Roadmap / brainstorm

[waldyrious]

I'm creating a thread here to allow some exchange of ideas about the general direction of the project and the key features that set this project apart from similar ones.

After the discussion is settled, the conclusions can be compiled into a roadmap document. I will start below with some thoughts which may go a bit beyond the original proposal, but I think are interesting and innovative and worth discussing.

[waldyrious]

I think the idea of tagged discussions (rather than pigeonholing them into pre-selected categories/subforums/whatever) has two main advantages:

1. Since a submission can fall into different categories (in fact multiple flairs has been a recurring feature request to the reddit devs), after it's appropriately tagged it will attract people interested in the content from different angles. That means the ensuing discussion will be less vulnerable to the filter buble (circlejerk) effect. It will also make vote brigading harder/irrelevant. This will result in more exposure to different views, less reinforcement of stereotypes and misconceptions and richer discussions overall. I think we would need very good reasons to implement manually curated communities, especially since that model is more than served by existing online platforms.
2. It is a fundamentally cleaner implementation of discussions around a given topic, where the threads aren't duplicated across various communities with each thread missing the insights of the others. Since the source of the discussion is the same, it makes no sense to have entirely insulated discussions. This makes sense in linear forums, but threaded discussions already allow us to easily ignore conversations that veer in directions we're not interested in, and focus on those we wish to explore further, so it's an unnecessary feature inherited from a different paradigm.

Now, the crazy part: what if we extend the tag system to any node of the thread, rather than the root alone (i.e. if we allow tagging comments in the same way as submissions)? This fundamentally changes the structure of the discussion, where it ceases being a single tree, and allows any branch to become its own tree. Think about it: if you subscribe to the tag "funny", and a submission isn't particularly funny, you'd still like to see a comment (and it's ensuing thread) that makes a funny joke as a response to the submission. So if you go to the '/tag/funny` page, the comment would appear there as if it were a root submission.

So my first suggestion is to deeply embrace the concept of tagging, and even extend it to all types of content on the platform (both submissions and comments).

[waldyrious]

Now, if we are reducing duplication and aligning the platform's model with the nature of the discussions it supports, here's another thought: Have you ever noticed how sometimes discussion threads not only branch off, but also kind of collapse? E.g. when someone replies to two people at the same time (say, a response to two people making the same question, or a connection between seemingly unrelated comments), they can only make their post a child of one of the parents, even if it quotes two or more.

The truth of the matter is that real-world discussions and conversations aren't pure-tree threads: they do split, but they also merge. And as far as I know, nobody ever implemented a discussion platform that allows threads to come together and, in fact, consummate one of the main purposes of a discussion, which is to seek consensus.

Have you ever noticed how large online discussions tend to feel either overwhelming (because they're confined to a single massive linear sequence, in forums where threads aren't supported), or weirdly unfulfilling (because the threads progressively dissipate into less and less relevant replies at the end nodes, apart from the occasional sequences which often become karma trains)? I believe embracing the true nature of a conversation as a graph, not a tree, would be a feature as significant and innovative for this platform as the tagging system described above, in the quest to promote good discussion and enable convergence/consensus (when appropriate).

I've searched online for a platform that implements this concept, or even plans for such a platform, but the closest I managed to find was this discussion in the Ars Technica forums, particularly this post by EgalitarianBovine and this one by Hast (the latter, interestingly enough, goes to suggest "Perhaps it's time to ditch it all [flat & threaded] and go with tagged forums?"). I think this is definitely something worth considering.