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[Dacvak]

How many times have you waited until a fresh new replies page for you to submit your fleshed-out, thoughtful response to a thread?

While I love forums, one consistent issue is paging system. It’s so difficult to find the top relevant/useful/insightful reply in a sea of dozens or more pages. Furthermore, making a reply at post #49 is essentially a death sentence in terms of visibility.

When replies are made at the bottom of an arbitrary page, their chances of being read significantly decline. (This is all based off of anecdotal evidence, so I’d love to know if this really is true, but I really feel like it is. EviLore pls)

Admittedly, this is one thing I appreciated about reddit (before they killed my favorite apps); the comment position could be organized by “score”, a combination of recency and upvotes. Genuinely, this made relevant and insightful comments easier to find, as opposed to manually sifting through pages of shitposts, memes, and gifs.

GAF (and frankly most forums) operate on a timeline-based system, meaning your post will always be displayed based off of when it was made (versus its importance or relevancy). This means that an insightful, conscientious reply may never by read by most people, since it happens to be posted at the very bottom of page 3 (or whatever).

NeoGAF does have somewhat of a rating system (with likes/reactions), but as far as I can tell, you’re not able to sort by comment interactions. I feel like it would be nice if I could sort by a few different attributes. It’d be nice if the #99th comment in a huge thread wasn’t automatically doomed to never be seen by most people joining the thread an hour later.

(Anyway, this was a random bathtub thought. Probably not worth paying any mind.)

 

[Trogdor1123]

people post for visibility? Wtf kind of vanity is that? I seriously don’t get it.

 

[nbcjr]

That's a very bad idea.

 

[Dacvak]

people post for visibility? Wtf kind of vanity is that? I seriously don’t get it.

Vanity? Visibility does not = vanity.

 

[Paltheos]

Nah. I talked about this a few months ago. This is an inherent limitation of traditional forums but preferable to reddit imo for a number of reasons.

It's an interesting experiment but inferior to traditional forums as a form of social media imo. Theoretically the best posts should be the ones at the top of any reddit discussion but people can't really help themselves and will upvote anything snappy or they agree with and at worst downvote things they just don't like the sound of (I'm not factoring in whether they even think on it). Any large-scale subreddit can easily become a shitty echochamber as the system by its nature gradually excludes opposing and moderate positions (even well-thought out, moderate posts that don't offend a sub's prevailing sensibilities won't be *first* and won't benefit from the most eyeballs).

Traditional forums like GAF have the issue of good posts getting lost in the 'between pages' - anything not the first or current page - but this outcome is still preferable to reddit's as extreme positions have a harder time taking hold in the culture since any one post will have only so much visibility.

Also, anyone else get bothered when you open up a reddit topic on the front page with 1k+ responses and think, "What are these people doing? A thousand people posted in this topic. Your post is never going to be seen by anyone." I had a thought as I was typing up this post: What these people really want is a traditional forum; they just don't know it or don't see an alternative.

 

[Jeeves]

The annoying thing about browsing Reddit is that it's hard to see how a thread developed over time. Yeah you can sort by old, but that doesn't take into account the replies to comments. No matter what you do it's just a very fragmented way of reading a discussion.

Anyway, I guess a toggle option for sorting by reactions wouldn't hurt anything, but...honestly I doubt it would add much, either. Reddit and traditional forums are built such that conversations tend unfold in totally different ways from each other; Reddit is like a ballroom party where people are divided into many tables having their own concurrent and independent discussions, and traditional forums are more like everyone sitting at a roundtable having one big talk. A feature like that doesn't make as much sense for this style of forum.

 

[Punished Miku]

Optional sorting sounds fine as long as its optional. I like the forum approach where all that stuff is not present and you just look at things chronologically. That's all I ever wanted.

 

[Kilau]

submit your fleshed-out, thoughtful response to a thread

 

[NinjaBoiX]

people post for visibility? Wtf kind of vanity is that? I seriously don’t get it.

What?

Why would you even post a comment on a forum if you didn’t want people to see it?

Might as well be left as a thought…

 

[StueyDuck]

What?

Why would you even post a comment on a forum if you didn’t want people to see it?

Might as well be left as a thought…

There's a difference to posting a comment and posting something to game the system to get the most likes and most eyes.

It would essentially turn into your average Twitter post if you follow the latter.

There's no reason that anyone should be treated as a special flower and have everything they say advertised and pushed onto you if you don't want to read or see the post to begin with.

 

[NinjaBoiX]

There's a difference to posting a comment and posting something to game the system to get the most likes and most eyes.

It would essentially turn into your average Twitter post if you follow the latter.

There's no reason that anyone should be treated as a special flower and have everything they say advertised and pushed onto you if you don't want to read or see the post to begin with.

I mean, I agree with everything you say here. But I’ve sometimes waited until a new page appears if I’ve put a lot of thought into a post. It’s rare but I’ve done it once or twice.

It’s probably a little churlish to call that “gaming the system”.

 

[StueyDuck]

I mean, I agree with everything you say here. But I’ve sometimes waited until a new page appears if I’ve put a lot of thought into a post. It’s rare but I’ve done it once or twice.

It’s probably a little churlish to call that “gaming the system”.

I mean it's exactly what you are doing, it's just so innocuous to wait to a new page that it's just a choice you made. It doesn't hurt the conversation

But adding filters and pushing "most liked" comments to the top will absolutely be gamed to be the most "famous" instead of just commenting and having conversation.

 

[Mr Reasonable]

Obviously somewhat defined by the subject being discussed but as far as I can tell, a significant number of people read around a third of the first post (or even just the title) and then reach for the same reaction gifs they always use, despite it having been posted on 5 pages by 16 people already.

I'm not sure many people are reading replies at the top of any page, so probably no need to worry.

 

[Mr Reasonable]

But adding filters and pushing "most liked" comments to the top will absolutely be gamed to be the most "famous" instead of just commenting and having conversation

Definitely this would happen - it'd also encourage a monoculture where only the most agreed with are visible.

Really, if people want that, just search the subject you're interested in via the trending tab on Twitter.

 

[BigDeadFreak]

Reddit has always seemed like such a jumbled up mess to me. I'll go on it if I have to (ie, if there is a specific piece of information I'm after and that is the only place I can find it) but I would never use it regularly. I've always prefered forums.

 

[k_trout]

but, but....causality

 

[Pegasus Actual]

I have noticed that my posts do die at the end of the page but I haven't quite sunk to the level of sniping 'top of the page' status.

But let's face it, if ya want visibility, or reactions... you don't want to snipe page 2, you want to snipe post 2, and make it pithy... shit on the thread in as few words as possible. Congrats. FIRE EMOJI FIRE EMOJI!

 

[Jeeves]

Reddit has always seemed like such a jumbled up mess to me. I'll go on it if I have to (ie, if there is a specific piece of information I'm after and that is the only place I can find it) but I would never use it regularly. I've always prefered forums.

Yeah, Reddit is alright if you're looking for an answer to a specific question or to get an idea of a general consensus, but as far as anything else goes it's an awful format. Very bewildered that it became the dominant forum site.

Seems like ever since smartphones brought the Internet to the normie masses, those masses have consistently chosen the worst websites/content formats to support.

 

[AJUMP23]

If people don’t get to see my clever reply because the page rolled over I feel sorry for them. Poor people not able to get a sensible chuckle.

Not a problem that needs solving.