jducoeur

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A conversation pointer: I've just made a post over in CommYou that some folks here might be interested in. Basically, I'm mulling over the concepts of tagging and context, as they relate to conversations -- it's all still rather vague, and I'm looking for any insights and opinions people may have. Anyone ought to be able to follow that link (although the look and feel may be a bit crappy in old browsers); if you don't have a CommYou account, feel free to comment here...

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From:

cellio

Facebook: thanks for the info. I don't mind my real name being out in the wild, but I do mind it being out in the wild in a service I'm not actually using. I know you're working on the LJ connection, which'll be great.

Context and threading: good point; there's a connection there, but I'm not sure how to articulate it. Will comments have subject lines? We know from mailing lists that conversations meander all over the place with the same subject line, but also that when someone actually does change the subject, that usually signals something important.

Contexts applying to messages sounds right to me.

I seem to have left my killfile thoughts half-baked. The feature I most craved then (and still would like now for mailing lists) is the option to use points. It's not as simple as "always read $subject", "never read $subject unless $clueful-guy posts", etc. There are times when that's true (I read anything from Cariadoc in rec.org.sca and anything from JMS in the B5 group), but most of the time I want weights. $subject_keyword is -2, $interesting_poster is +3, $known_loon is -20, etc. And then I would set a threshold, either a default one or what I have time for today, and let the software sort it out.

This isn't about contexts per se -- but as soon as you provide hooks, some subset of your users will want to use them in expressions. (I'm still frustrated that LJ doesn't give me the ability to write a boolean expression for looking up tagged entries, for instance.) I guess I'm just urging you to think about the use cases for contexts now; it might help you figure out what the design needs to take into account. (You're probably already doing that and this comment was redundant...)

[Comment too long, eh? Ok, to be continued...]

From:

jducoeur

Will comments have subject lines?

Yes, no and maybe. Internally, the schema supports them. (Indeed, main conversation posts are largely the same objects as responses internally.) So far, the UI doesn't expose them, but that may well change. I'm still messing around with that, to see what seems to be useful.

The feature I most craved then (and still would like now for mailing lists) is the option to use points.

Hmm. That's damned interesting, and quite powerful; on the downside, it's so complex that I doubt that most users would go near it, and it's potentially expensive to compute. It's worth chewing on, though -- not just for the mechanism itself but for the *approach* it implies about conversations.

There's a general issue here that I'm still wrestling with: how much is a conversation a clear collective object, and how much is it really just a bunch of individual atoms that should be treated separately. LJ is off at the first extreme (that is, the comments have little existence outside of the main topic); Twitter is off at the other (insofar as there is a "conversation", it is really just a loose convention defined by the participants).

So far, CommYou is sort of squishily in the middle -- which, to be fair, is rather the same as Usenet was. I do (so far) have a concept that messages belong to specific conversations, but I'm not wholly wedded to that, and some of the stories (such as killfiles) imply a different attitude. So we'll see where this winds up going.

but as soon as you provide hooks, some subset of your users will want to use them in expressions. (I'm still frustrated that LJ doesn't give me the ability to write a boolean expression for looking up tagged entries, for instance.)

Oh, absolutely. Indeed, I am explicitly not introducing tagging until there are ways to *use* tags, for exactly this reason -- I find LJ's tags downright irritating precisely because I can't use them for filtering. (And I agree that features without use cases are a bad idea.)

I've been tending to think in somewhat simpler terms -- more binary logic than weightings. But the broad concept is certainly intended to go in...

From:

cellio

[points]
Hmm. That's damned interesting, and quite powerful; on the downside, it's so complex that I doubt that most users would go near it, and it's potentially expensive to compute. It's worth chewing on, though -- not just for the mechanism itself but for the *approach* it implies about conversations.

Yup. The reason I phrased it as "I wanted this there" and not "I want this on CommYou" is that I don't know enough yet to judge the latter. Usenet, CommYou, and mailing lists are all somewhat different. Usenet messages might have also been a little more independent (vis-a-vis the conversation/thread) because you couldn't assume that all the other messages in the thread had made it to the reader at all, let alone in order. That's a consideration that doesn't apply with CommYou; I don't know if it makes a difference.

By the way, I do not recommend that you make a scoring system the primary or only interface. Most Usenet users were happy with the simple killfile. If you go down this path at all (and I don't know if you should), it should be exposed as a refinement for advanced users.

There's a general issue here that I'm still wrestling with: how much is a conversation a clear collective object, and how much is it really just a bunch of individual atoms that should be treated separately.

Yes, that's a fundamental question, and I'm not sure how to determine it or even what all the variables are. Even on LJ you see the occasional desire for a per-user killfile ("I never want to see anything this person posts"), and readers will tune out on some comment threads while continuing with others, but that's pretty coarse. Mostly, if you cut out certain messages in the thread the whole thread will stop making much sense. (Consider posts where someone later deleted/screened some comments but you still see the replies. Weird.)

One more factor that might affect all this: the size of the community. The larger it is the harder it is to read everything and know everyone, and so the less social pressure there is to do so.