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[EnigmaticHat]

Reddit: Discussion is threaded...  This is a good thing, conducive to actual discussion.  Having a back-and-forth with someone doesn't spam the topic like on this forum, because it's all kept in a thread.  If someone does want to follow that thread, it's laid out seamlessly for them.  If it's interesting enough to get a lot of votes, it'll be near the top.

If it's popular enough to get a lot of votes - not interesting, it'll be near the top. And its layout isn't seamless, it's a trainwreck.

See, that's not actually true.  I checked just now to be sure, and sure enough, first article I clicked on had threads out of vote-order.

It decays by time so new messages get a chance, but a good SUMMARY of the system would be "most popular is on top" because that's the primary decider.

[Bohandas]

Reddit: Discussion is threaded...  This is a good thing, conducive to actual discussion.  Having a back-and-forth with someone doesn't spam the topic like on this forum, because it's all kept in a thread.  If someone does want to follow that thread, it's laid out seamlessly for them.  If it's interesting enough to get a lot of votes, it'll be near the top.

What do you mean by "thread"? Isn't that the same as a "topic"?

[Rolan7]

It's a tree system.  The topic is a tree, the replies are branches, more replies branch of that.
I might be misusing "thread", but Thunderbird calls it "threaded" when you sort messages by replies like that.  And computers do have parent and child threads, processing-wise, so yeah.

It decays by time so new messages get a chance, but a good SUMMARY of the system would be "most popular is on top" because that's the primary decider.

Ah makes sense, thanks.

[Bohandas]

So basically the topic diverges into isolated non-interacting discussions like a universe undergoing a Big Rip?

[Frumple]

What do you mean by "thread"? Isn't that the same as a "topic"?

It's basically like your average OS file system. If you were looking at a folder on your computer, you'd have the main folder (the initial post), with each reply to it being its own folder. Replies to replies nest down another level.

It... honestly, it's not much better for readability or usability than what we have here, t'me. It's different, and it has some advantages in keeping track with one line of discussion, but when you've got several or a lengthy back and forth it frankly becomes ruddy annoying to navigate, and multiple discussions branching off the same topic doesn't so much lead itself to coherent discussion continuing as discussion dying quickly as no one is quite sure what everyone else is saying. It's maybe better for something with major traffic (though it leads to just as much being lost as something like simple machines), and it's alright for really small discussions with only a few branches, but basically everything else, well.

It's a lot like trying to navigate a particularly convoluted game directory looking for a specific file or folder, with every bit of awkwardness that entails.

---

Not sure what a better system would exactly entail, really. I do like what Xenforo is doing with threadmarks, at least. Took a while to get used to, but it can make thread navigation significantly easier (providing the OP is staying on top of things, anyway). What an improvement would probably boil down to would be multi-format integration (allowing for the OP or maybe particular subforums to use different formats), or maybe just a preference option to change the format for the individual user.thread

[Flying Dice]

What you seem to be implying is that there aren't useful discussion subreddits, that the voting system makes them impossible.  But I think you know that's not true.
It's like saying "/tg/ sucks, just look at /b/"!  Doesn't follow.

That's a completely invalid comparison. Suggesting that Reddit has a shitty community and little/no discussion of value because of the way it's structured - that's targeting form as the point of failure. Your example is a faulty generalization based solely on content ("Y sub-board's community is shitty because X sub-board's community is shitty"), which has basically nothing to do with the original premise.

For what it's worth, I think the chan-format is pretty decent for the intended purpose, and that Reddit is a roiling cesspool for reasons previously outlined (and for similar reasons as Imgur being much the same): it encourages circlejerking and groupthink, and also glorifies pandering to that status quo and continually reposting content known to elicit certain responses.

Frankly, that whole "below-article comment section" style of threading is woefully inadequate for anything approaching real discussion. You were complaining about having to quote people with BBcode. Here's the thing about Reddit: You can't quote people directly. Want to include points which were raised outside of the thread you're commenting in? Too bad, everybody who doesn't trust blindly is going to have to go digging around for it instead of (as with both SMF and chans) clicking on the link to the post. My observations have been that this tends to narrow discussion even further, so that it tends to be people all bandwagoning single points instead of bandwagoning entire arguments.

But yes, any system which includes a "upvote/downvote" system as a metric for post importance is pretty much inherently leaned in the direction of shitty groupthink communities. The only way I've ever seen something like that work out less terribly is in places like Spacebattles where it's still a traditional post-by-post forum setup, there are no downvotes, and likes don't shift posts around -- and SB/SV still seem more prone to bandwagoning than fora without that feature.

It's related, I think, to the issue of visible postcounts. There are a lot of people willing to avoid critical thinking and just go with popular opinions. A system where it's easy to see which opinions are already popular (or which have been voiced by *snrk* notable figures) is one in which that sort of groupthink and bandwagoning will foster readily. See a post that's already been downvoted to oblivion? Clearly the easy thing to do is to downvote it yourself and throw in a "me too!" post. And that's what people do, over and over.

the scp foundation created [DATA EXPUNGED]

Wow....SCP has gotten really stupid since the last time I was there.

"Gotten"? Man, it was absurdly stupid years ago, back before all the circlejerking and SI Mary Sues were purged. The signal-to-noise ratio over there has never been particularly favorable.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

See, that's not actually true.  I checked just now to be sure, and sure enough, first article I clicked on had threads out of vote-order.
I don't actually post on Reddit yet, but the way it was described to me is that it seems to factor in upvotes and downvotes.  IE, downvotes may help a thread get seen.  It's about whether a popular conversation is going on.
There's even a link on the main page for "controversial" threads, where I presume upvotes are weighted even less.

You've got to be joking me; how is this not what I said it was? Ebin upboats m9

Right, quotes.  To quote your message as more than an unreadable mass of text, I have copy-pasted a line of BBCode and am manually typing /quote.  For each interjection I make.
Why isn't it a problem?  It's a very basic use case - read a controversial post, try to find a reply.  On this forum that involves glancing over other posts, looking for an avatar or username, sometimes on multiple pages.  On Reddit the replies are literally right there.  On 4chan they're a mouse-hover and/or click away.

This is such a minimal amount of effort it's astounding you even find anything to complain about
And tbh I don't even look at avatars or read names until I've quoted a post, and that's just because I don't really give a shit who's making an argument I am interested in arguments
And if you're interested in finding someone's username or identity or whatever on 4chan you're doing it wrong

Uh?  Toady usually posts a nebulous notification that something was deleted, yeah.  But there's no notification that my post was deleted.  All the posts vanish, and it's pretty much forbidden to discuss what was deleted.
And it's super easy to get a conversation deleted...  It's only rare because people learn to avoid rocking the boat.  The serious discussion threads get pruned with regularity, and are living on borrowed time in my opinion.
Of course there's no record of any of that, even for people whose posts were deleted.  I know I've seen a Toady post and been unsure whether one of my posts was deleted.

If you don't like getting deleted then why go from bay12 to reddit of all places, that's like moving from Russia to North Korea
And a long list of -post deleted- is not preferable to a nebulous Toady who rarely deletes

I'm still admitting that there are a lot of echo chamber subreddits
That is not a thing I stopped saying...
But who cares about them?  They're pointless, gross, maybe even fun.

BECAUSE THEY BREED NARROWMINDED PEOPLE WHO ARE SHELTERED IN SAFE BUBBLE-WRAPPED IDEAS OF STAGNANT REGURGITATION. Pardon the caps locks, but the emphasis is sorely needed. This is the reason why hotbeds of dank meme creation come from places where people can post whatever and ideas thrive, whilst reddit takes those dank memes, cuts their claws off and repeats them ad nausea - one step away from 9gag.

What you seem to be implying is that there aren't useful discussion subreddits, that the voting system makes them impossible.  But I think you know that's not true.

Literally the only time in my life I've found reddit to be useful was in social engineering lots of gullible idiots, so I don't know that's not true and I find it to the contrary; I don't go to reddit because to me reddit is synonymous with people who don't actually like different opinions.

It's like saying "/tg/ sucks, just look at /b/"!  Doesn't follow.

/tg/ sucks, just look at /b/. Everyone who made either board great are gone, their replacements just propping up dead shadows
And seriously? It does follow - reddit is structured to be a hugbox
A hugbox it will be

Edit:  And this is definitely at that length where almost everyone will skim, sigh, and maybe someone will suggest "take it to PMs".  Because this is a bad way to have a discussion, and it's clogging up the topic.  Threaded systems solve this problem.

So do spoilers

Heck, when I edit this, it'll make the thread reappear for everyone in their "unread replies" queue.  A queue which it's impossible to remove entries from, incidentally.

Not being able to pull threads off the notification list is a scourge upon bay12, of that I am in agreement nyahhhh

[i2amroy]

Threaded discussion can be nice, however I think in smaller communities like this it really runs the risk of just essentially causing flash-in-the-pan type of discussions, where you have a single post splinter off into a dozen tiny discussions that each only last for a few posts than die. On the other hand a system like the one currently in just tends to constantly force the discussion forwards. You might not get a chance to reply to everything as a result, but I think that as a whole it means that at any given point there is much more likely to be at least one discussion you are interested in, because you end up with several rolling discussions (much like this one) that just keep going and morphing and changing without ever really stopping or dieing.

The serious discussion threads get pruned with regularity, and are living on borrowed time in my opinion.

Honestly the only times that I've really seen the serious discussion threads sink almost always involved someone who was relatively new to the Bay12 boards (as in less than a few months) with a specific hot-button issue where they would just refuse to be civil about the discussion. When those people aren't present I find discussions tend to roll on for quite a while even about some of the more inflammatory topics; I certainly remember that at one point we had a gender inequality discussion thread that managed to go for at least a hundred pages or so (on the default 20 PpP setting) before one of the aforementioned hot-button people (who in this particular case was indeed fairly new to the forum), got involved and the thread quickly degenerated to a locking within a day or so.

I mean I've personally seen and been involved with several somewhat heated discussions on this forum where everyone was still willing to be civil to one another despite differing opinions, the religion and spirituality thread (currently at 194 pages) is a pretty good testament to that.

And I guess that's kinda one of my favorite things about this community, hot-button people come, stay for a couple of months, then get banned after one too many explosions of rage and insults, while for the most part the core, calmer group of people who can disagree passionately with each other about things while still being able to apologize for anything they do that crosses the line stick around.

Edit: 4 Ninjas, we're getting into some TMNT stuff there.

[Rolan7]

So basically the topic diverges into isolated non-interacting discussions like a universe undergoing a Big Rip?

It discourages related but distinct discussions from getting in each others way so much, if that's what you mean

Just imagine, someone could share their WTF despite the fact that there's a discussion already going on!  And if people were ignoring that discussion because it's dumb and wordy and practically off-topic, they'd easily see that new WTF and could start up a discussion about it.  And it'd be really easy for a person to follow whichever one, or both, because the messages wouldn't be intertwined with each other needlessly.

You don't have to imagine, this is how people have been doing internet discussions literally for decades now.  Slashdot kinda popularized it in HTML form, but newsgroups were always this way.  Because... sorry, I feel like there's a major disconnect here ):  It seems so obvious to me, which I guess is making it hard to explain...

Well, crap, now I have three people to reply to, each with a different argument.  In a threaded system, I could neatly make a reply to each argument, and we could go from there.  In this system, I would have to quote everybody...  And the thread with Loud Whispers is already crazy huge...  Or I could make some blanket statement that doesn't really address the specific points.
... Done!

As a side effect, I feel overwhelmed by the cases being made.  There's no easy way to keep track of them, without saving the page or something, or knowing what I (or anyone else) has replied to.  So one might panic and stop reading carefully, start arguing against what they assume is being said.  Or get emotional and resort to ad-hominems.
Instead I'm just going to ignore the posts out of respect.  I think I've explained my position enough already   Again, there seems to be some major disconnect, because I honestly don't understand the support for this system as a practical debate platform.

Edit: Sorry, to be clear, I'm definitely going to read what everyone said.  When I get a chance later - I'm about to be late for something -  But I don't think I'll reply, sorry.

[Orange Wizard]

I wish people would invest in summaries instead of just going all visible-from-outer-space Wall of Text on us.

[Arcvasti]

I mean I've personally seen and been involved with several somewhat heated discussions on this forum where everyone was still willing to be civil to one another despite differing opinions, the religion and spirituality thread (currently at 194 pages) is a pretty good testament to that.

I'm going to point out that the religion and spirituality thread is the second or third of its kind in my brief[Wait, I've been here a year or more? The hell? Maybe not-so-brief.] stay on the forum. Its been nuked or removed or locked quite a bit.

And I guess that's kinda one of my favorite things about this community, hot-button people come, stay for a couple of months, then get banned after one too many explosions of rage and insults, while for the most part the core, calmer group of people who can disagree passionately with each other about things while still being able to apologize for anything they do that crosses the line stick around.

Not quite. There are totally forumites who are usually calm and controlled who blow the fuck up when certain topics are broached or when one of the aforementioned hot-buttons offends them mightily.

I wish people would invest in summaries instead of just going all visible-from-outer-space Wall of Text on us.

The text wall is an important fortification used to defend against criticism.

[EnigmaticHat]

The text wall is an important fortification used to defend against criticism.

The crowd on this forum encourages text walls.  Don't go into enough detail, people are like "well, yeah, except *thing you thought of but didn't mention for the sake of being laconic*".  If you go into too much detail, one line gets pulled out of all of it and dissected in detail and in isolation.  The only defense is to go into enough detail to cover everything but not enough that your post can easily be cut up, while anticipating criticism so you can counter it in advance and also remaining calm and keeping your statements mild enough that people don't get angry but strong enough that no one smells fear.

Basically people on this forum like to correct people.  I keep remembering that episode of the (American) Office where one of the guys kept going "well, actually" and correcting people on things they didn't care about and everyone hated him for it.

As for the hot button topics, well, at least we generally know what they are.  I don't think I've had any of the "argument quarantine" threads in my unread posts list for at least a year now.

[Bohandas]

Frankly, that whole "below-article comment section" style of threading is woefully inadequate for anything approaching real discussion. You were complaining about having to quote people with BBcode. Here's the thing about Reddit: You can't quote people directly. Want to include points which were raised outside of the thread you're commenting in? Too bad, everybody who doesn't trust blindly is going to have to go digging around for it instead of (as with both SMF and chans) clicking on the link to the post. My observations have been that this tends to narrow discussion even further, so that it tends to be people all bandwagoning single points instead of bandwagoning entire arguments.

But yes, any system which includes a "upvote/downvote" system as a metric for post importance is pretty much inherently leaned in the direction of shitty groupthink communities. The only way I've ever seen something like that work out less terribly is in places like Spacebattles where it's still a traditional post-by-post forum setup, there are no downvotes, and likes don't shift posts around -- and SB/SV still seem more prone to bandwagoning than fora without that feature.

It's related, I think, to the issue of visible postcounts. There are a lot of people willing to avoid critical thinking and just go with popular opinions. A system where it's easy to see which opinions are already popular (or which have been voiced by *snrk* notable figures) is one in which that sort of groupthink and bandwagoning will foster readily. See a post that's already been downvoted to oblivion? Clearly the easy thing to do is to downvote it yourself and throw in a "me too!" post. And that's what people do, over and over.

I agree with all this. Especially the first paragraph.

Threaded forums are garbage for discussion of any depth (or even discussions that are shallow, but not extremely so)

[Bohandas]

But anyway, what I'm really looking to find is a Simple Machines based forum where the moderators absolutely don't care what you post as long as it isn't either spam or something highly illegal and where threads cannot be locked or deleted by anyone who is not a mod (including the person who started the thread).

Does anyone know of any forums like that which also have a decent amount of traffic?

[scriver]

You lot aren't particularly cuddly.

Says the charging cactus guy