Hey, I want to explain some of the design on the main feed of the new community center.
Our intention is to act as a hybrid between a more modern newsfeed and a traditional forum. Right now, users can click on titles to go into the post page, which has its own shareable URL. For this to work properly, there needs to be a very clear distinction, product design-wise, between what's accessible in the feed and what's accessible from the post page.
For now, the main distinction is comments - clicking on the comments icon under a post in the feed takes you to the single post page. We did this for 2 main reasons:
1) A single post can have an unlimited number of comments - there are existing threads in the CS forum that have 1000+ replies. It would be cumbersome to show everything in the feed.
2) We want to encourage slightly more thoughtful, long-form replies than is conducive with the traditional Facebook newsfeed. We think that only allowing comments when clicked into a post will encourage this. The rough analogy here is Quora, which mostly encourages you to click into a question in order to write an answer.
Thoughts?
