Mozilla-Knight's Beyond Comment Threads Challenge

https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/beyond-comment-threads/

by knowtheory • 15 years ago

27 18 15 years ago

knowtheory5• 15 years ago

These challenges are interesting. The space for collaboration between journalism and tech seems to be really hot right now.

I can't help but think that with all the stuff that's been thought of and implemented in commenting systems like slashdot and reddit and hacker news, that we've plateaued out, and it's time to think of systems that don't involve direct mass communication between participants.

Hacker News works alright, but if you look at Slashdot there's just so much content for so little value.

miraj• 15 years ago

but how do we cross-check & cross-verify comments & opinions across various web/media/news outlets? for example if this current challenge info is posted/covered on reddit, boing boing, slashdot, hackernews etc.

it would be really beneficial if we could have a unified commenting system that can aggregate feedbacks from all publishing mediums and social-media channels. that in itself could create a single narrative & storyline for each story/news article on a global scale.

knowtheory5• 15 years ago

Yeah but there are so many hurdles to that sort of structure. And really it's kind of antithetical to the nature of the web which is distributed and decentralized (well, more or less decentralized).

Things like adoption of a unified comment system is really hard to manage, although companies like Disqus are doing some interesting stuff there.

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

I actually think some separation of comments is a good thing. Without it, discussion is going to fall to the lowest common denominator. It'd be like bringing together people at a scientific conference and some folks at bar because they happened to be discussing the same topic. The scientists will have one perspective, and the average Joe will likely have another. To combine them would probably just make the discussion worse for everyone.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

Not really addressing the concerns they seem to be dealing with in the article, but "embedded comment threads" was my favourite thing about Google Wave - you could embed a thread anywhere (like, one wave for each blog post) and see/reply followups directly from your mail client (well, wave client).

That way you weren't making little "data islands" all around the internet (that you're not likely to get back to) and there was more chance that a given idea/topic would be more thoroughly discussed. In theory!

edvinasbartkus• 15 years ago

I am working on a project Comment Reader. It's a tool to follow updates on comments through different sites or singles pages.

In my view the biggest value it would have that you can track comments from sharing portals like reddit,HN and others.

Idea came by other person who don't want to subscribe email updates after leaving comment in some regular site but want to know if there are replies.

I have told about it to several people but they weren't that much excited. As it's almost ready for launch I will make it public.

If you have idea how smartly it can help someone, please let's talk :) http://comreapp.com/

phillipadsmith2• 15 years ago

Okay, let's see it already! :-)

knowtheory5• 15 years ago

I sort of think that the focus on commenting and debate itself is possibly distracting. I think it'd be interesting to see what people think about how users could interact with news more, rather than just interacting with each other.

jerf2• 15 years ago

What exactly is "news", as you are using the word, and how exactly are you proposing that people interact with it? And how exactly is the form of interaction you are seeking already not being done in a world of freely available blogs?

knowtheory5• 15 years ago

Funny you should ask!

I think the focus on news pieces as being long form text documents is fundamentally flawed. The paragraph (or proposition or whatever) is probably a more natural atomic unit, and makes a bunch of the problems currently plaguing how we interact with news content/knowledge go away.

The idea i've been thinking about, is why can't we harken back to the days of text-based adventures (really the distilled essence of user interaction), and make news queryable and navigable by users?

You get to know what your users what to know about a topic, and how they explore your content, and you can get that info w/o all the social overhead and shouting matchings.

riffraff• 15 years ago

as most things, this could be attacked with semantic web technologies, specifically SIOC[1] does this. Alas, 12 years after the RDF standard, the semweb has still not been widely embraced.

[1] http://sioc-project.org/

kaizenfury73• 15 years ago

Here's my entry:

http://threadit.kaizenrails.com/discussions/691

I'm experimenting with redesigning thread layout to focus on context and making it easier to follow and comprehend a complicated thread.

It's not as ambitious as other ideas out there, but I feel this is a improvement over what we have currently.

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

I actually found this more confusing. My immediate thought of the up/down arrows was that they'd up/downvote the comments, but they instead take you to others. I don't really get how they're grouped either, since they don't seem to be replies...

kaizenfury73• 15 years ago

The arrows let you cycle through the replies of the above comment. This way, instead of using indentation to indicate a parent or ancestors, you simply look at the comments above. I find it easier than following indentation or indentation lines to mentally juxtapose a comment with its parent and its ancestors.

kaizenfury73• 15 years ago

Here's an example of a HN comment with 200+ comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530963

Here's the same thread in my layout:

http://threadit.kaizenrails.com/discussions/839

Mozilla-Knight's Beyond Comment Threads Challenge

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