Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site’s greatest stories. Cramping my middle finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what’s going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you’re never going to catch up and still give a shit.
Problem with reddit is that everyone thinks they’re a comedian and people just upvote the same repeated jokes over and over. You still have to wade though tons of garbage to find the good stuff, and thats after filtering tons of shit with RES. Reddit was great at one point but it got exhausting.
Never really put my finger on why, but that must be the reason I’ve never been active on any forums, just lurking, but I’ve always been very much active on Reddit and now lemmy. Combine that with the need to register an account to all the different forums and the fact that you can’t catch up to all of them from a single front page.
Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.
Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site’s greatest stories. Cramping my middle finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what’s going on.
This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you’re never going to catch up and still give a shit.
Problem with reddit is that everyone thinks they’re a comedian and people just upvote the same repeated jokes over and over. You still have to wade though tons of garbage to find the good stuff, and thats after filtering tons of shit with RES. Reddit was great at one point but it got exhausting.
If you nested the comments by time and layer instead of votes and layer it would reduce the amount of attention seeking behavior.
First!
-_-
Reduce
You can collapse whole comment trees, though, which cuts down scrolling time.
You can with a decent App…
On old.reddit, it’s the
[-]button and on new reddit it’s done by pressing the vertical lines on the left of the comments. I don’t know about mobile.r/science was great in this regard. They moderated the threads to weed out the exhaustion.
I wonder if something that combines reddit and slashdot could work well. Instead of simply up voting things, you do “+1 funny” or something.
Never really put my finger on why, but that must be the reason I’ve never been active on any forums, just lurking, but I’ve always been very much active on Reddit and now lemmy. Combine that with the need to register an account to all the different forums and the fact that you can’t catch up to all of them from a single front page.
Then you find modetated forum and you can follow anyone, not just a community/subreddit, and over the years…
Great for sharing and storing valuable rare information too.
They both have their place. I’m on linear forums as well as here, and other types convo format social media