Nested Commenting?

September 2, 2005 2:43 PM

How 'bout nested commenting?
posted by HiveMind to Feature Requests at 2:43 PM (38 comments total)

Yeah, I've thought about that too, but I fear it would just make the big threads even more unreadable as they go off in a thousand separate branches. Does anyone here participate in a community site like Metafilter that uses nested commenting? How well does it work?
posted by LarryC at 2:49 PM on September 2, 2005

I think that single-threaded discussion, and a concious effort to keep it from fragmenting do a good job of keeping the comments useful.

Sites like slashdot, kuro5hin tend to suck. So there's that.
posted by delmoi at 2:52 PM on September 2, 2005

Works terribly. One of my favorite forums changed from straight-up to nested and now I find it nearly useless.

It really cuts down on the community dialogue. The topic post gets lost as smaller focii spin out in all directions. You get into the habit of ignoring whole chunks of commentary. The point of a discussion forum -- considering points of view that are presented, and then rejecting or incorporating the points into further discussion -- is lost. It's cumbersome to navigate.

One of my favorite things about MeFi is that it still caters to people who like to read, not just people who like to click.
posted by Miko at 2:53 PM on September 2, 2005

Nested commenting strikes me as more forum-ish and less weblog-ish, and this here be a weblog. I find LiveJournal and slashdot unreadable because of the nested comments. And since this is all about me, I say nay, NAY to nested commenting.
posted by iconomy at 2:54 PM on September 2, 2005

No.
posted by gleuschk at 3:16 PM on September 2, 2005

No.
posted by languagehat at 3:17 PM on September 2, 2005

Absolutely not... Not that I have any say in it, really.

But yeah, what everyone else said and then some. Slashdot is readable only because of the threshold and the highlighting of highly rated posts. Kuro5hin is unreadable. Then again, that could just be because no one seems to care about the noise.

I feel that the continuing conversation feel of this place really helps keep it in line and that nesting would do a lot of damage.
posted by ODiV at 3:18 PM on September 2, 2005

Ecch.
posted by interrobang at 3:18 PM on September 2, 2005

Good god, no.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 3:26 PM on September 2, 2005

An another NO vote.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 3:30 PM on September 2, 2005 [1 favorite]

I vote no. I used to hate the unthreaded view, but it's really grown on me. Using firefox and MetaFilthy has made things much easier. Now for a way to externally track threads that I'm interested in/have posted in, etc.

Looks like some greasemonkeyfiddlin' time!
posted by zerokey at 3:34 PM on September 2, 2005

Please, no.
posted by dazed_one at 3:36 PM on September 2, 2005

I'm too lazy to look up my previous comment(s?) in previous MeTa thread(s?) on this subject, which is just as well since they probably weren't exactly gems or anything, so I'll just paraphrase:

no, no, no, no. Hell no.
posted by cortex at 3:41 PM on September 2, 2005

Please god no.
posted by dobbs at 4:01 PM on September 2, 2005

People asked for this six years ago when I first started the site, but I like to keep things simple and easy to follow the entire thread, including all the side-topics (and discourage too much derailing to side topics).
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:09 PM on September 2, 2005

no
posted by fishfucker at 4:09 PM on September 2, 2005

Yes!

No, wait...no.
posted by vacapinta at 4:11 PM on September 2, 2005

No
posted by bonaldi at 4:16 PM on September 2, 2005

부정
posted by peacay at 4:27 PM on September 2, 2005

Lord no. Every time I follow a link to a site with threaded comments, I'm forced to sign up to the site in question and cock about with preferences to make sense of the discussion I'm interested in.

Maybe some sort of standard for quoting and linking to previous comments would be a good idea, but nesting is just confusing.
posted by jack_mo at 4:28 PM on September 2, 2005

Flat threads, and the linear interchange they mandate, make Metafilter what it is. Get rid of 'em and it'd be just another PHPBB forum.
posted by killdevil at 4:29 PM on September 2, 2005

Sweet, crunchy deep fried babyheads on a stick, no!

What the hell do you want, Slashdot?
posted by loquacious at 5:22 PM on September 2, 2005

That's a big NO!
posted by wendell at 5:34 PM on September 2, 2005

What made you think this would be good? Was it drugs?
posted by klangklangston at 5:46 PM on September 2, 2005

Why can't we ever get a consensus around here?
posted by languagehat at 5:48 PM on September 2, 2005

It would not be Metafilter without flat comment threads. It forces us to deal with each other, like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner.
posted by whatnot at 8:00 PM on September 2, 2005

It would not be Metafilter without flat comment threads. It forces us to deal with each other, like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner.

Well put!
posted by Miko at 8:08 PM on September 2, 2005

Ha! whatnot, I was just thinking the very same thing before I reloaded this thread just now.

With a nested reply structure, you still wind up blowing your praise/disdain/whatever into the fairly anonymous ether.

With flat, if you want your point to be properly connected to whatever you are making a point about, you NEED to reference whoever stated what you are responding to, be it simply by name or a quoting of their text.

It just makes things feel more tight knit. Like a real flow of conversation with good points, bad points, interruptions and goofballs. Like a real human community.

(jumping jebus on a pogo brick! I'm processing on MeFi..that can't be good!)
posted by zerokey at 8:33 PM on September 2, 2005

AAAAnd that settles that! 0 Yeas and a bunch of neas.

And let's never speak of this again.
posted by HiveMind at 8:44 PM on September 2, 2005

Nested comments: no!

Now paginating comments...
posted by mullingitover at 10:30 PM on September 2, 2005

No; and as implied above, this comes up over and over.

I kinda wish Matt would put some more information in the sign-up page that really gets across what MeFi is and is not. Threaded comments is very much what it isn't.

Matt doesn't say so above, but somewhere (in his book?) he's said that flat threads were a deliberate design decision, for basically the reasons people state above.

By the way, I think that it's these various design decisions of Matt's that have kept mefi, under the onslaught of all the new users and much-enlarged population, still something recognizable as "MetaFilter". Threaded comments alone would go a long way in destroying this and turning MeFi into just another web discussion site, of which there are a bazillion.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:11 AM on September 3, 2005

No bloody way!
posted by madman at 6:19 AM on September 3, 2005

Nope.
posted by drezdn at 9:19 AM on September 3, 2005

No.

Absolutely not.

No!

posted by mendel at 12:47 PM on September 3, 2005

no!

that's like trying to take the metafilter out of metafilter.
posted by mayfly wake at 1:52 PM on September 3, 2005

For fucking fuck's fuck sake, no.
posted by angry modem at 3:36 PM on September 3, 2005

Aghhh...nightmarish David Spade flashbacks...

But yeah, uh, no.
posted by danb at 6:32 PM on September 3, 2005

why not
posted by matteo at 6:05 PM on September 4, 2005