Tags, Contexts and Conversation

[jducoeur]

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...

Comments

Re: part 1

[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.