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

[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).