said (2mo ago #2215 ):
Some Sofiechan Design Questions
Hey folks. I have some design questions to resolve for the future of sofiechan. I want to solicit feedback from those of you who have been using it and helping me.
First of all, the OP question. Basically, are threads started and defined by an OP introductory post, or are they started and defined by a subject and optional link, with OP's possible commentary being merely the first reply?
* The first (OP is a post) is what we're doing now, and the way 4chan does it as well. The advantage is that its somewhat simpler on the back end because we don't need a separate kind of entity for the thread, and it is very natural to write little blog posts which are then discussed as we've been doing. The downside is that OP posts are in fact different in a few ways: they have titles and links, they get much more engagement (replies and thread votes) which throws off our post engagement statistics, and designwise the OP is set apart and rendered differently which complicates things. If we really want to double down on this, we would try to harmonize format between OPs and replies (more like twitter) so that there is less distinction between them, possibly even to the point of making "threads" something computed from the post graph (as on twitter) rather than being so tightly defined as a discrete space.
* The second (OP is a subject/link) is the alternative. That way we would steer the format more towards the link discussion model of hacker news or reddit. The advantage is that the design and statistics are simpler and then we can also more cleanly separate links and other kinds (wiki pages, books, etc) of structured curation from discussion. It also seems like the natural development of the "thread as container of posts and first class object in its own right" idea. The downside of steering that way is that we would have to handle OP essays as a first class kind of thing separate from posts which means complexity and partial negation of why we might do this in the first place. If we were going to have multiple types of OP (eg wiki pages and stuff) anyways, then the complexity is not so bad because we would need it anyways. But we might want to handle wiki pages and a curated link index separately from how we organize discussion anyways.
I'm quite undecided between these two. I see the merits of both. I think I lean towards the first path as it seems better for what we're doing and is already what we're doing. But I wanted to ask for opinions there. Is there some way to get the best of both worlds?
Second of all, the formatting question. Right now we have a very simple sort of chan-like formatting system where line breaks are literal, > quotations turn into greentext, properly linked >> post numbers get linked, and urls on their own lines get linked (I could probably make that urls anywhere get linked, now that I think of it). I've heard some requests for markdown style *italics* and _italics_, code blocks, and other markdown fanciness. In particular, if we're going to be writing high powered effortpost essays on here, which is a desirable direction IMO, then ways to link them together naturally would be good as well. I like old-school wikiwiki-style CamelCaseLinks a little more than modern wiki style [[square bracket links]], and I like both better than markdown style [separate link and url](https://to.anywhere.on/the/web). I'm keeping images styled as "attachments" rather than inline. Somehwat relatedly, I'm a strong partisan of a formatting style that acts more like syntax highlighting than either separate markup or wysiwyg html voodoo. I'm also a partisan of minimalism, preferring not to add features (eg italics) unless a case can be made that they make something important possible. I have no big question here, but wanted to document my philosophy a bit and solict feedback.
Finally, I'm curious for general ideas towards making this a really great platform for a user-serving epistemic sovereignty.
Let me know what you guys think.
First of all, the OP question. Basically, are threads started and defined by an OP introductory post, or are they started and defined by a subject and optional link, with OP's possible commentary being merely the first reply?
* The first (OP is a post) is what we're doing now, and the way 4chan does it as well. The advantage is that its somewhat simpler on the back end because we don't need a separate kind of entity for the thread, and it is very natural to write little blog posts which are then discussed as we've been doing. The downside is that OP posts are in fact different in a few ways: they have titles and links, they get much more engagement (replies and thread votes) which throws off our post engagement statistics, and designwise the OP is set apart and rendered differently which complicates things. If we really want to double down on this, we would try to harmonize format between OPs and replies (more like twitter) so that there is less distinction between them, possibly even to the point of making "threads" something computed from the post graph (as on twitter) rather than being so tightly defined as a discrete space.
* The second (OP is a subject/link) is the alternative. That way we would steer the format more towards the link discussion model of hacker news or reddit. The advantage is that the design and statistics are simpler and then we can also more cleanly separate links and other kinds (wiki pages, books, etc) of structured curation from discussion. It also seems like the natural development of the "thread as container of posts and first class object in its own right" idea. The downside of steering that way is that we would have to handle OP essays as a first class kind of thing separate from posts which means complexity and partial negation of why we might do this in the first place. If we were going to have multiple types of OP (eg wiki pages and stuff) anyways, then the complexity is not so bad because we would need it anyways. But we might want to handle wiki pages and a curated link index separately from how we organize discussion anyways.
I'm quite undecided between these two. I see the merits of both. I think I lean towards the first path as it seems better for what we're doing and is already what we're doing. But I wanted to ask for opinions there. Is there some way to get the best of both worlds?
Second of all, the formatting question. Right now we have a very simple sort of chan-like formatting system where line breaks are literal, > quotations turn into greentext, properly linked >> post numbers get linked, and urls on their own lines get linked (I could probably make that urls anywhere get linked, now that I think of it). I've heard some requests for markdown style *italics* and _italics_, code blocks, and other markdown fanciness. In particular, if we're going to be writing high powered effortpost essays on here, which is a desirable direction IMO, then ways to link them together naturally would be good as well. I like old-school wikiwiki-style CamelCaseLinks a little more than modern wiki style [[square bracket links]], and I like both better than markdown style [separate link and url](https://to.anywhere.on/the/web). I'm keeping images styled as "attachments" rather than inline. Somehwat relatedly, I'm a strong partisan of a formatting style that acts more like syntax highlighting than either separate markup or wysiwyg html voodoo. I'm also a partisan of minimalism, preferring not to add features (eg italics) unless a case can be made that they make something important possible. I have no big question here, but wanted to document my philosophy a bit and solict feedback.
Finally, I'm curious for general ideas towards making this a really great platform for a user-serving epistemic sovereignty.
Let me know what you guys think.