@rodolphito Agree with all of this. Want to add one more thing (or at least consider it) - on SE comments can be upvoted but not downvoted. I see no reason not to allow both Up & Down, particularly if comment votes are “just votes, not rep” (and we are heading to the direction where even Q and/or A votes might not be “rep”). I see no reason (except “SE did it that way”) to say “comments can’t be downvoted”.
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If comments are either ephemeral or permanent-but-non-discussional, why does it have to have threading?
Am I a lone voice (perhaps not so lone if I got @manassehkatz and @mattjbrent’s support) in proposing there should exist a comment system in addition to the discussion page/tab/view/whatever that is to be attached to each post? That is, a comment system pretty much like that we’re used to in SE? (with an easy way to mark comments as discussions and also some mechanisms to educate users so they won’t keep posting comments as discussions and vice-versa)
P.S. ping notifications are easy to implement IMO, and are required from day zero. MVP if you ask me.
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@Marc.2377 I think there needs to be “comments” similar to SE - a string (threaded or not, I don’t care much one way or the other) of short posts below each Q and each A.
Whether there is also a separate “chat room” or not, I don’t care. I have no problem with “discussion” in comments. I do have a problem with “chat rooms” - they become unwieldy and if implemented the way they are in SE they are hard to find and “too separate”. So if we have them, they need to be easy to find closely linked to the question (Link below Q: “Chat room - 27 messages, 3 new messages since your last visit” or whatever) and not “a separate world”. Or no chat rooms at all (except moderator or other special stuff, but not “per question”).
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What I had in mind was something akin to this (sorry, my design skills are just terrible):
Where the messages in the example above are considered comments (which I named ‘Notes’ just for lack of profound insight) or discussion, doesn’t matter a lot. What matters is that both options are there.
Alternatively:
Edit: to clarify…
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discussion can be threaded, comments need not be.
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comments are most likely MVP. Discussion, probably not so much.
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Discussions should be able to be referenced in the body of the answer as superscript annotations.
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One challenge is that comments tend to spawn discussions, and people don’t always agree on what’s “just a comment” and what’s a discussion. Threading is a way to mitigate this: assume that all of these bits of supplementary text are going to be jumbled together ('cause that’s how people work), use threading to group conversations, and show only the top-level comments (true comments and starts of discussions) until the reader asks for more.
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I wondered how to improve the comment system and I would prefer something like what Monica also seems to allude to, a system with tabs.
SE’s comment system had several drawbacks and it’s always obvious that the feature was bolted on later. On the one hand, they are considered noise, on the other hand they are too visible, too distracting. Thanks to the voting and their visibility, they are the opposite of hidden and you’ll frequently see people even continue discussions in comment when a chat room for it has already been created.
My suggestion is to
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better support discussion (also important for curation)
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not distract viewers from the question and answers.
My suggestion is somewhat inspired by Wikipedia. Imagine the post as a sheet of paper with the discussion sheet of paper behind. By default, the post is always visible. The discussion part is hidden behind a tab at the top of the post (maybe add a visual indicator that there was activity, like a red dot, for example).
This also leaves open how to implement discussions, either as SE comments, chat or maybe even more fancy with a Discourse-style discussion page (like every post has its own meta page already).
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For comments, I fully support multi-level threading like on reddit.
Comment votes, up and down should be a thing eventually.
Flagging bad comments should be in MVP.
Discussion is important, and I think it should be discussed more in its own topic.
For cases of “nuking comments” or even clearing them up selectively I suggest moving the threads to the less visible “discussions” tab where it can stay, but each thread in the discussion tab should be user-taggable somehow (reactions?) as:
- clarification talk - when implemented, should be hidden into the discussion tab with “clarification implemented” tag/label for comment threads;
- extra details / useful info (maybe should be moved to its own answer to become more visible, suggest that to people by tagging so);
- related post link(s) - can be hidden from main comments into the discussion tab but should still add linked posts to “related” section - (which is its own topic, and I think users should be able to vote/flag on specific linked posts when they’re not as related to remove from that list);
- chit-chat, jokes, humor - basically not anything useful but just something fun; idk what to propose to do about such comments, I like an occasional funny comment but idk if I can propose an official policy on them yet :р
- meta discussion about the topic in general, like is this a valid question to ask here, maybe move it to a different site, should it be broken apart, are there ways to improve this question, how it should be tagged, etc
To sum up, I think comments should be threaded, and threads should be markable for what purpose they serve. Threads which should not be immediately visible should be moved to the “discussion tab” to preserve all comments but to not clutter the main view.
Also, the discussion “tab” could be a toggleable half-of-the-page sidebar, like comments panel on Twitch, but bigger. We have large screens in 2019 and there’s a lot of unused screen space if you fullscreen a SE question which can be used for that.
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However some users still have small screens, even in 2019. (for whatever reason; possibly against their will!) Also we don’t have to forget mobile users.
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For mobile and for cases when you have 3 vertical windows in a tryptich arrangement, CSS should handle automatic dom element arrangement or switching of views based on viewport size, of course. But for desktop I ask that we please utilize the screen space fully when it’s available.
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