"Forum software blew a 4000x lead with poor UX" - Simon Sarris

I really liked forums. I liked imageboards. I dislike many of the patterns on twitter and group chats etc. But it's undeniable that those apps offer a richer more engaging user experience somehow. It's just more immediate with something you want to respond to, and so easy to respond. It hits you with notifications of things you like to see. But there's more than that maybe.

I'm curious to hear more from you all on what the je ne sais quoi of engaging platforms is. How could we tap into that without becoming an anti-intellectual slopfest? What do you like and dislike about forum and chat software?

The way I've seen forums do this is to have a shoutbox, or just an irc chatroom attached to the forum.

A sofiechan shoutbox could be fun, sometimes I come here and there is nothing new or too little activity so I just leave and forget about it for a few days.

>>3017
what's the value of a shoutbox and would that work for us? Is that just a live chat feed for low-stakes chat comments? I have always found such things to be awkward and gimmicky and have never used them. I think the best platforms have their attentional focus built around their main offering. For us my current thought is that the main user interface just needs a lot more polish. So much of quality of life on a platform is just how pleasant and easy it is to use, and how easily it feeds you valuable information.

Some of the UX stuff on the todo list include notifications when someone replies to you, more realtime-ish indication in threads of someone else having posted, better visibility of images on front page etc, better link and post reference summaries, and other stuff like that. I'm very interested in suggestions and inspiration of this quality-of-life type because they are pure wins that build on the core idea.

A rare miss for Mr. Sarris. Forums died because every single major Internet platform optimized for ad impressions as they onboarded the entire world, and as a consequence jingling keys and evoking snap emotional responses became the norm for communication. If you post in order to see a bunch of notifications pop up you should take up slots instead. It's a more honest way of being a mouth-breathing ape.

> What do you like and dislike about forum and chat software?

To actually answer this question w/r/t Sofiechan, the main things I like about forum software compared to here:

1. Threads don't fall off the board.

I've said this multiple times here and to you at this point, but it's my main gripe with the site as is. I would like to be able to refer to things I've written on this site in threads that are being written today. I would like to see discussions from months to eventually years ago revived. Knowing that what I post here will eventually be inaccessible makes me less likely to write on things I think are important here.

2. Last read over notifications

If you want to figure out if someone has replied to your post on a forum, you have to read all posts after yours and not just the replies. This has obvious positive effects for having conversations.

3. Avatars, signatures, and other methods of personalization make me feel like I'm part of a stable community.

Anonymous posting is ideal for doing schizoanalysis. One can, and should, argue a particular viewpoint in one post and argue just as vehemently in the opposite direction in a reply to that post. This vision is partially dead to the atrocious SNR on modern imageboards and partially dead because schizoanalysis works for cult building and not actual engineering. If you see the same avatar day in and out, you feel like you are a part of something with this person, and can also make useful snap judgements on the quality of a post.

4. BBcode is good.

Having freeform access to text formatting, actual quote functionality, media embeds, etc. gives one the freedom to craft more complex posts.

5. Hierarchical boards are a sensible solution to organization.

Boards develop unique cultures when they have sensible boundaries that determine who wants to post there. I am least interested in this idea for sofiechan as I want to see how the tagging system plays out, but I suspect a simple hierarchy is best.

I can say that I have mostly lurked on many forums prior to sofiechan, and the reason I like to post here is twofold:

1. The high quality, honest, truth seeking conversations that occur spur me to more clearly articulate ideas and engage in interesting discussions. This can clearly work with all the standard forum features.

2. The default anonymity lowers the threshold to voicing an idea. Typically, to write out an argument or view under my name (or even a pseudonym) I feel the pressure to evaluate whether this is an idea I would like to hold publicly for the long term. Very few ideas pass this threshold, so I choose not to contribute. Here it feels good to be able to say something, and then at a later time, choose to associate this with a pseudonym if upon reflection it fits well.

So I would look at new features through the lens of what contributes the most to these two factors. I think supporting more structured text may be good, but I wonder if rather than by default going with an HTML based scheme, choosing something more esoteric like LaTeX might act as a good barrier to the kind of people you want writing well formatted text.

> Threads don't fall off the board.
I agree with this point, having a sense of permanency to threads somehow seems important for sofiechan to hold the highest quality discussions over many years. However I don't know if the forum strategy is much better than tags. Clearly in the long run, a reliable search over threads will be very important.

>>3020
>Threads don't fall off the board.
fwiw, things actually don't fall off the board right now. They fall of the front page. Dig around in the tags and necrobump your favorite finds. I thought about the stuff you said and I'm sympathetic, so I tried a few different solutions and currently have it not ephemeral at all.

>case against notifications
Interesting. I find it nice to be able to know when someone has replied to me specifically and very much appreciate that being called out in some kind of notification. Otherwise it's too easy to lose threads of conversation. People can read the rest too if they like. I dislike how twitter makes it hard to read the whole thread as one big conversation. That's why I like linear threads like this, rather than reddit-style branching or twitter-style insanity.

>personalization and avatars
I'm thinking of adding more personalization options for those of us who use persistent nyms. Suggestions for how it could work well with the model here would be appreciated. I think basically a nym page should be able to be a high quality presentation of one's profile and posting, almost like a blog. Relatedly, I've been thinking of ways nymposters could tie their posts together and index them in lists and sequences, and other things that could make that general idea more useful. I enjoyed tumblr on this dimension, actually (is it possible to have too much theming and customization?). Open to suggestions.

As for avatars, we should figure out something more visually aesthetic and recognizable than just colors and names. I don't like big prominent forum style avatars. They take up too much space and emphasize the wrong thing. Twitter style is plenty IMO. I appreciate information density.

>BBcode
BBcode sucks. It's a terrible user experience. There's a case to be made for more complex formatting (text links, emphasis, lists, wikiwiki style concept links, headings, etc), but BBcode is insane. I very much like the "syntax highlighting" paradigm we've got going. I'm open to re-adding more options (we actually used to have more but I removed them for simplicity because I wasn't convinced we needed them).

>hierarchical boards
the only difference between boards and tags in theory is degree of overlap. I think some level of overlap and cross-pollination is good, and it also enables more exploratory categorizations instead of being stuck in a rigid hierarchy. I do like the idea of boards/tags having their own unique cultures. I think that's a function of a) features to allow customization of boards/tags b) features to support membership in boards/tags c) relative isolation between boards, and d) scale. We'll see how it plays with scale and more board customization when we get there, and then we can tune the parameters for how much it looks like a hierarchy vs a high dimensional space.

not a ton of new ideas here, mostly agreeing with what others have said already.

i think one of the bigger parts is how the UI of discord + group chats constantly encourages "more"/throughput

it drives a lot of low stakes commentary or discussion like others here have talked about. Things being lower stakes leads to lower general quality, which leads to the weird, disjointed authoritarian mod stereotypes as the shitters complain about injustice. i don't think throughput/more is bad, maybe that it just redirects incentive away from what made the culture strong to begin with.

at least, i think things tend toward this direction. it's still possible to maintain strong cultures like this but i think the factors that lead to this are more socio than UI

i think the anonymous culture is big too. plugged into a more discerning or precision-oriented group it leads to more effort put into the quality of the posts as the metrics are much more clearly on the merit of the words rather than the scale of one's influence. but idk yet how this relates much to the strength of a culture. on one hand i feel like numbers can easily fuck things up in centralizing incentive away from whatever's implicit in the culture, but i've been around places where that didn't affect anything.

or maybe it did and i didn't see it. i originally had the thought that the lack of numbers lets the incentive fall onto attuning words to whatever the culture demands, but this feels too vague and incomplete. i can't find anything beyond that.

i like permanency, too, like others--there's a much better feeling of familiarity in a place where the history of the culture is all immediately accessible. it's very neat to see the history of a place and the voices i've come to be familiar with.

"strength of culture" feels too load bearing here, wonder if there's a better way to put it.