Post ordering

Overall I'm liking the look of the new forum - it's going to take a bit of getting used to but I can see it going great places.

There's just one thing I absolutely hate about it: you've got comments on threads in reverse chronological order! This makes reading any actual back-and-forth between people really, really awkward - I have to read the OP, then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, then work my way back up again...

Reverse chronological order works in situations where replies are pretty much independent of one other (so there's no back-and-forth) and it *can* work when you have threaded replies (like on the recipe pages), but it doesn't work here.

Guys, please please please... restore the flow of time to its natural direction

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Comments

Brendan_Lee_56950

I'm pretty sure you can select between "hot" and "new" at the top of every comment section

richard.fine

So you can - neither of those give chronological order though. If an 'Oldest' option were added, and made sticky across pages, that'd probably satisfy me.

(I realised that threaded comments *are* supported here, which makes things a little better, but it's still pretty common that a post will reference an earlier one without being an outright reply to it.)

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Yes, I understand your point and this is something we debated quite a bit internally. Basically, we've implemented Hot and New sorting, as Brendan pointed out, and the default Hot sorting is supposed to automatically surface more relevant comments on top so that you can read more interesting content immediately. I'll point out that Reddit has this style of threaded commenting and it seems to work well for conversations. So for posts and comment threads moving forward, hotness and nesting should work to maintain conversational flow. This is really important to do right though, and we'll be monitoring the situation closely and probably tweaking some things soon.

Secondly, threads imported from the old forum have Hot sorting turned off, which was a compromise we made to make sure that the old posts, which were in chronological order, didn't get jumbled by the Hotness algorithm. I agree though that it's tricky to read them in reverse chronology and will think about how to solve this.

Would love to hear any feedback on these thoughts.

Seth_Ratner_91225

I'm with Rich on this one. I don't think the nature of the chefsteps community blends well with the reddit model. Reddit is more like twitter, where everyone just yells their thoughts and in a day it's gone. A user only looks at a given post once, so the order of the comments doesn't matter. Here, the posts work more like conversations, and a user may come back many, many times to see new replies. Using the "hot" method means I have to scroll through everything to see if there's anything new, since some new content may not have been scored as high as other older content.

And for chronological, it's just weird to have to read from the bottom. Just my two cents.

richard.fine

(See what you did there? You referenced Brendan's comment, but yours isn't a reply to his. If this thread gets larger, your post might get separated from his, making it harder to know what you're referring to...)

"Hot is supposed to move more relevant comments on top" - I wasn't aware that there were a large number of less relevant comments being posted around here? One of the reasons ChefSteps is so awesome is because the SNR is so high - pretty much all the content the community posts is interesting, at least from my POV. When I read a thread I pretty much always read all of it. There are a few exceptions, like What's For Dinner, but only a few.

richard.fine

I agree. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it is about Reddit that makes it a poor match for ChefSteps but I think you've nailed it.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Thanks for the thoughts. We'll think about this.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Isn't that user error though? If you are replying to someone like I am to you right now you should be doing it directly in-line with the previous comment you are referring to.

richard.fine

Maybe, but sometimes a post needs to reference multiple other posts (and it can't be a reply to all of them), and more importantly, good design is robust against user error.

Take Andrew's post in this thread as an example - he implemented the system, so he knows how it's supposed to work...