[civilized]

A chat app with "good" threading wouldn't be a chat app anymore. It'd look like either a forum or a Reddit/HN comment section, depending on how much nesting you want.

Threading is fundamentally at odds with the idea of a group conversation. It relentlessly splinters the conversation into subchains because you have to reply to someone in particular rather than talking to the group in general.

Slack already has threads essentially identical to those in this Discord proposal. And people already complain about how this relatively basic form of threading makes conversations impossible to follow. Channels are no longer linear conversations, but have side pockets that have to be checked to make sense of the whole.

This is why channels ultimately make more sense if what you want is the ability to have group conversation while keeping the possibility of a few going on simultaneously.

(I admit I'm suddenly intrigued by the possibility of a "live forum". It would be identical to a traditional web forum, but each post would generate its own instant message space.)

[jimkleiber]

> (I admit I'm suddenly intrigued by the possibility of a "live forum". It would be identical to a traditional web forum, but each post would generate its own instant message space.)

Guilded kinda has this, as they have different channels types, one of which is a forum channel. I actually love that feature and yet have noticed over the last half year or so, the Guilded team doesn't seem to be developing and fixing what seem to me to be dealbreakers. However, it has shown to me just how much I would appreciate something like Discord or Slack but with the ability to make forum-type posts. Maybe the next evolution of these apps will have this. I find myself lost in normal group chats on WhatsApp, Discord just seems to be even more of those linear chats with what I believe is a worse interface than WhatsApp and Telegram. Guilded's forum channel makes it much easier to pick and choose which part of the convo I'll follow.

[civilized]

It's very interesting to think about how the data structure and API of the app interacts with its social function. How you organize the messages, what ways you can reply to people, what options you give to who. It feels like we've only begun to explore the possibilities.

[jimkleiber]

Exactly, and just how much those little design/infrastructural decisions impacts how we interact with each other. For example, how does no notifications on HN impact the speed with which people reply? I know I read your comment on my phone and despise replying on my phone, so luckily checked HN on my computer later and am replying now. Little things like that, I'm grateful you pointed it out.

[civilized]

I know what you mean but I do a surprisingly large amount of mobile HN commenting anyway, lol.

[jimkleiber]

haha mad respect to you

[ItsMonkk]

It's a continuum. You want content to go from idea(chat), to discussion(forum), to documentation(wiki). Most people should only have to read the wiki, if they have already read the wiki, they can drop down to the forums, and if they have read the forums and have an idea of their own they can do so within the chat. The problem is that pretty much no service has all three. Discord does fairly well because they do chat, and with their pins feature do a really bad job of being a wiki. So 1.5 is better than most services 1. StackOverflow is the only service I know that has all 3(Answers are wikis, the discussion underneath is a forum, then if there's enough messages they kick you into a chat).

I kinda see this as what happened to TV after we got DVR's and Netflix, where we went from episodic stores to serialized stories. That magnified the amount of nuance that TV shows were able to work through. As a result you get shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Squid Game - all shows that were fundamentally impossible before you knew that people who were watching episode 5 also watched episodes 1-4. Because no one can be sure that you have read all of the previous wiki content, forums are currently episodic in nature. They move very slowly. They need to repeat themselves many times. The bigger the forum, the slower it moves.

One of the worst features of Discord is that when you splinter conversations into different channels it becomes impossibly difficult to keep up with them. You need to click once for each channel you are tracking. Forums had this same issue. Reddit brilliantly solved this problem with their "an upvote pushes threads into the future, then we sort by most recent", but no other service(HN might? I'm not sure.) uses it to this day. I'm not sure why.

What I need on Discord is the ability to have multi-Discords like multi-Reddits where I see every message in a single interface, and clicking that message would allow me to send a message to that channel. So every message would look like this:

Server > Channel > Thread : Hi

AnotherServer > SomeChannel > GeneralThread : Some message

The big problem with chat is it quickly becomes useless as more people join the conversation, for example see Twitch chat, it scrolls so quickly you get an almost instant Eternal September effect of low quality content that reinforces itself. Even Reddit/HN falls over when you get over 1000 comments on a post. What you need is automatic sharding of users, an upvote system that would then push those certain users "up a level", and depending on the amount of users chatting in a channel there would be several levels of hierarchy involved. People who chat within your shard would then instantly reach you, but only high quality posts from other shards would reach you, but it would appear like a forum post, or be refined into a wiki.

I have a lot more thoughts on this topic, but I'll leave it here.

[civilized]

I think you're onto something. Quite a few things actually. Social media has a lot of untapped potential if we engineer better products. A continuum of related products will help. And for all their problems, voting systems can be very helpful in the right context.