I’m not sure what you’re saying.
Yes, I choose not to read Wanderthread, but if things were different, I would gladly read it.
If nobody wants to know my opinion on this, why ask it?
Is my opinion somehow wrong?
Your opinion isn’t “wrong” and that’s not what I said or even implied.
I simply don’t get what’s so difficult about picking and choosing which topics we want to engage in… or, barring any disinterest in jumping into a thread with a ‘daunting’ comment count, starting one’s own post based upon the inspiration you got from someone else’s comments.
That’s often how conversations begin in 3D life, organically, on the spur of the moment, because something someone said sparked an interest.
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Well, things don’t have to be fun to be engaging. Serious topical conversations can be engaging as well.
It’s really kind of a non-issue. Waetherman’s current OP at the top of this thread serves as his opinion, which I share: if a thread gets too long and unwieldy, that can (without anyone meaning to) discourage newbies or latecomers from catching up. That’s all. Sometimes a conversation is fine if only the initial participants stay with it.
But it’s something to keep in mind when starting a topic that might want to stay easily accessible.
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Well, of course not; but most people seem to actively like having fun, so that’s just one viable option for encouraging more engagement.
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Oh, undoubtedly. But my point was that W sensed a minor barrier to entry when it comes to the long-ass threads: catching up is a daunting proposition, and certain readers (among whose number I count myself) would feel somehow not-up-to-speed if we just hopped in and read the last 20 or 30 posts. There’s a sense that, not having read the whole damn thing, there’s a risk of piping up with what we think is a fresh contribution, only to be told that that point was already covered, like, days ago. So we stay out. Which, to a sensitive sort (among whose number I do not count myself) might feel unpleasantly exclusive.
But really: no existing thread need change at all. Nobody wants to upset anyone’s favorite pet applecarts! It just might be a valid point that keeping threads well-labeled and of reasonably manageable length (and not even all threads by any means; just most of the general-interest ones) might help encourage engagement.
Most of us who have run the Badass games have separated each weekly round by locking threads and starting a new one each round. Helps playability in the game, especially ones with upwards of 20 players, and also makes the game material easier to reference after the fact, which is sometimes both fun and useful. But that Banestorm game has been going on for months and months with just 2 long-ass threads: one for in-character narrative and one for technical back-and-forth. And that works fine for their purpose!
Still, all that said, this isn’t a crisis by any means. Just a point that I’m glad was raised.
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I think I found the problem… y’all are a bunch of completists! LOL
When I find a thread on a topic I like and its umpteen replies long… I’m not going to read it. I’ll skim like the last dozen or so comments, and follow any particular comment thread I like, but reading the whole thread? Oh hell no.
I’m still not sure I see a “problem” nor do i see a solution that won’t create a schism between those that see a problem and those that don’t…
/shrug
Happy Monday all!
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You should read our GURPS games here and at BB. We write well I think.
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I don’t do the games threads. 
I’m sure you all write well!
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Sometimes I can’t catch up with the long threads as well.
I’m behind a heavy firewall at work. I have to unblock the thread every few minutes, and when I unblock it a second time, I go right back where I started from the first time.
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As a new user, I wanted to comment on this.
I saw those posts and immediately went “nope!” after trying to read through them, in large part because I’m very much afraid that I will rehash something by accident that was already discussed.
I am trying, slowly, to get through them, and perhaps once I do I will feel more comfortable contributing, but yeah, it’s a lot to ask someone who comes to visit the site! Especially since it seems there aren’t many new discussions starting here (just tacking on to existing ones!)
Of course, perhaps that’s just fine? It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of new users here, anyway, so perhaps “designing for new blood” isn’t as important as how established folks feel in the long run?
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We’ll eventually need to court new users if we want this place to survive. A bunch of us still maintain a presence over at The Old Place for various reasons, not least of which the sheer number of participants there make for a very active bunch of conversations. I, myself, don’t comment or really even read there anymore, for reasons based upon the reasons this place exists at all, but I understand why several of us can’t resist the conversation over there.
I know waetherman eventually noped out of this place, but his stated goal of tying this BBS to an eyeball-attracting blog is still a good one (in fact, an increasingly necessary one, I believe). But in the short and long term, though we shouldn’t break up those long-ass conversational threads, we really do need to create more of the shorter, more focused and easily accessible threads, if we want users to stick around.
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I’m going to ask what I did last time this thread was active – why? Why not just read the last 20-30 posts so you know what’s up with the thread?
I mean, with shorter threads that means skipping more threads overall. It’s still the same number of posts to read.
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Wanderthread was basically created so that I could indulge my political news obsession without firehosing other threads.
Every day, I post the half-dozen or so things that catch my attention; there are a handful of people who regularly read the thread and occasionally post their own comments.
I’d be astonished if anyone read the whole thing from the start, unless they were really interested in day-by-day observations of US politics from six months ago.
Readers are appreciated and comments/discussion/argument are welcome, but I’m mostly writing for myself there.
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And threads like that certainly have value, especially for long-term… uh, subscribers, I guess I’d call 'em.
But I do think threads like that should be the exception, rather than the rule. A rather large fraction of the forum’s posts can be found in a handful of threads that each contain well over 200 posts. Some of them are just fun things (Counting, Memeversation, etc) that don’t require much time to scroll through, nor even particularly reward Absolute Completism. But others feel like they should be Categories rather than monolithic threads. Australian News, for example, or Our So-Called President, contain many links and stories and items, many of which might deserve their own threads and conversations, which would make them much easier to find and join.
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A technique I learned at the Other Place was to use the jump-to widget (on mobile, press the article counter in the lower right corner) and jump down to the last fifty or so. Pick it up there. If you hang around you’ll find links and refs back to the body and you’ll get to it all eventually.
My thread, Wanderthread, Marjins Þridus, etc., they work because they let us get things off our chest in a contiguous way. Other long threads exist for other reasons.
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Well, again, speaking as a new user, one assumes the posts are there to be read, though I know the twitter era has changed that a bit since no one is going to go back through thousands of tweets.
New users tend to have a fear of being told “We already discussed this!”, I suppose. Plus, old conversations tend to help get a feel for the folks in a conversation, since we don’t have the benefit of body language or other nonverbal cues to go on.
Does it really help a newbie in the end to read a whole thread? Probably not. Will I try anyway? You betcha!
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Just be certain that you take thorough notes because the final will be comprehensive.
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This discussion is repeating right now , but that’s cool, because discussions do that (and they already have, many times).
I’m thinking back to the old AOL/USENET forums, or even today’s software support forums. So long as someone showed reasonably that they did a search for a previous instance of a topic (assuming there was a search function, which we do have here), no-one was ever expected to read every single post on the off-chance someone had made it before – because no-one was expected to read everything.
And even if someone did complete that rather daunting task, no-one’s expected to memorize everything, nor would the readers of their posts be expected to have everything memorized. That’s why Vannevar Bush included the concept of links in “As We May Think” and Tim Berners-Lee implemented them.
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FWIW, if I find myself suddenly interested in a long thread I hadn’t read up to that point, and want to respond, I do a search for a keyword or two from what I want to say to see if they’ve been said before in the thread.
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