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Ask HN: Meaningful discussions, how?

3 points by KajMagnus ↗ HN
I'm wondering how do you think a discussion system would look that:

- Helps people understand others with other points of view

- Solves problems in society, removes unfairnesses

- Helps you make better decisions and build a better world

- Saves time

I'd like to build that discussion system :-) Actually I've already started but I'm not sure if I'm doing the right things.

For example: What features would it have that aren't already present in other discussion systems? In ten years, what things/features would we then take as obvious, that are missing today?

10 comments

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striking
In my opinion, it really depends on the subject matter at hand. StackOverflow only works because it removes discussion and forces people to write questions with single, factual answers. [1]

What subject matter do you wish to approach?

[1]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-constructio... (Find "At Stack Exchange,")

KajMagnus
That's an interesting point of view, to think about what things to discourage / remove / hide, rather than what to show.

Thanks for the link to Discourse — I haven't noticed the words "you must suppress discussion" until now when you pointed them out.

The only ways I could think of implementing that, was by collapsing threads with relatively few upvotes, or that people flag as off-topic. Hmm..., S.E. actually does it also via making comments smaller, via community guidelines and by removing formatting. I wonder if that can make sense in forum software.

Your mentioning "suppressing discussion" made me think about something, namely removing the discussion completely: collapsing long sub threads, and replacing them with auto generated summaries of the most interesting things therein, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581040

Actually I don't understand "What subject matter do you wish to approach" (not a native English speaker). Could you please rephrase?

KajMagnus
I think in the future there will be advanced text analysis libraries that summarize discussion forum threads and quotes the most useful and interesting information therein. So, instead of having to read a sub-thread with 30 comments, you will be presented with a text block that summarizes the thread including the most useful information therein. And it'll also be clarified for you if the thread is about something everyone agrees about, or if it's something controversial. And the most useful links to other Web pages will be provided to you.

This would make it possible to quickly get something interesting out of a 1000+ comments long discussions here at H.N.

krapp
Why is an algorithm telling me what I should be interested in preferable to the minimal effort of actually reading what people write? Discussion forums are about the dialogue, and those long threads are a feature, not a bug.

What you seem to be looking for is akin to insisting that book publishers only publish the covers of a novel because the summary is really all you need. You're missing the plot if you approach it that way.

KajMagnus
If you get a summary of a thread and the most interesting things therein, you can better decide if you want to read the thread in whole or not. This helps you focus your time on the threads you are really interested in.

Right now, when I find a 1000 comments long page at H.N., I might read a bit at the top, then scroll down a bit randomly, read some comments, and then go on to some other topic. Most threads I don't read — I don't have the time — and I think I miss many interesting things. I think I'd want accurate summaries that helped me find and focus on the "right" threads.

krapp
But discussion threads aren't articles. I don't believe they can be summarized with fine-grained precision as if they were, because by definition the quality they provide is primarily to the participants, and terms like "interesting", or "meaningful" or "right" are entirely subjective.

You see this phenomenon whenever someone complains about why a particular story is popular. Any number of people have completely opposing ideas of what Hacker News should be. Everything one person finds interesting is completely noise to someone else.

You could apply user-level filters to the threads, I suppose - choose longer words over shorter, or longer posts over shorter posts, remove posts with words or phrases you object to. Hacker News could mitigate this single-channel effect by allowing tags or sub-boards, but I believe their solution so far is for the mods to manually tweak things when some stories get too popular. The site already puts high-karma posts at the top, which is supposed to act as a qualifier through consensus.

But to me, it seems the more you try to engineer the experience of discovery though automation, the less likely it is you'll discover things which might be interesting, but unexpected.

KajMagnus
If threads can usually be summarized in a way that most people think is useful, that's an interesting question. I'm thinking it varies from discussion to discussion and thread to thread. — Hmm, one area where summaries seem impossible, is jokes. Well unless one summarizes the thread with "A joke and funny replies".

Threads cannot be summarized? But I think I can summarize this thread?: "A suggestion to summarize threads, and a discussion about if this is doable and useful." :-) Couldn't that summary potentially save time, help people to know if they want to read this thread or not?

krapp
You've just described the function of the title, though, as the subject of the thread, which only has (as of now) a couple of rather short subthreads.

It might not be that easy if you're talking about a 100+ comment thread, with various tangents, each of which might be interesting in their own way. What if the content you want is not directly related to the subject at hand? The longer a thread becomes (particularly using a threaded format like HN does) the more divergent the subthreads become.

KajMagnus
Did you mean that my summary was a title, not a summary? I didn't quite understand "described the function of the title".

Right now I'm thinking only poorly written comments and off-topic threads would benefit from being summarized. A good comment starts with attracting attention and interest, and a summary would destroy that.

A poorly written comment though, it might be verbose and chatty, and it might make the discussion stray off-topic. Then, instead of just collapsing a not-so-popular off-topic thread and showing the text "Click to view 33 comments", one could show a summary: "Click to view a suggestion to summarize threads and a discussion about if doing so makes sense (33 comments)". Or "Click to view a joke (5 comments)".

(I agree this is getting complicated for long threads that branches off in many directions.)

krapp
> I didn't quite understand "described the function of the title".

Sorry, I meant the purpose of the title was to do what you did - to briefly summarize a post. Since it's your thread, obviously, it would be easy for you to describe your own intent, but it might be much more difficult to do analytically.