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...

[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]

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.

[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).