I took out the trash today, and I'm on fire

[venta]

Bloomin' 'eck. In an attempt to be down with the kids, I have bravely attempted to interact with the Facebook page that an ex-member created for my dance team. She told me the password when she left, but every time I've logged in, I've immediately run away screaming.

Today I have boldly grasped the nettle, accepted some friend requests, updated my status, and even commented and liked some stuff. Holy crap, it's confusing.

Also: Usenet had cracked comment-threading well over two decades ago. Why do we still have to put up with an impenetrable jumble of comments? It's like the Ancient Brits deciding when the Romans left that they didn't want any truck with this foreign-fangled central heating nonsense, thank you very much.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001767268566, by the way, for people who are into that kind of stuff.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

I should, in fairness, have added that I only managed all of them above because a colleague came and leaned over my shoulder and told me where to find stuff.

If you can imagine trying to explain to your grandmother how to operate a PVR, the conversation was a bit like that...

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

It's ok, they didn't know what they were doing either; I gather one's meant to make a 'page' rather than a 'personal profile' for that sort of thing (unless you want the privacy of a 'group'). That way, people can follow it without you having to accept friend requests.

Good news is you can apparently now convert it.

Oi, where'd LJ put the 'preview' button? I want to test my links before I hit post...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had noticed that "Mabel Gubbins Rapper" seems to be a person. Had no idea how to covert it, though, so thanks for the link. Will read. I wonder what happens to all my friends...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Reading the comments on that link haven't really made me want to do it! Sounds like the 'Page' is extremely unuseful, doesn't allow much interaction, etc.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

So far as I can tell you can still do status updates, post links and images, and maintain image galleries.. Not sure how they work with event creation/invites; I seem to get most of my event invitations from humans, but many of them are from people I've not friended who I'm assuming are admins of 'pages' that I've 'liked.'

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

is sounding a lot like wordpress so far. :)

(Hi Venta, I've spent the week introducing myself to Wordpress & converting an old CMS I've been working on. It seems like a handy platform if you want a blog/CMS, with optional comments, and maybe one other function for which there is a plug-in. There are gazillions of plug-ins. I expect Wordpress doesn't handle conversations as well as LJ, alas)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. LJ comment notification seems to be stuffed again. Excellent.

[uitlander]

It's like the Ancient Brits deciding when the Romans left that they didn't want any truck with this foreign-fangled central heating nonsense, thank you very much.

More likely that they couldn't work out how to use the system because i) the manuals were in latin, and ii) no-one left could read anyway.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Also: Usenet had cracked comment-threading well over two decades ago.

No, no, you're misunderstanding how things work on the internet.

0) Some new type of application is needed.
1) Some beardy Scandinavian makes a text-only version which does everything perfectly but is bastard hard to use and virtually undocumented.
2) Five years later, some student puts a menu-driven front end onto the original, making it semi-usable. A couple of obscure features are lost.
3) Someone in California writes a new (still free) version from scratch. It isn't as good, but has a graphical UI, so people actually use it. Lots of the more powerful features are now gone, but nobody much cares because nobody used the older versions.
4) A startup company forms to make a commercial version. It's objectively worse than all previous versions apart from being really shiny and having a non-zero marketing budget. It gets some press coverage and suddenly it has 10M users.
5) Industry pundits declare the application to be important, so competitors enter the market. Almost all useful features are stripped out and actively annoying stuff aimed at "monetization" are added.
6) Time magazine and The Economist finally notice the application and declare it to be the future of the human race. People's pets and grandmothers start creating accounts. The resulting vast system is useless for anything except propagating itself.

So yes, Usenet > BBS > LiveJournal > FaceBook > Twitter. The only question is what the next even-more-useless system will look like.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Or possibly: all these systems are equally useless, but you harbor nostalgic delusions as to their usefulness roughly in proportion to how old they are.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It's not an age thing, because G+ comes second after LJ.

Look, someone's done proper science to prove it and everything: SCIENCE!

;-)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people (crucially, the people who design comment systems, and the people they use as proxies for the user), actively oppose threaded comments. It's not that they don't know how to implement them, it's that for whatever reason they prefer lots of separate single threads, rather than one indefinitely-branching giant.

[(Anonymous)]

But it doesn't result in separate single threads. It results in one long single thread, where half the comments are things like "Yes LOL I agree" and you just have to guess which of the preceeding comments they are LOLing at and agreeing with.

Not all the time, of course - unthreaded is fine for relatively short spates of comments, or threads where everyone is replying to the original post.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er, that was me.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I think that in some fairly important sense it doesn't matter which of the previous comments they LOL.

Other than that I agree, there's often some structure that gets lost in a single comment thread. If the thread is short this doesn't matter, so it comes down to how long the designers think discussions will run for. Plus the fact that they don't care what happens in the small proportion of threads that (1) are long, and (2) contain more than one overlapping non-trivial conversation.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do agree with the spirit of your original comment. But everyone knows that on the internet "an alternative way of doing something" is just the polite form for "eye-meltingly wrong, wrong I tells ya!"

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I remember when I started using places like LJ and Slashdot over 10 years ago, I didn't even think anything of the threading - that was just normal, and what one would surely expect from any kind of discussion interface. How things turned out is rather sad.

The other problem on Facebook I think is not just that it's unthreaded, but all the comments to all posts are shown on a single page, with no longer any opportunity to open in a separate page. I can see that for your average response to a Facebook "I just ate breakfast. Posted from my phone" type status updates, this is better. But not for groups with discussions hundreds of comments long... (Now that I think about it, I'm sure that Facebook used to have a groups format that was better for discussions. Still probably unthreaded, but at least meant separate posts and their comments could be viewed on separate pages.)

I could even forgive the argument of trying to simplify things, but webpages like Facebook seem hideously overcomplex, both in terms of what gets thrown at me as a user, and the system requirements to view the webpage (I'm sure I could view Slashdot with hundreds of threaded comments on a 64MB machine, but now it seems people are having to upgrade from phones that actually have more memory, just to keep up with Facebook).