Help "invent" comments again

Question

Social media

At the moment, the Internet is dominated by two ways of displaying comments: linear and tree-like.

The disadvantage of a linear display is that it is not clear who is responsible to whom. Partially solved by adding the ability to quote, but this creates a new problem - tags for quotes (for ordinary users, this is straining + duplicating content).

Disadvantages of tree view - limited depth of nesting, i.e. with a large number of comments, it is likely to hit the edge of the screen + the need to turn up / down if the top-level comment is no longer visible.

So, the question is: how to implement a comment system without quotes and without a tree view, but so that it is always easy to understand what the comment refers to? Or how to solve the problem with the depth of the tree (limiting the depth is not suitable)?

Maybe someone read about some new approaches, methods? We need a collective mind :)

I would be extremely grateful for any ideas, tips, links on the topic.

Answer 1

Tree with linear branches.
For example, why would two people leading a discussion between themselves need a default tree? A linear structure will suffice, branches should appear only when they are really needed and defined by the user.
Total, linear structure by default, plus a button for each post to "select to a separate branch"

Answer 2

Well, if neither this nor that, then the principle of q & a on Habré. Wood with a depth of 1 step.

Answer 3

mb upon reaching the right edge of the screen - expand the subsequent nested ones to the left side?
and when moving away from the edge - again to the right :)

Answer 4

Here's another idea for you on how to get rid of the right edge of the screen.
Most often, in those places of the tree where the nesting is large, the left half of the screen is empty. In such cases, you can make automatic horizontal scrolling. Or do horizontal scrolling at the moment when the user hovered over a comment that is not fully visible.

Answer 5

In fact, there is no right edge of the screen and there are no nesting depth limits (let's omit the internal limits of browser rendering engines). Do something like overflow:visible and that's it. There is no need to fit yourself into the boundaries of the block where comments are displayed, just step over them.

Answer 6

By the way, now I remembered one feature that appeared relatively recently in browsers and thunderbird:
the image is initially displayed in the size of the screen, and on hover we see the magnifying glass icon with (+)
click - we get the original size,
click again - it is reduced to the size of the screen,
nothing concrete yet , but in principle it can be somehow shifted to the comment tree

Answer 7

Maybe something like a tree with a plus ala the old explorer in Windows.
Comment, the answers to it are hidden under the plus. By pressing the plus, all comments on this comment are opened, etc.

Answer 8

Organize in tabs, like in ICQ/Skype/Irk or other IM: Zoom to the tree, new comments are large and easy to read, and old ones shrink (the older, the smaller and dimmer), if necessary, unfold with a mouse scroll. The chain of answers does not go from top to bottom, but from right to left. Each thread comment looks like a chain from right to left, the user sees new comments immediately, and after the old ones along the chain, you need to scroll to the right.
[User1 +2] [User2 & User 3 +6]
Коммен... Комментарий от....


Answer 9

Maybe like Google Voice?

Answer 10

When you hover over comment A, make a pop-up window with the comment B that was written by A.

Answer 11

2 more thoughts:
do not use an offset, but mark the nesting with a color
or do not display the nested ones as a collapsed tree at all, but turn them into a link with information about who answered there and how many answers (etc.)
when we click on the link - it is drawn by javascript the window in the middle of the screen, which displays the hidden tree
Esc - close this window,
because when we want to read the contents of a long branch, we are not interested in anything other than this branch,
it is logical to untie it from the general tree and show it in full screen, and not press it to the right edge - on the left a lot of space wasted

Answer 12

Somehow I played with an interesting visualization technology - each next nesting element in the tree is rotated along the Y axis by a certain degree (well, in general, the most difficult thing, hello css3 and webgl), so after 4-5 nesting we get a rotation of 90 and then we no longer see the perpendicular us space.
When you try to view the data, the whole tree is spinning and you can see what is there.
You can also not rotate, but shift along the z coordinate (hello transform3d again)
Why - because going into deep branches usually means that people are discussing something of their own there, and these are often completely separate discussions.
Option two - deep branches are converted into separate branches, for this, a separate button for the moderator / author appears at the top node, under which “many”

Answer 13

I had an idea, something like this:

• nested blocks, slightly indented, with each level of nesting the background gets darker
• when scrolling down, the comment that is being discussed is fixed from above - recursively to the very first comment of the branch.

That is, with a view tree:

one.
1.1.
1.2.
1.2.1
1.3
1.3.1
1.3.2
1.3.3

when scrolling to the very bottom will be visible

one
1.3
1.3.3

The upper levels will have to be partially hidden if they are long, and there are many other subtleties, but in general, if it can be implemented, I think it will be nice.

Answer 14

limited nesting depth, i.e. with a large number of comments, it is likely to hit the edge of the screen

And who forces to display all nested subcomments at once? LiveJournal does a good job in this regard (deploys on demand), but usability is a little underdeveloped, often you have to deploy a lot, and for some reason this deployment in place (via AJAX) is not available everywhere.

Answer 15

2ch.so/pr/
And see how the threads and the answers in them are arranged. You don't have to invent anything.

Answer 16

But what if we make the selection of branches color?