Forums and Chat

submitted by fschmidt from self.nonmorons

I have been looking at chat apps, Discord and Telegram, and of course they are horrible. But this got me thinking about the difference between chat and forums. The only significant difference is that chat is real time. Otherwise the concepts are the same. Consider classic forums versus reddit-like forums versus Discord. These are the related concepts:

  • forum = sub = server
  • thread = post = channel
  • post = comment = message

I will use classic forum terminology. In most classic forums, the thread layout is flat just as it is in Discord. If you make forum threads update in real time, then you have the best world of both forums and chat. Current chat apps are a complete mess, completely unorganized. Putting real time conversations in a forum context would be the ideal social media in my opinion. What do you think?

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[–]filbs111 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Not really sure. I like that saidit-alikes and twitter-alikes allow tree-like comments. Twitter's UI does a dreadful job of making these comprehendable, though that isn't what they are optimising for. Something like a graph (can be directed acyclic graph (DAG) if edits are limited) where a post can reference multiple previous others would be fun (currently with saidit, a post can have many replies, but can only reply to one other post). That's how things like essays and scientific papers are - they have multiple references.

Being able to track which version of a post was replied to would also be useful - to stop a post being edited resulting in posts below it saying "i completely agree with that" being misinterpreted. Being able to reference posts that don't descend from the OP would be neat to. basically, you can make a top level post that descends from nothing, or a post on a board that descends from some start post for that board, and/or descend from "hashtag" posts, and descend from a page about the author, and an edited post could descend from the post that it is a revision of.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

NotABug is all live, even the vote counts. They have other cool features too https://notabug.io

[–]fschmidt[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

NotABug looks broken to me. Things don't seem to work.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I don't know, maybe you are blocking their javascripts. It is unmaintained for sure. I never liked the CPU based voting, but they have some really cool opt-in moderation concepts that can configure for yourself. Like code your own moderators.

[–]fschmidt[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

So I click on "Welcome to notabug" that says "498 comments". And there I see no comments. So I hit the browser back button and all I get is "waiting for data" and nothing shows up. This is on Chrome and I don't block anything.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

you're right, it's all broken. the dev went MIA but he was a cool guy https://old.reddit.com/user/freespeechwarrior