| |
|
personally, i've felt that the "today's active topics" button, the "quote post" button, the email notification, and the ability to see all of a thread while replying have made for me a very efficient barbelith that allows the highest quality of interaction with the community and intellectual engagement with the threads specifically and the board as a whole. can we at least, in the spirit of barbelith, debate these changes and the presumably well-thought out reasons for them? i don't mean to be saying think the changes are wrong, but i do want to come to understand how they make the boards potential stronger.
Ok - let's start at the beginning. SOME of the changes to the board are NOT designed to make everyone's lives easier. In fact quite the opposite - some of the changes are designed to put in brakes, to help encourage people to post in the spirit of the board rather than in the easiest way possible. This is why - for example - there aren't immediate updated links for the Conversation and Policy on the front page - we're attempting to encourage people not to immediately flock to the easy conversations. This may or may not work, but it HAS BEEN THOUGHT THROUGH. If it doesn't work we will change it, but we won't change it without seeing if it does work. This is experimental community building we're doing here, we have to have the space for some mistakes.
The 'Today's Active Topics' button again encourages people to respond VERY quickly to a thread - and it does have its benefits as well, which is a rapid sense of what's going on around the board - but this incredibly quick replying mechanism may be a bad thing for the level of conversation. So removing it was designed to act as some kind of a brake. I'm not saying that we don't need something like it, because we clearly do, but we need to think about what kind of process might be more useful. Would it be MORE useful to be able to keep track of threads that YOU'VE contributed to, or that you think are particularly INTERESTING rather than all of them? Would that keep them more on track?
Finally the topic review thing. This one I have to take exception to. Loading up the whole topic again seems to be a completely unnecessary waste of bandwidth for most replies - and I simply do not see why people can't open another window and read in one while typing in the other if they need to see the whole thing in front of them... The current model provides easy context on exactly the part of the conversation you're involved in - it's close to the top of the page so you don't have to scroll all around the place to see who you're replying to etc. I really don't see the problem.
My comment is not that there aren't things from the old board that couldn't be useful, simply that I can't help thinking that it would be better and more interesting if rather than just recapitulate these old ideas, we all thought of ways we could reintroduce their functionality BUT MAKE IT BETTER! MORE USEFUL! That's all! |
|
|
