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

[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!"