Possible alternatives to comment threading

Thanks for opening this @strypey . 'More threads' in place of sub-threads sounds OK to me, provided that we can avoid scrolling endlessly through generations of threads and . .

• We have access to a super-thread mode of organising - which exists in the Gold version (and not the plain Vanilla version) of Loomio, it's called tags. Available only to coordinators.
• We still can search within a thread, as proposed here. Sometimes there's exploratory reflective (insightful!) discussion rather than linear progress to a goal (!), and it's easy for good thoughts/phrases/instances etc to get lost down in the detail after a few weeks have passed.

Rather than nesting, I'd be happy with chronological listing within-thread if there's another way of systematically and obviously forking. In any case it seems that, broadly, many commenters don't deploy (or notice?) the existing sub-threading option (tiny arrow - respond to comment).

So many options and I don't really know where and thing is.

I also observe that direct responses make it much more likely for threads to devolve into increasingly tense back-and-forth debates between two people, rather than group deliberations. Yes, guilty-as-charged. But in my defence, I think there are psychological reasons why nested comments encourage rather than discourage this kind of discursive drag-racing.

In GH Issues, I might @mention someone, or quote them and respond to this quote, but my comment is implicitly directed at the group, or if it’s a public GH repo, any interested member of the web-using public. The person I’m quoting might choose to respond, but it’s obviously just as valid for anyone else to do so. Any other comments that appear between the original comment and my reply, and between my reply and their comment if they reply to my reply, help to visually remind us that we are talking across a group discussion.

When I make a direction response to a comment on a Loomio thread, the original commenter gets a notification, and may feel put on the spot, and obligated to respond. If they do that by replying to my direct response, that implicitly starts a new pseudo-private discussion (like a whispered side conversation in a F2F meeting). When they reply, I get a notification, and if their reply was a little defensive as a result of feeling put on the spot, I may feel put on the spot. Then I reply a little defensively, rinse, repeat.

Without all the non-verbal cues available in a F2F conversation, unless someone else notices and steps in with a facilitative turn, this can quickly escalate from slightly defensive to raging chest-pounding. But because the nested replies appear in a pseudo-private subthread, rather than chronologically in the main thread, other group members may feel unsure about whether its appropriate to step in. Or, the rest of the group can be carrying on with the main discussion, not even aware that two group members have been left behind in an increasingly sceptic pool of infinitely nested comments.

EDIT: a couple of vaguely relevant talks about language use that is unintentionally "jabby" (I learned a lot from these):
* Gina Likins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWmrlft2FI)%27
* Morgan Gangwere: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-dark-side-of-free-software-communities/

I agree a lot with @strypey : if forums or mailing lists were the right tool to support groups making decisions online, we'd have seen a lot more groups using them with more effective results in the twenty last years. I think Loomio should focus on group organizing and decision making rather than debating. Discussions are a mean to reach a decision, threads are a mean to organize a debate that could work with very disciplined debaters...

In the groups I'm part of (10 to 40 diverse in age and computer/smartphone literacy members that meet in real life around a project), this is why and how we use Loomio:
- sharing info/ideas (including with passive members, works well for the 80% of the members, except for those that haven't accepted the invitation)
- keep info/ideas together and try to make them accessible and well organized for future members or reference (works pretty well, except for the current lack of moving posts option to fix an error from the poster who didn't open a new thread or replied in the wrong thread)
- making sure that any member could :
- share info (in reality, very few people will start a discussion)
- react to shared info (our mileage varies on this)
- allow members to express themselves through decisions/polls (works well to engage with up to 60% of group)

I haven't yet seen examples of structured and constructive debate happening in these groups. It usually stops after one reply to a reaction comment, except if it's a member starting to troll around.

I hope that being able to nudge procrastinating invited members in, improving the writing UX, allowing posters and coordinators to move a comment to a new thread and maybe add a "post as a new discussion" button alongside the "post as a comment" button to help posters make the right decision will help these groups to be more efficient, but I don't expect them to start debating in threads outside of physical meetings, and that's OK!

Groups I'm in use it really well. It encourages participation. I wouldn't choose to go back. We now have the fork button so you can move things to a new thread if you wish (very new, announcement coming soon).

Anyway, It's just a view of the same data as before. We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired - we were just waiting for feedback before doing anything.

We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired - we were just waiting for feedback before doing anything.

I'd strongly prefer if group admins got such customization tools. IMO it's deeply undesirable for the overworked Loomio devs to put such design choices on their plates, when those choices can be distributed to admins and their communities.

We can make the default view a group setting if that's desired

That seems like a good way to enable groups to use whichever works for them. But one setting or another has to be the default, and I guess I'm arguing for nested comments to be an option that group coordinators can turn on, rather than the default.

How about putting this on/off switch a level further down, at the thread-owner level?

@strypey has persuaded me of the evils of too much nesting and the virtues of forking. He's right to remind us of @mentioning as a means of weaving within a thread. I take the point of Strypey and @juliencarnot that decision rather than debate is the distinguishing usefulness of Loomio, but IMHO folks are going to use Loomio as a forum too, no stopping us (and the tech-averse folks I collaborate with are not going to use Discourse AND Loomio). Above, I pointed out that tags (absent from free basic Loomio) provide a super-thread level of organising content. With all these in mind I propose four features to enable greater thread literacy and usefulness:

1 From Strypey . . automatically embed a link to the comment being replied-to. Then we could live without sub-threads, and happily use chronological listing of comments.

2 Make the button big, explicit and orange, on a par with the button (which could be a tad smaller). Even without nested threads, we need to be able to reply to a comment. Folks just don't notice the little grey bent-arrow thing half the time - at hurried times I've hit the wrong button myself, and posted a new comment.

3 Add a button to the options for responding to a comment (only thread-owners have power to fork at present). Big and orange also.

4 Enable content searching within threads, and not just across threads as at present. I have a thread on this here on a topic first raised with James @gdpelican back in January - but no Loomio-team response on this. Elsewhere, I'm in one thread that is 55 comments deep and counting: probably needs forking but the sub-topics are intrinsically hard to distinguish. Given that we do debate and explore here, I do believe we need means for finding useful things that have been said in a thread, even if the wise response is then to fork it.

Nesting comments is one of my favourite features in Loomio. I switched back from VocalEyes when Loomio implemented it. In real life experience for me, big decisions always involve discussions about different details. No way am I making 5 threads to discuss different details relating to one issue.
I'm not finding any issue with load times and navigation is way more intuitive for me, seeing a reply right next to the comment it's connecting to, rather than jumping up and down the screen duplicating text with WhatsApp and Telegram's chronological-only approach.
Given it's purely cosmetic, I guess a feature could be implemented that always made threads already chronological-only, just for you.

I do quite like the apps that highlight new/unseen replies a different colour and you mark them read by tapping on them..hmm.