no. idiots try that every day with "web 2.0".

One idea rattling around in my head, what with all the What Is MeCha threads recently, is that often the discussion is not "What is this site about?" but "What is this thread about?"

For example, say some people want to argue about the merits of cillantro, nay, it's very right to exist as a plant species, and others want to trade foccica recipes.

What if there was a more wiki-ish approach? Not in the content of posts, but in the structure of the site? What if you could say "for me, this is two seperate discussions, and I wish to view them as such" and, fiat lux, it was so? What if when enough people did this, the main view of the site changed to reflect this? What if there was an intuitive way to browse through the forks and branches of a conversation, spawning off new avenues of discussion (see? I promise mixed metaphors, I deliver mixed metaphors!).

I think these discussions should be like talking at a party. If something's interesting, people wander over and join in. If two or three people want to digress, they just sort of naturally huddle up and form their own conversation. If two people start yelling about municipal politics and those damn dirty theives at the zoning comission, everyone else just kinds of drifts away.

Also, WEB 2-POINT-OH!!!

though it might be interesting to have new threads appear at the middle of the page and alternatingly rise upward or descend as time passes. and comments could appear completely random unrelated threads, and scroll horizontally leftward, like a reverse 9622. Fora 4.0. i like it!

Well, how about that? What if there was some kind of thread or comment tagging, or some other way to Capture The Zeitgeist, such that comments from related discussions could appear on the side or something?

Another way to parse your examples is by size and number of members, and site traffic. Your flat site examples are a lot smaller than your user-moderated site examples. The user-moderation 'features' found on larger sites often seem to be a way to handle info overload. I think you'd have trouble implementing a '3rd way' that is scalable from a cosy 1k users to an anonymous 1m users.

What if there was an intuitive way to browse through the forks and branches of a conversation

I really don't think that there is any universal, generally intuitive, zero-learning curve way to wade through crap on browse discussion sites. If there is however, anybody who really figures this will be very, very rich.

What if there was some kind of thread or comment tagging, or some other way to Capture The Zeitgeist, such that comments from related discussions could appear on the side or something?

While this appears to be a good idea, I don't think it will work. Who/what will tag, according to what rules/vocabularies?

This is part of a much wider discussion, and there are plenty of ideas out there. A good rule-of-thumb for me here is to review wish-lists for trojan-horse examples of AI, and if they are found, to go back to the drawing board ...

Don't mean to pee on your parade, although I guess I just did ... ;)

What I'm talking about is AI in the sense of Anonymous not Artificial.

Anyway, like I said, brainstorming. It is ok to discuss ridiclously impratical things.

And why does intuitive browsing have to be hard? We've got great big pattern matching order seeking brains here.

Threading. Usenet has had this for years. Why are most web discussion forums (I despise the Latin declension!) so far behind this groovy 80s technology?

Follow LiveJournal and you won't go too far wrong.

And why does intuitive browsing have to be hard? We've got great big pattern matching order seeking brains here.

Yes, I agree. But the patterns that we seek and find significant do not exist 'out there' as universal entities, but are local to where we live in time and space. I might intuitively categorise threads in one way, and you might intuitively categorise them in another way.

In the case of cilantro, for example, how would you split/tag this in such a way as to be useful across threads, and also to all MeCha users? Cooking and taxonomy? Baking and philosophy? Recipes and biology? Depending how you tag, you'd get different groups looking for different threads.

You'd think that as libraries all use the same cataloging formats - e.g. LoC and Dewey Decimal - that once you learn how to use one library, you somehow know how to use them all. However, a book on implementing information technology systems might be filed under 'computer systems' in an engineering library, and under 'management science' in a business school library. To find something in those libraries, you have to get to know how that library sees the world.

How you describe something depends on how you see the world. It also affects where you put it. And where you put it affects how others may or may not find it.

So why couldn't *I* split it how I wanted and *you* split it how you wanted it. See, right now, I would split this thread in to brainstorming and poo-poo'ing.

So why couldn't *I* split it how I wanted and *you* split it how you wanted it.

Sure we could. How we split it will depend on the existing/available categories. As long as we are happy with those.

See, right now, I would split this thread in to brainstorming and poo-poo'ing.

You have a point. Right now I'm poo-pooing; apologies. I think it comes from having sat through a number of RL examples of this sort of discussion.

Okay, in a brain-stormy way, you could possibly do this with on-the-fly scraping of thread contents and running these through some kind latent semantic analysis tool. This might show up some of the different foci/topics/modalities in a thread. (A problem here would be that many individual comments are very short and it would be hard to extract meaningful patterns.) The tool could then present these foci back to the user through some kind of interface. You could then ask the user (a) to track the displayed foci back to the conversations they were abstracted from, and (b) to rate these particular conversations. Once the tool had learned your user-prefs it could look for similar patterns in other threads, and alert the user to their presence.

What is this thread about?

PooChat!

Anything I want to say has either been squashed or better said by Clay Shirky.
A Group is its own enemy.
Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Interesting observations made:
Experimentation and rapid iterations.
The software is not as important as the group dynamic & the software will modify the group dynamic in ways you cannot predict.
The Tragedy of the Commons.

If there's anyone who hasn't read these two articles (And I'm looking especially hard at our group moderators here), they should do. I'm not saying that Shirky has all the answers, but there's plenty of food for thought in there.

If I were to do something different than other collabarative sites, I'd try an "ignore this user for two weeks" button, and also change the "posted by xxx" comment tagline to read "posted by {xxx}; ignored by {y} users"

(My opinion) Categories work on sites where people want information, or where the user base is too large to hold a single running conversation. Categories run the risk of creating ghettos, but they have the advantage of allowing quieter users to form there own subgroups. In situations where categories are needed, I believe the number of categories must be kept to a minimum.

I was going to say that Metafilter needs to start splitting off into categories soon, but actually it already has been done. The blue, green and grey can be seen a separate categories. That Matt has managed to enforce categorisation without alerting people to the fact is a brilliant piece of social software engineering. My hat goes off to him for that one.

I really don't believe tagging has any social use in discussion websites.

Threading tends to fragment conversations.
When the conversation involves lots of people, this is a good thing.
When a conversation involves few people it's not so good.

Also, I like everybody to read what I've said.

*obediently reads the above links, even understands a little of it*

I agree wholeheartedly that tagging is pointless in a discussion forum - being the latest buzz though, everyone has to jump on the bandwagon.

Also, for what it is worth, I think that threaded discussions destroy the community aspect and would certainly never have started participating in MeCha if it had gone that way. There are some advantages in splitting off groups and developing clusters of like-minded users within each thread, but the same things that make this a good idea make it an even worse one.

I did have an idea once where you could have a forum like metafilter and then all the users could filter posts (and maybe comments) using bayesian filtering creating views. A view wouldn't just be GOOD and BAD or SEE and DON'T SEE but totally customizable boxes such as ART, SCIENCE, NEWS, NSFW, whatever the user wanted.

Each user could have their own view and each view would be accessible by other users. This would effectively be like being able to chose your own moderator. So if you liked the way seanyboy had his view set up, you could use his view instead of your own.

Interesting in theory but I think it has big problems. Um, which I won't go into now cos I'm too damn tired.

Dude - That's genius.
You'd need something like a spam bin (spam view?) so people can flag false negatives, but I like it.
I had an idea once that comments would get lighter and smaller the more people flagged them. I think mixing this with the baysian thing would be a mucho interesting experiment.

Dude - That's genius.

You're too kind. Hey, who knows, if Mecha expands massively then maybe it's a feature we'll implement.