Dragan Espenschied
activity timestamp 3 years ago

I have a suggestion for Bonfire:


@BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback


Bonfire does a lot of great things with single posts:

  • show them in a "timeline" view as they occur
  • according to who I follow
  • according to what topics I follow
  • according to the instance I'm on
  • personal messages
  • show them in a threaded view highlighting semantic connections
  • according to filters, such as searches for tags, or taking into account blocked users


It is everything that you'd want, but also a bit much. In particular, after seeing the threaded view once, I'm always having the impression that I am missing something when looking at a post. Bonfire allows for quite a rich context for every post, but most views present single posts. They might be parts of threads that I haven't visited before and therefore might misinterpret. I have to click on every post to see it in thread view to understand if I'm indeed missing something.

It would be great if each post would feature some information about its context. For instance, it could show a mini-map of the thread, or display metadata like "part of a conversation started 2022-09-19, 4 participaring users, 34 messages (3 unread)"

If threads were more of a basic unit users would interact with (rather than single posts), it could also be possible to mute a thread. For instance when all your friends start to talk about some sporting event that you're not interested in or whatever.

Things like that could encourage better discussions, as in slower, less repetitive, more interaction with other thread participants.
ivan
activity timestamp 3 years ago

or alternatively we can leave the feed as it is, but showing more context when the user click on the reply icon.

Rather than just showing the replied to post above the composer box, we can show a more contexted set of information related to the thread (We can merge the read discussion and the reply icon together, so that when you click on the reply icon it shows the thread and load the position where you want to reply to ?)
ivan
activity timestamp 3 years ago

this makes a lot of sense, especially since our thread UX is not the flat standard one, when a user replies from the timeline, they don't know in which layer of the tree they're replying to.

There is always a balance to find between overwhelming the feed showing too much info per single post and not giving enough context to the user (as it is now in bonfire and most of the social networks i'm aware of)
Dragan Espenschied
activity timestamp 3 years ago

My sense is that commercial social networks have a high interest in providing minimal context. Minimal context increases engagement because users cannot figure out what has already been said in a discussion. Discussions most of the time look as if everything is still very "open" even if hundreds of messages already exist. The most "successful" posts on commercial social media work best without requiring any context. Such posts can be easily algorithmically processed, and presented to users at any time in any other context. Even the slightest improvement in that era would make bonfire stand out. The current nested thread view is already a great contribution.