It's open source (https://github.com/cq2-co/cq2) and not part of Salesforce, both appealling features. But deeper than that I have no experience of Quip (and precious little of CQ2 beyond the blog post) so can't comment reliably.
Zulip is more of a Slack-like instant chat system with threading as a first class citizen; CQ2 looks like threads only exist in the context of one "root" document vs a channel in zulip where threads can intermingle.
I was scrolling through looking for the Google Wave comment. Sad to see it at the bottom.
Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.
I think the problem it suffered from, besides being a little too "out there" for the average user, was that it required to much careful attention to how you used it. Where to fork the discussions, where to spilt them off into their own wave leaving only a link in their place, etc. It just doesn't work for people for whom the "reply all" button seems a sensible solution....
I had such hope for it though. The technical side seems pretty well solved at this point, it seems like that we need is a crack team of psychologists and UX people to have a go at the problem.
> Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.
This paradigm is alive and well at www.cix.co.uk - which predated Wave by 20yrs. HN looks based on it.
I agree. Its way beyond what today's average user wants.
> ... too much careful attention to how you used it.
Zulip has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, with similar results in utilization.
I like learning and exploring new tools, but if there's one thing I've learned about building them is that most people are only interested in using your tool to the barest minimum to get the result they need. See (without citation) how many software engineers you know don't "understand" Git beyond add / commit / push.
What that means is that if you have a dedicated group of people that is interested in exploring a new tool and understanding it, then great! Those people are going to love the tool and take the time to learn it. But the demands of society / work / time limits means that most of the time, they don't want to spend that time investment. It might be a "waste" of time, it might not solve the right problem, other people also have to invest the time, etc.
That friction is huge. That's why Slack took off at first, and then Discord blew it away in the consumer world. Discord removed those internal silos, had a lot of the same chrome on it that Slack did for IRC, and then they've continued to make certain things very easy to do within their platform (jumping into voice chats, for instance). But, if you see the newest way they've tried to have threads act as forum messages or posts, there's no consensus on how to use them effectively and I haven't seen them used much, as a result.
Anyway, one day we'll get Wave again and hopefully it won't be killed before its time, for those few of us that really loved it.
Tools are created to reduce the amount of time one spends on a task. The greater the ratio between benefit and effort the better a tool is. If a tool requires the "barest minimum of effort" to be moderately useful, it is an amazing tool because that ratio is high. A tool that requires high effort for high benefit isn't.
That being said, people will voluntarily learn new features if it creates tangible benefits for them. But the learning curve can't be too steep—it has to be intuitive on top of what they already know with consistently increasing rewards.
I think this isn't necessarily true for a company environment though. If a tool is useful and is made the "official" solution for some problem, people will be forced to learn how to use it. Example: Jira. It has lot of complex structure and it can take quite a while to understand just a fraction of its features, but a lot of companies use it. (Granted, most people don't use or need all of its features.)
Kialo looks interesting but it looks like it ends up being a binary tree of pros and cons? (Ie debate outcome)
One shortcoming of debates is assuming that there are only two positions. I get that it’s a simplification to help us manage our thoughts but in many complex discussions the answer is usually a combination of both sides.
Such a combination can become a leaf, triggering a new debate refining it further. I can't fathom a more practical way to explore a subject (and, if necessary, make a decision).
The best way IMO is still (somehow) a 4chan-style linear timeline, with heavy UI affordances to make following >-ref’s simple. This application (and HN, and Reddit) go with the “threads on threads on threads” tree, which is awful for when you want to respond to a specific subset of replies to the same parent comment at once.
How could it be improved? I say embrace the DAG nature of the beast and allow for selecting a specific set of parent nodes a comment is in reply to, and, importantly, make that set editable so when some other person comes in and replies to a comment with a topic that has already been discussed, you can link your earlier replay to that new parent without needing a “see my reply here” comment.
They probably aren't a problem, but they might be. I can see there potentially being some graph theory optimisations on the server side you can do if you know you're dealing with a DAG.
You could edit a comment to violate the DAG criterion, but not every edit that references a prior node must result in violation of the DAG. Those edits which would result in a violation should be prohibited.
To be cyclical they’d need to have elements in reply to a post made after they were created. Including back references is a way of adding more parents, not children.
You are referring to providing a sequential post ID past the current latest? That is more of a quirk of their naming convention than a product feature. UUID's, for instance, would not support this, and checks could be made in either case to prevent it.
The underlying conceptual structure is still a tree, but now you have to unfold it into a line, with one reply potentially having nothing to do with the one before it (because they're on very different branches).
No, the underlying structure is a DAG. I've already stated this, and that heavy UI affordances should be made to support ease of interaction with this model.
DAG does seem natural here. Having a LLM add metadata to the nodes can make this even cooler.
For instance, person A presents statement Sa. Person B comments on person A's statement, Sba and person C comments on person A's statement, Sca. The viewers now, especially new parties that are joining the conversation, would be able to see that Sba agrees to most of Sa said, but refutes a fact said by Sa. Sca doesn't agree with anything Sa is saying. Another example would be, nodes getting more weight as more people agree with it and smaller as more people disagree. Obviously, the implementation and implications are boundless.
An idea I’ve been playing around with in my head for some time is to have LLM’s play a role in somehow generating an idealized debate structure of any given topic. For example, given the prompt “Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those!”, many actors (LLM’s, humans, etc) would submit top level replies to a hidden container. Eventually, an LLM would look over all the replies and cluster them into a small number of “essential responses”. The process repeats with each of these responses being new top level nodes. Eventually, a tree/dag/graph/something is created that recursively contains all the things one might have to say about the topic at hand.
Although the discussion structure may be different from Fb/Twitter-like platforms, how does this approach mitigate or go around algorithmic curation issues? It's long been know that posts or comments that are visible 'above the fold' promote certain (popular) ideas while occluding the varied long tail. Discoverability, in a way, still needs to be taken into account.
I think this would basically kill debates about a lot of things (which is a good thing).
Because when you read enough of the common things people debate, like whether dynamically typed languages are a very bad idea, or how we should address global warming, or stuff like that, you quickly realize there's only a few clusters of arguments which can probably be summarized in a few words each. If you know those clusters, it becomes increasingly hard to add anything different to the discussion... but most people have already heard each of the cluster arguments but did not accept it, which is why the topic remains unresolved - despite the fact that, if everyone agreed on the factual nature of each claim, there would be a mathematically optimal answer. I think the problem is not finding the answer, but accepting the arguments - which you can't get people to do in any case where some judgement is needed.
The 4chanx extension (userscript, run it in violentmonkey or equivalent) lets you nest comments in a chain to make following threads easy while maintaining the overall chronological state of the threads. You can also hide a reply, and it will automatically hide the entire chain of replies to that reply.
It seems like an enhancement of some parts of email threads rather than a reinvention: replies are identified by where they're rooted rather than a subject; a "concluded" metadata bit is present to at-a-glance delineate stale threads from completed ones; tree structure is enforced by the platform rather than the users following a plain-text convention re: top-posting and quoting; contribution, reply reading, and tree browsing all happen in a single place without involving transmission asynchrony or email clients (which mailing-list-all-the-things zealots probably do not consider an enhancement, but which history indicates most people prefer).
> In CQ2, there's no mess of unorganised comments — create threads inside threads so that each thread stays on topic and organised.
Wish this could work, but my experience is that getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people.
IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse.
The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people
I've found that as well. I wonder why that is--many times I've been working with someone who is extremely intelligent and methodical as an individual, but structured communication totally breaks down as soon threads enter the picture.
Interestingly, this sometimes even happens verbally (at work, when doing tech support on either side of the phone, at feedback discussions with artists/writers, when talking with friends): some folks really do not like "zeroing in" on specific sub-discussion items, talking them out, then moving on or going back to the bigger picture. Instead, they like to jump around or "chroot" the discussion to whatever the most recent topic of interest is. Anecdotally, it's very much a "two kinds of people" situation, but I don't know what the common factor is (and again, I don't think this is a skill/bad-faith issue; these are smart and reasonable people. They just ... don't think in trees or stacks).
For the verbal phenomenon, I think that is just a symptom of human brain function. Only a small amount of processing is conscious verbalisation, so you will need to talk about new things while your subconscious processes other ones.
As for online, I think the idea of threads is obviously antithetical to the concept of linear discussion. When you organise things as a tree, you present the many branches as though each is a valid target for a new entry. If you want things to be discussed linearly, you must present that discussion linearly. This linear discussion is feasible only in text, as you have time to think something over before verbalising it.
Because nested threads get so deep into the weeds that the eyes start to glaze over.
I liked the old Joel on Software boards. No threads, messages posted sequentially as they are created. If you want to quote, do it manually. I feel like discussion stayed on topic or at least evolved sensibly, there were no deep tangents on pedantic matters that pushed the rest of the messages off the bottom of the page.
Edit: here's a post where Joel talks about the design of his forums.
I think there's a lot of good sense in there, if you are too young to remember, the JoS forums were the "Hacker News" of their time, a place where programmers and other people involved in software businesses had online discussions about a number of interesting things. Those forums were even simpler than HN is -- no threads, no replies to individual posts. You could read comments in linear order, and post your comment after scrolling to the bottom. That's it.
Because, in Slack for example, the post new top-level message box is right there! The most prominent affordable for replying results in it appearing at the top-level.
If the 'Message #whatever' input was hidden behind '+ New post' then there would be a much clearer push into threads. In my experience (and my own doing) threads are more likely to be used if there's other conversation happening too, or another unrelated message has already followed; otherwise if it's quiet people are quite likely to reply at top-level and I don't think anyone can blame them.
(I don't even really have a problem with it personally, as long as someone doesn't then reply in thread ignoring the top-level discussion about it, which does confuse things.)
Although technically tempting, I think most people don't want to have a transcript/recording of person to person calls, especially in a work context. Even if you aim for "just" an AI summary, there has to be a recording, there has to be a transcript somewhere. Do you trust in the promise of deletion?
Self-censorship, preference and knowledge falsification come to mind. People behave differently when there is no expectation of privacy, when they know they're observed. Apart from employment consequences, social alienation and mental health impact, panopticism may negatively affect creativity and innovation, when people behave less impulsive and more agreeable.
In my practical experience, (local) transcription also tends to be anything, but instant, if you don't allocate significant compute to the task. So your summary may not be available for some time after the call ended. You may need to cognitively backtrack quite a bit to confirm plausibility/"correctness" of the AI production.
Management will love it, everyone else will grow to hate it.
For me, at least, private personal talks/calls are the last bastion of interpersonal bonding and social relief in the modern (remote) work environment.
A different angle: cutting private personal talks and interpersonal bonding can help a lot in remote environments.
It might feel paradoxal, but as there's little context on each other's private life in the first place, private talk stays limited and trite (basically close to grocery lane small talk)
For instance imagine having a call for reworking a service and the other side starts asking what you did during the weekend, which happens to be medical follow up for your kids on the spectrum. Either you start explaining all your life, or you just cut it down and deal with the purpose of the meeting.
There's of course a ton of personal preference, some people thrive in grocery lane talks. I just wouldn't expect most people to be so.
Luckily I managed to avoid socially alienated work environments so far. I actually enjoy working even.
I presume the vast majority of humans needs and enjoys social warmth, and a personal connection. You can escalate almost any conversation out of grocery lane talk with one or two questions, so your experience is maybe a bit on you, too. Also don't shun chitchat, there is subtext, belonging and trust building encoded. It's an offer and a compliment.
Apart from basic needs, this also creates an environment more resilient to worker exploitation.
Yes, definitely, though people going the full-remote route tend to get enough of it to not seek more in the work environment. It's the first time I've ever been in a team where half the people are either actively parenting (taking the kids to school etc.) or fully engaged in a different activity circle (side gigs are ok).
Discussions are fun during offline events/retreats, just not during the meetings.
> resilient to worker exploitation.
Thanks, this is an important angle I didn't consider. I wouldn't drop that kind of inquiry in a casual discussion, but it's something that needs its time and place to check on.
If you can't trust your coworkers, it might be a sign that it's time to move on. A healthy workplace relies on a certain level of trust.
We already naturally adjust our behavior depending on whether we're with friends, family, coworkers, or supervisors. If your boss is having an affair with the receptionist, you're not going to bring that up in a team meeting. That's self-censorship at play, without any need for surveillance or written records.
Regarding the mental health impact of workplace surveillance, I've never encountered someone explicitly linking their stress or burnout to call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries. Many complaints I've heard about mental health tend to focus on these issues:
* Excessive workloads from bosses or coworkers with no recognition.
* Transfer to toxic work environments engineered to make you quit a year before retirement.
* Invasive management that gets too involved in your personal life, knowing details you never told them.
* Boss sharing personal (sometimes even health) information with coworkers.
* Being called into work even when on vacation.
* Soul-crushing jobs with high stress, like call centers.
* An imbalanced work-life dynamic, leaving no time for family or personal care.
* Persistent crunch time with no relief.
* Office politics with gossip and backstabbing.
* Workplace mobbing.
* A number of personal issues that I'm not going to list here.
These are some reasons employees face burnout and dissatisfaction at work. While I'm open to hearing more about the potential mental health impact of call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries, it's not something that appears in the complaints I've come across.
That trust should not rely on people having to censure themselves all the time, since that would be harmful for an organization's performance in the long run. And a lot comes down to how that criticism is delivered.
Self-censorship is a natural part of social interactions; it's what allows us to navigate complex relationships and maintain harmony in a workplace. Consider all those intrusive thoughts you’ve had—the ones you chose not to voice because they were inappropriate or would create conflict. Our ability to filter what we say is key to functioning in social settings.
It's like a skill we take for granted. When you see people with certain mental disabilities who can't regulate their words, it quickly makes you realize why self-censorship matters. It's a critical tool for keeping things from descending into chaos.
The question isn't whether self-censorship is necessary, but rather, how much is appropriate. I shared the example of someone who revealed a boss's affair during a team meeting. It was a moment of impulsiveness that led to serious career consequences, to put it mildly.
I understand self-censorship, white lies, and similar social constructs are crucial so that people can get along at all, but sometimes it's important to be able to ruffle some feathers without fear of repercussions, for the benefit of the whole organisation. The Emperor's New Clothes and all that.
That ability goes out the window once all communication is written down verbatim because now people can point fingers and have a grudge with each others for years.
Now, that affair with the receptionist is really HR's problem, and it's just great for one's prospects at the company to inconsiderately flame on the boss' way of doing things (not!). But somehow it should be possible to criticize things without having to join management at the golf club or at pub crawl...
> it's not something that appears in the complaints I've come across.
It reads to me like it is.
Arguably five to six of the issues in your list are exacerbated (if not enabled) by constant surveillance. Call transcripts are one more thing that adds to that feeling of surveillance.
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult
Partly a UX problem. In slack and discord, the default is to send unstructured message to the whole chat - with a big text box and send button at the bottom. The reply-to-break-out-a-thread option is more obscure.
This could be solved by simple UX rearrangement and emphasis. Creating a new thread could have some more friction, for instance, by requiring a title or simply having a button to open the text box.
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people
Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.
This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.
Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.
I like the concept. What I would want to see is a clear path to reaching consensus documents.
Comments-upon-comments makes it hard to get an idea of what the overall consensus is. You pretty much need to read all of it and explore every comment thread to understand what are the generally agreed parts and what are the more controversial takes(?).
You could maybe achieve that with this design if a summary could be set for resolved discussions and shown at a higher level (eg. when hovering over the source text of a thread).
Having the ability to differentiate between a resolved, useful thread and a resolved but ultimately unnecessary thread might also help avoid noise.
Yeah exactly, it would be interesting to see a concept where the center piece is a consensus document where you could hide/show sections that are more or less controversial. Instead of leaving comments you propose changes, sort of wiki style. But to facilitate a higher level of difference of opinion, changes should have some mechanism for validation against consensus. And controversial changes should not be discarded but instead folded away in a linked comment-like.
Then there also needs to be a mechanism for working towards succinctness.
I questioned your genuineness; given the context of the topic and the your orthogonal figurative of speech used to describe the issues with the article.
If the meta-pun was incidental, apologies.
This is why HN discourages puns or insubstantial jokes, as it impedes the benefit of doubt when attempting good faith discussions.
One thing that would be nice to add to the "concluded" status would be a updated version of the highlighted text that started that thread. Probably the old version striked out, and some conclusion appended after it, that way you don't even have to open the thread.
We're now back to email threads again it seems. (This is not the criticism it might seem, I miss the days of long-form proposals discussed through email, it promotes a kind of thinking that Slack etc doesn't).
It's how comments are ranked, and displayed based on "rank"
>couldn't* care less
>my..."troll metric" / rage bait/"le reddit quantification", formalized as a response's comment's conversational entropy divided by parent comment length, this is a fantastic comment.
>
>Pure, distilled, thought provocation.
Short small comments that provoke pages of thoughtful discussion should be ranked higher than dumb punny one-liner quips or distracting detouring near-suspicious detoured astroturfed irrelevant conversations that often derail important topics.
There should be more than one dimensionality to ranking a comment just like slashdot had.
Downvoting a comment to disagree with it is such a ingrained unfortunate consequence that down votes should actually count more than up votes and all ranking of comments should be by "controversial".
Spam is spam, including "le reddit" humor.
A rank of a comment should be at least somewhat indicative of the the substance of the comment in relation to a point being made... Not whether or not an uncontributing lurker thinks a comment is funny or politically agreeable.
There used to be a unspoken rule that you don't downvote without at least mentioning why. We all know why that went away and we can't say why, But we can think of how to prevent it for the next intellectual chamber we would like inhabit to prevent from it echoing so much we can no longer hear the new ideas.
My (personally) most "provoking" of a comment was:
>Whataboutism is whataboutism
The other half is presentation. Collapsible comment trees seem good until I hijack every top reply and all others are minimized or top detached visually to be sequitur.
I fear these near-obvious improvements are features, not bugs.
This seems similar to the good-old-days Usenet with threaded readers that showed only new posts and a culture of interspersing responses (with much scolding of people who top posted).
I'd love to see something like this that works more generally. I suspect it might need a more graph-like structure akin to mind maps.
This feels a lot like Google Docs's commenting system, and seems to have the same issue in that it requires a lot of clicks to open each side thread one at a time. It's hard to "finish" digesting a series of replies at once.
I think I'd prefer Discourse's current linear format, where all new replies are stacked at the bottom (but ideally with a quoted snippet for context). It makes catching up on updates easier, since you just keep scrolling and reading like any other document.
IMO it often isn't super useful to go through each individual comment piecemeal unless you're working on a document together (ie tracking changes and commenting on them). Otherwise, being able to read through several comments at once and THEN replying to the whole of them in a summary can save everyone time.
It's the infinite back and forth on every minor point that makes long form discussion impossible to track. That's the sort of thing that probably IS better dealt with in real time, over Slack or a call, and then summarized briefly back in the main convo. You don't need to have every sentence recorded in the main convo, just something like "Re: point 4, after talking it through with Joe and Jane, we all agreed it would be best to use blah blah".
> This feels a lot like Google Docs's commenting system
This was my first impression as well. The summary tree of replies to a thread seems like a possible improvement over Google Docs but the basic interaction workflow seems the same as Google Docs.
Perhaps there is more innovation to be had by looking at the various specs for webpage annotation systems that have been proposed over the years?
Super cool. I've been thinking about building something like this for years. I have a background in debate, and the inability to "flow" complex discussion in any sort of digital format has always bothered me. I'm excited to try this out.
As someone else who is currently into debate, I'll probably use this for flowing in the near-future. It's interesting that most people view debate as "who can make flashier speeches?" when the skills are more so about tracking and participating in very lengthy discussions.
I never fully grasped just how hard it is to understand and respond to what other people say until I got smoked by people who do it competitively.
As much as they have a bad reputation, I think the image board style of comments is the best for these kinds of discussions.
Each post has a unique ID, and you can insert links to other posts in the text of your post. Then each post is given a set of back-links showing all posts that quote it. In this way, posts form a hyperlinked network that you can traverse relatively easily, while also being displayed in chronological order.
I've found this quite effective for long-form discussion. My only complaint would be that structure is needlessly limited. It would be better if posts simply formed a connected graph of content which you could ask the website to present in arbitrary ways.
This project reminds me a lot of Xanadu in its layout. I don't really think this complex of an interface is necessary. In fact, it might get in the way of productive discussion. I find that the constraints on other mediums (character limits, reply depth, etc.) often aid clarity. The transmission of information between people is fundamentally linear, and so you are pretty much always just going to be composing short essays and exchanging them as the basis of any real discussion. Complicated features seem like they would obstruct this.
Yes, people just need to embrace the directed graph nature of hyperlinks, instead of desperately trying to flatten the graph into a tree or a sequence (chronological or otherwise). We shouldn't be too surprised it's hard to have complex discussions with modern tools, when those tools removed the possibility of such discussions at structural level.
I don't know if it's still the case, but Reddit used to be open source.
Years, ago, back when I worked at EA, I convinced some people to spin up an Reddit instance to use for internal discussions. I figured it would be much better than email chains which are easily lost and don't support threading well. It was fun for a while. I have no idea if it stuck around. I left shortly after.
I think the key part of the UX there is the instant pop-up visibility of the linked comment when you hover over it. Navigating between comments seems like the biggest barrier for most users, where even the extra couple seconds to find out what the person is replying to may be enough to deter someone's interest. And if you accidentally click the wrong place or hit back too many times, it's easy to lose your place.
I refer to all the chan sites and many other sites in the same style. Reddit and HN are not image boards. HN doesn't even have images. They are link/content aggregators.
Ironically, IME the smaller imageboard is the higher average discussion quality ends up. I really enjoy having anonymous discussions on smaller chans, though of course it's still not a very productive endeavor (just like reading reddit or HN).
The downside of this approach is the redundancy of information. If multiple conversations are happening at once, it's hard to follow what people are saying about a particular one. Following a thread's history means there is a huge amount of cognitive load regarding filtering irrelevant comments and ignoring redundant quotes. By this new method, I will only ever be shown a post I don't care about once.
I quite like this for the niche of "medium to slow reply rates" + "larger posts" + "participants who are willing to thoughtfully participate in structure" + "participants interested in discourse" (that is, people who want to record their fully formed thoughts in a thread, or who want to structure persuasive arguments, rather than casual conversation or sniping).
In other words, ideal for dueling essayists, technical RFC documents, or professional/academic debates.
I see there as being 1-2 additional tricky problems to solve for something like this (other than ironing out UX kinks in the implementation, of which there are many--e.g. visual signifiers for overlapping thread sources outside of tree mode; a tree mode that allows users to browse responses without manually expanding things; making "conclude" meaningful):
The first is optional, but I think it would be valuable: in many contexts, discussion and collaborative writing overlap substantially--often more than they don't. It would be interesting to see how the notion of addressing/concluding threads could be tied to changes in the document. E.g. a thread for "I'm onboard with this proposal if we alter the paragraph this is rooted at to contain X because Y" -> "If it gets you onboard, I'm happy to make this change, how about <proposed rephrase>" -> approval/conclusion causes the document to be updated and the thread archived. While that's technically not hard to add, the question is whether bringing in those aspects of mutation/collaborative editing would dilute the utility of the discussion layer, resulting in a shitty Google Docs/shitty Discourse combo, rather than a single-purpose Discourse-but-better application.
The second problem I see isn't optional: thread topology needs to be mutable somehow. In addition to all the valid criticisms of forum/Slack/email-thread discussion formats, any significantly-sized discussion of a complex root document inevitably develops redundancies. You end up with Slack (or whatever) threads cross-linking to other threads ("as I said over here, <content that either may be invalidated with time or which breaks user flow to navigate to another discussion location>"). That leads to significant confusion, and more than a few cases of people making decisions based on stale information as the cross-references get more complicated. Sure, ideally everyone would root discussions at the single most relevant point of their parent content, and new contributors would carefully browse the existing tree to ensure that their contributions were on both the freshest and most germane leaf. But that's never going to happen in practice, so a tool like CQ2 needs some way to rearrange (or embed-with-live-updating, or make rooted at multiple sources rather than one, or something...) discussion trees.
I have no idea what this would look like UX-wise. The 4chan model solves the replies-that-are-relevant-to-multiple-places issue, but doesn't help with re-parenting/consolodation after the fact to make future readers' lives easier, nor does it deal with staleness issues caused by replies linking to intermediate posts on threads which changed consensus later on. Regardless, I think functionality like this (even if it were used infrequently, by curators or administrators) would make the difference between things like CQ2 being useful only for short-to-medium-lifespan discussions with small numbers of participants, and being useful for discussions that stand as long-lived artifacts on their own.
Thanks so much! Loved reading this. Both of the problems are very interesting and it would be fun to go deeper into them. Would love to stay in touch with you. Can you send a hi at anandbaburajan@gmail.com?
The most important aspect of having effective discussions is reading what other people say, and people are more likely to have the patience to do that when they're on mobile and have nothing better do, rather then being on desktop and supposed to work.
I think the mindset of "participating effectively in complex [work] discussion is not an inherent part of your work" is exactly what desktop-only is concretely pushing back against.
The fact that I can’t see their demo because I’m using the device most people use to browse the web is comical. I don’t like criticizing new products but this is clearly made by someone who doesn’t know how to make product, and considering the pitch…
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadQuip has almost exactly the same feature set as google docs — which part of quip were you referring to?
Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.
I think the problem it suffered from, besides being a little too "out there" for the average user, was that it required to much careful attention to how you used it. Where to fork the discussions, where to spilt them off into their own wave leaving only a link in their place, etc. It just doesn't work for people for whom the "reply all" button seems a sensible solution....
I had such hope for it though. The technical side seems pretty well solved at this point, it seems like that we need is a crack team of psychologists and UX people to have a go at the problem.
This paradigm is alive and well at www.cix.co.uk - which predated Wave by 20yrs. HN looks based on it.
I agree. Its way beyond what today's average user wants.
Zulip has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, with similar results in utilization.
I like learning and exploring new tools, but if there's one thing I've learned about building them is that most people are only interested in using your tool to the barest minimum to get the result they need. See (without citation) how many software engineers you know don't "understand" Git beyond add / commit / push.
What that means is that if you have a dedicated group of people that is interested in exploring a new tool and understanding it, then great! Those people are going to love the tool and take the time to learn it. But the demands of society / work / time limits means that most of the time, they don't want to spend that time investment. It might be a "waste" of time, it might not solve the right problem, other people also have to invest the time, etc.
That friction is huge. That's why Slack took off at first, and then Discord blew it away in the consumer world. Discord removed those internal silos, had a lot of the same chrome on it that Slack did for IRC, and then they've continued to make certain things very easy to do within their platform (jumping into voice chats, for instance). But, if you see the newest way they've tried to have threads act as forum messages or posts, there's no consensus on how to use them effectively and I haven't seen them used much, as a result.
Anyway, one day we'll get Wave again and hopefully it won't be killed before its time, for those few of us that really loved it.
That being said, people will voluntarily learn new features if it creates tangible benefits for them. But the learning curve can't be too steep—it has to be intuitive on top of what they already know with consistently increasing rewards.
Anyone else unable to scroll the website on mobile?
One shortcoming of debates is assuming that there are only two positions. I get that it’s a simplification to help us manage our thoughts but in many complex discussions the answer is usually a combination of both sides.
How could it be improved? I say embrace the DAG nature of the beast and allow for selecting a specific set of parent nodes a comment is in reply to, and, importantly, make that set editable so when some other person comes in and replies to a comment with a topic that has already been discussed, you can link your earlier replay to that new parent without needing a “see my reply here” comment.
OTOH I'm not sure that cycles are even a huge problem.
> And your DAG ends up A'->B->A
A' would be in response to A.
For these with high level of engagement you often get distinct subtrees of threads which have little to do with each other.
For the latter the linear structure is awful.
But I'm not sure you can get an automated map from comments to ideas, no matter what data structure you use...
(Perhaps you could edit in a circular quote of this... :)
Maybe it wouldn’t work for internet chats, but for discussing complex topics as a team? Yes!
Because when you read enough of the common things people debate, like whether dynamically typed languages are a very bad idea, or how we should address global warming, or stuff like that, you quickly realize there's only a few clusters of arguments which can probably be summarized in a few words each. If you know those clusters, it becomes increasingly hard to add anything different to the discussion... but most people have already heard each of the cluster arguments but did not accept it, which is why the topic remains unresolved - despite the fact that, if everyone agreed on the factual nature of each claim, there would be a mathematically optimal answer. I think the problem is not finding the answer, but accepting the arguments - which you can't get people to do in any case where some judgement is needed.
Wish this could work, but my experience is that getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people.
IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse.
The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.
I've found that as well. I wonder why that is--many times I've been working with someone who is extremely intelligent and methodical as an individual, but structured communication totally breaks down as soon threads enter the picture.
Interestingly, this sometimes even happens verbally (at work, when doing tech support on either side of the phone, at feedback discussions with artists/writers, when talking with friends): some folks really do not like "zeroing in" on specific sub-discussion items, talking them out, then moving on or going back to the bigger picture. Instead, they like to jump around or "chroot" the discussion to whatever the most recent topic of interest is. Anecdotally, it's very much a "two kinds of people" situation, but I don't know what the common factor is (and again, I don't think this is a skill/bad-faith issue; these are smart and reasonable people. They just ... don't think in trees or stacks).
As for online, I think the idea of threads is obviously antithetical to the concept of linear discussion. When you organise things as a tree, you present the many branches as though each is a valid target for a new entry. If you want things to be discussed linearly, you must present that discussion linearly. This linear discussion is feasible only in text, as you have time to think something over before verbalising it.
I liked the old Joel on Software boards. No threads, messages posted sequentially as they are created. If you want to quote, do it manually. I feel like discussion stayed on topic or at least evolved sensibly, there were no deep tangents on pedantic matters that pushed the rest of the messages off the bottom of the page.
Edit: here's a post where Joel talks about the design of his forums.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti...
I think there's a lot of good sense in there, if you are too young to remember, the JoS forums were the "Hacker News" of their time, a place where programmers and other people involved in software businesses had online discussions about a number of interesting things. Those forums were even simpler than HN is -- no threads, no replies to individual posts. You could read comments in linear order, and post your comment after scrolling to the bottom. That's it.
If the 'Message #whatever' input was hidden behind '+ New post' then there would be a much clearer push into threads. In my experience (and my own doing) threads are more likely to be used if there's other conversation happening too, or another unrelated message has already followed; otherwise if it's quiet people are quite likely to reply at top-level and I don't think anyone can blame them.
(I don't even really have a problem with it personally, as long as someone doesn't then reply in thread ignoring the top-level discussion about it, which does confuse things.)
Self-censorship, preference and knowledge falsification come to mind. People behave differently when there is no expectation of privacy, when they know they're observed. Apart from employment consequences, social alienation and mental health impact, panopticism may negatively affect creativity and innovation, when people behave less impulsive and more agreeable.
In my practical experience, (local) transcription also tends to be anything, but instant, if you don't allocate significant compute to the task. So your summary may not be available for some time after the call ended. You may need to cognitively backtrack quite a bit to confirm plausibility/"correctness" of the AI production.
Management will love it, everyone else will grow to hate it.
For me, at least, private personal talks/calls are the last bastion of interpersonal bonding and social relief in the modern (remote) work environment.
It might feel paradoxal, but as there's little context on each other's private life in the first place, private talk stays limited and trite (basically close to grocery lane small talk)
For instance imagine having a call for reworking a service and the other side starts asking what you did during the weekend, which happens to be medical follow up for your kids on the spectrum. Either you start explaining all your life, or you just cut it down and deal with the purpose of the meeting.
There's of course a ton of personal preference, some people thrive in grocery lane talks. I just wouldn't expect most people to be so.
I presume the vast majority of humans needs and enjoys social warmth, and a personal connection. You can escalate almost any conversation out of grocery lane talk with one or two questions, so your experience is maybe a bit on you, too. Also don't shun chitchat, there is subtext, belonging and trust building encoded. It's an offer and a compliment.
Apart from basic needs, this also creates an environment more resilient to worker exploitation.
Yes, definitely, though people going the full-remote route tend to get enough of it to not seek more in the work environment. It's the first time I've ever been in a team where half the people are either actively parenting (taking the kids to school etc.) or fully engaged in a different activity circle (side gigs are ok).
Discussions are fun during offline events/retreats, just not during the meetings.
> resilient to worker exploitation.
Thanks, this is an important angle I didn't consider. I wouldn't drop that kind of inquiry in a casual discussion, but it's something that needs its time and place to check on.
We already naturally adjust our behavior depending on whether we're with friends, family, coworkers, or supervisors. If your boss is having an affair with the receptionist, you're not going to bring that up in a team meeting. That's self-censorship at play, without any need for surveillance or written records.
Regarding the mental health impact of workplace surveillance, I've never encountered someone explicitly linking their stress or burnout to call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries. Many complaints I've heard about mental health tend to focus on these issues:
* Excessive workloads from bosses or coworkers with no recognition.
* Transfer to toxic work environments engineered to make you quit a year before retirement.
* Invasive management that gets too involved in your personal life, knowing details you never told them.
* Boss sharing personal (sometimes even health) information with coworkers.
* Being called into work even when on vacation.
* Soul-crushing jobs with high stress, like call centers.
* An imbalanced work-life dynamic, leaving no time for family or personal care.
* Persistent crunch time with no relief.
* Office politics with gossip and backstabbing.
* Workplace mobbing.
* A number of personal issues that I'm not going to list here.
These are some reasons employees face burnout and dissatisfaction at work. While I'm open to hearing more about the potential mental health impact of call transcripts or AI-generated meeting summaries, it's not something that appears in the complaints I've come across.
It's like a skill we take for granted. When you see people with certain mental disabilities who can't regulate their words, it quickly makes you realize why self-censorship matters. It's a critical tool for keeping things from descending into chaos.
The question isn't whether self-censorship is necessary, but rather, how much is appropriate. I shared the example of someone who revealed a boss's affair during a team meeting. It was a moment of impulsiveness that led to serious career consequences, to put it mildly.
That ability goes out the window once all communication is written down verbatim because now people can point fingers and have a grudge with each others for years.
Now, that affair with the receptionist is really HR's problem, and it's just great for one's prospects at the company to inconsiderately flame on the boss' way of doing things (not!). But somehow it should be possible to criticize things without having to join management at the golf club or at pub crawl...
It reads to me like it is.
Arguably five to six of the issues in your list are exacerbated (if not enabled) by constant surveillance. Call transcripts are one more thing that adds to that feeling of surveillance.
The issue then isn't about communication but decision making.
Complex topics, for the reasons listed in the linked blog post, should not end up in "let's settle this over a talk".
I personally, to this date, consider moderated vBulletin/phpBB-like forums the highest form of long term communication online.
There are active discussion threads on many forums I follow that are decades old.
Partly a UX problem. In slack and discord, the default is to send unstructured message to the whole chat - with a big text box and send button at the bottom. The reply-to-break-out-a-thread option is more obscure.
This could be solved by simple UX rearrangement and emphasis. Creating a new thread could have some more friction, for instance, by requiring a title or simply having a button to open the text box.
Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.
This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.
Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.
Comments-upon-comments makes it hard to get an idea of what the overall consensus is. You pretty much need to read all of it and explore every comment thread to understand what are the generally agreed parts and what are the more controversial takes(?).
Maybe some hybrid between this and Wikipedia?
Having the ability to differentiate between a resolved, useful thread and a resolved but ultimately unnecessary thread might also help avoid noise.
Then there also needs to be a mechanism for working towards succinctness.
If the meta-pun was incidental, apologies.
This is why HN discourages puns or insubstantial jokes, as it impedes the benefit of doubt when attempting good faith discussions.
https://jkorpela.fi/usenet/laws.html
Most of the best discussions I've had online followed those rules.
(OTOH, those rules are written tongue-in-cheek and not likely to be understood well by most newcomers.)
There should be more than one dimensionality to ranking a comment just like slashdot had.
Downvoting a comment to disagree with it is such a ingrained unfortunate consequence that down votes should actually count more than up votes and all ranking of comments should be by "controversial".
Spam is spam, including "le reddit" humor.
A rank of a comment should be at least somewhat indicative of the the substance of the comment in relation to a point being made... Not whether or not an uncontributing lurker thinks a comment is funny or politically agreeable.
There used to be a unspoken rule that you don't downvote without at least mentioning why. We all know why that went away and we can't say why, But we can think of how to prevent it for the next intellectual chamber we would like inhabit to prevent from it echoing so much we can no longer hear the new ideas.
My (personally) most "provoking" of a comment was:
The other half is presentation. Collapsible comment trees seem good until I hijack every top reply and all others are minimized or top detached visually to be sequitur.I fear these near-obvious improvements are features, not bugs.
I'd love to see something like this that works more generally. I suspect it might need a more graph-like structure akin to mind maps.
I think I'd prefer Discourse's current linear format, where all new replies are stacked at the bottom (but ideally with a quoted snippet for context). It makes catching up on updates easier, since you just keep scrolling and reading like any other document.
IMO it often isn't super useful to go through each individual comment piecemeal unless you're working on a document together (ie tracking changes and commenting on them). Otherwise, being able to read through several comments at once and THEN replying to the whole of them in a summary can save everyone time.
It's the infinite back and forth on every minor point that makes long form discussion impossible to track. That's the sort of thing that probably IS better dealt with in real time, over Slack or a call, and then summarized briefly back in the main convo. You don't need to have every sentence recorded in the main convo, just something like "Re: point 4, after talking it through with Joe and Jane, we all agreed it would be best to use blah blah".
This was my first impression as well. The summary tree of replies to a thread seems like a possible improvement over Google Docs but the basic interaction workflow seems the same as Google Docs.
Perhaps there is more innovation to be had by looking at the various specs for webpage annotation systems that have been proposed over the years?
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/65129?hl=en&co=GENIE....
I never fully grasped just how hard it is to understand and respond to what other people say until I got smoked by people who do it competitively.
Each post has a unique ID, and you can insert links to other posts in the text of your post. Then each post is given a set of back-links showing all posts that quote it. In this way, posts form a hyperlinked network that you can traverse relatively easily, while also being displayed in chronological order.
I've found this quite effective for long-form discussion. My only complaint would be that structure is needlessly limited. It would be better if posts simply formed a connected graph of content which you could ask the website to present in arbitrary ways.
This project reminds me a lot of Xanadu in its layout. I don't really think this complex of an interface is necessary. In fact, it might get in the way of productive discussion. I find that the constraints on other mediums (character limits, reply depth, etc.) often aid clarity. The transmission of information between people is fundamentally linear, and so you are pretty much always just going to be composing short essays and exchanging them as the basis of any real discussion. Complicated features seem like they would obstruct this.
it basically takes the task of organizing and just turns it into a format
Years, ago, back when I worked at EA, I convinced some people to spin up an Reddit instance to use for internal discussions. I figured it would be much better than email chains which are easily lost and don't support threading well. It was fun for a while. I have no idea if it stuck around. I left shortly after.
Just run a private instance if you want.
They're rarely "nice" places though (lain is fairly pleasant).
In other words, ideal for dueling essayists, technical RFC documents, or professional/academic debates.
I see there as being 1-2 additional tricky problems to solve for something like this (other than ironing out UX kinks in the implementation, of which there are many--e.g. visual signifiers for overlapping thread sources outside of tree mode; a tree mode that allows users to browse responses without manually expanding things; making "conclude" meaningful):
The first is optional, but I think it would be valuable: in many contexts, discussion and collaborative writing overlap substantially--often more than they don't. It would be interesting to see how the notion of addressing/concluding threads could be tied to changes in the document. E.g. a thread for "I'm onboard with this proposal if we alter the paragraph this is rooted at to contain X because Y" -> "If it gets you onboard, I'm happy to make this change, how about <proposed rephrase>" -> approval/conclusion causes the document to be updated and the thread archived. While that's technically not hard to add, the question is whether bringing in those aspects of mutation/collaborative editing would dilute the utility of the discussion layer, resulting in a shitty Google Docs/shitty Discourse combo, rather than a single-purpose Discourse-but-better application.
The second problem I see isn't optional: thread topology needs to be mutable somehow. In addition to all the valid criticisms of forum/Slack/email-thread discussion formats, any significantly-sized discussion of a complex root document inevitably develops redundancies. You end up with Slack (or whatever) threads cross-linking to other threads ("as I said over here, <content that either may be invalidated with time or which breaks user flow to navigate to another discussion location>"). That leads to significant confusion, and more than a few cases of people making decisions based on stale information as the cross-references get more complicated. Sure, ideally everyone would root discussions at the single most relevant point of their parent content, and new contributors would carefully browse the existing tree to ensure that their contributions were on both the freshest and most germane leaf. But that's never going to happen in practice, so a tool like CQ2 needs some way to rearrange (or embed-with-live-updating, or make rooted at multiple sources rather than one, or something...) discussion trees.
I have no idea what this would look like UX-wise. The 4chan model solves the replies-that-are-relevant-to-multiple-places issue, but doesn't help with re-parenting/consolodation after the fact to make future readers' lives easier, nor does it deal with staleness issues caused by replies linking to intermediate posts on threads which changed consensus later on. Regardless, I think functionality like this (even if it were used infrequently, by curators or administrators) would make the difference between things like CQ2 being useful only for short-to-medium-lifespan discussions with small numbers of participants, and being useful for discussions that stand as long-lived artifacts on their own.
CQ2 is not optimized for mobile use. Please try on a desktop or laptop. Go back to homepage
It will hurt their initial adoption, but might help the product.