the last few decades, unlike any in history. Other old systems, like the Well, continue to exist and even keep paying customers in spite of minimal innovation. This is like gopher beating Firefox, or a CD Walkman being superior in some ways to an iPod. It’s crazy. (The users aren’t crazy, it’s the fact that their choice is right that’s crazy.)