Two things LJ could do to vastly improve conversations

[andrewducker]

1) Rather than collapse comments at all, ever, go to multiple pages sooner. I've had long conversations going on on my journal where multiple people are commenting on each other, and the second the comments were collapsed the conversations stopped. Oh, a few threads staggered on, with people replying back and forth, but the general melee finished the second people couldn't browse the entire thing. It's a terrible way to display information and kills the general discussion stone dead.

2) Contra-intuitively, remove the option in comment emails which takes you straight to "reply to this comment". If you forced people to go to the thread starting at that comment instead then they'd see the whole discussion, note what points had already been responded to by other people, and pick things up there. Instead, what you get is people responding back and forth in a dialogue, not taking in the wider context.

Comments

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I agree with point one entirely. That's something that pisses me off tremendously. I've never reached a second page in comments and yet I've hit 100 comments on an entry before now-and trying to read back through them is damn near impossible!

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

By 'I' I of course mean 'my journal'.

Look, it's late and I've had a lot of gin...

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Agree with 1).

Re: 2), I think a link to comments is good, but it should open the whole page and take you to the linked comment, in context.

[andrewducker]

True - giving a comment box isn't the problem, it's the removal of context.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

I believe that the issue with (1) is server load from userpics. It's something that's come up frequently before.

[andrewducker]

It is indeed. I didn't realise the problem was with userpics.

I'd much rather they dropped userpics than folded up the comments.

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

There's a greasemonkey (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5552) script that will dynamically unfold threads using AJAX or some such jiggery-pokery. I don't use it myself as my PII laptop is already groaning under the few Firefox extensions I do have.

[andrewducker]

I have that greasemonkey script. Sadly, it only seems to work about 50% of the time.

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

bah, people should use the thread links more. the whole comments subscription system seems interesting enough, but the mechanism for it feels rather clunky. i still think they need to re-evaluate their existing features for usability rather than add new functionality in a seemingly feature creep style. ajax (and other such systems) ftw.

[andrewducker]

I have the greasemonkey unthreader - sadly it doesn't work all the time for me.

Amusingly, they seem to have added that feature to add usability...

[cx650.livejournal.com]

Point 1
Totally agreed.
Point 2
There is the choice of 'view all comments'.

[andrewducker]

I know there's a choice of view all comments. But people don't tend to use it. They go straight for "I have a reply, let me speak!" - which reduces the quality of the conversation. Which is why I'd like to see it removed. (Or changed so that you're shown the rest of the thread as well).

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

your threads are too long to read in their entirety

Re

[http://users.livejournal.com/phentermine_/]

good

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

*nods* I really wish there was some "unthread this page" option you could link on, so for the most part it would save on bandwidth but if you really wanted to see everything all sprawled out you could.

I wish there was some way in the email responses to "go directly to my comment but still be able to see all the other comments too" so when a response page did get busy enought that finding your thread is a pain, you could still see the others around it when you loaded up the page.

Also if I click on the first message in a tree of threads I'd like to see that whole thread at least. I don't want to have to click on every single response in a thread to be able to read everything that isn't from the initial first line of discussion.