An upgrade overnight has seen the introduction of “real” threaded comments on Digg.
The new comment system includes proper tiering, response per comment and improved visual navigation.
The upgrade did not roll out without a hitch, Digg founder Kevin Rose posted that the new upgrade caused an outage and that at least temporarily, Digg was rolled back to its pre-upgraded form.
Potium reports that after initially offering hidden thread replies, the feature has apparently now been dropped with all comments being immediately viewable.
Threaded comments done properly, work well. Anyone who has tried to read the thread at Slashdot knows how difficult reading threaded comments can be. The Digg take on real threaded comments appears to deliver results that are accessible, easy to read and follow.
Agree completely, done right these comment systems work a dream but done wrong ala’ slashdot go terribly wrong.
I’ve tinkered with digg abit and it seems to be leaning towards the right way.
Perhaps TECHCRUNCH should experiment with one - and enhance it by adding alternating Pastel colors as backgrounds for each full comment thread
White, Pale Green and Pale light Gray for example. Does anyone find it convenient to see commenters refer to previous commenters by #
With all due respects, I find amusing that a site gets a “threaded comment system” and that becomes a newsworthy item. Of course, Digg itself is a newsworthy item, so it’s expected that any change/improvement gets attention, but if you think about it, is this something really newsworthy? Threaded comments are, well, something that has been in place ever since the USENET or even earlier. Digg - and for some reason, most blogs - are the only outlets that seem to resist something so naturally basic and simple to develop and implement.
Of course, one could entertain the thought of the unfortunate deployment of the feature and last-minute rollback until they get it right, but I’m not going to be the one to critizise them for that - I hope they can work it out and do a fine upgrade next time around.
Now all Digg needs is some comments worth reading.
Their old comments system is incredibly broken in the sense that you will read replies to dugg-down (= invisible) comments. So a typical conversation in Digg comments will read like this:
A: [dugg down, invisible]
B: I disagree with that argument, because 1) the Israelis never (etc. etc.)
A: [dugg down, invisible]
B: That, too, is somewhat misleading, considering that Israelis are actually (etc.)
Naturally, you can expand any hidden comment or toggle with the display options, but this is the default view if you don’t invest in “usability optimizing” the site yourself… and it will make sure that you won’t understand the conversation.
The down-digging of comments is broken for another reason: comments are often dugg-down because someone agrees with the opinion stated in them, not because the comment is irrelevant/ spammy. In a recent discussion on the middle-east conflict, whatever your stance on this, that became awfully clear:
http://digg.com/politics/Here_.....om_Lebanon
For instance:
A: “Israel - Educated, Productive, Hard-Working people with a thriving economy that is NOT dependent on one commodity (oil)
Rest of the Middle East - Mostly uneducated, unproductive and lazy people that spend their time filling their children’s heads with hate. If it weren’t for oil they would be living in caves….oh, wait….they ARE living in caves.” (+31 diggs, comment is visible)
B: “To blame one side, and not the other is not intellectually, nor philosophically, justified.
Arabs and Muslims, and Jews and Christians have all taken pot shots at each other - all have blood on their hands.” (-26 diggs, comment turned invisible)
Again, whatever your stance on this issue, I find it ridiculous that someone only pointing out “hey, there may be another side to this issue!” is heavily dugg-down and rendered invisible on the site.
A new technical feature, like real nested threads (simple threading was already available), won’t help this deeper problem.
Edit: “because someone agrees …” = “because someone disagrees …”
RBA
if Kevin Rose scratched his arse in public it would probably be news, and yes, I’d probably write about it
I know you would Duncan, and I’d probably read it and hammer you for making me read it
RBA
lol.
May be its time for TechCrunch also to have a threaded comment system. What say, Mike/Duncan?
@SEARCH ENGINES WEB (comment #1442932)
I agree with you completely, and I really just wanted to respond to you so I could show your comment number.
I still think that it doesn’t really change much. I haven’t at least seen much of a change. I really still don’t like the stair-step comment system. I’m not really sure what would be a good alternative though. An easy way to collapse threads though would be nice.
Those SOBs banned me for digging too many stories!
@matthew
they banned me too!
@#0
Add them here too, please. Contact mashable if you can’t figure it out.
Why is this little upgrade in the frontpage? How many sites do upgrades and don’t get so much attention as Digg? I do like Digg, but boy.. it is starting to be a Marketing machine for the media.
yeah -
- SLASHDOT Please / take some direction from digg
( I just thought I was too stupid for slashdot ) :/
-RB
Never Dugg, never will.
So if they already had threaded comments, what’s really changed? Is it just the addition of the comment box directly under the comment you’re replying to? I don’t see too much else different when I look at the screenshots taken by potium.
How is Slashdot’s threading bad? It works perfectly, IMO.
I don’t see any threaded comments on any stories (other than the second layer), and I don’t see a way to reply to any comments other than the first layer of them. Huh?
Lastly, I agree with others - this isn’t news, even if I did like digg. If digg’s userbase was older than 10y/o on average, maybe I’d go there once in a while. As is, I can’t stand it.
I just discovered MySpace News. Did anyone know about this? It’s very similar to Digg, but a lot easier to use.
is this really ground breaking in web 2.0?
there are many interesting things happening in technology, why do not i see them here?
Here you have a “Digg style” just for automotive news based in RBA´s Corank
http://allaboutcars.corank.com
I happened to stumble upon the new comment system last night and was not impressed. I am glad to see the old one back.
They were only loading some of the comments initially and then you would have to make an AJAX request for the rest of the comment thread, I guess this saves bandwidth but makes the comments harder to read quickly, especially since the AJAX request didn’t seem to be working too well…-Metagg
What about adding VIDEO comments on TechCrunch!!!
now you just need to get the users to figure out how to reply to the right comment, rather than just replying to the first comment so that their comment show first on the page.
This is good.
Funny, they should just copy the threaded commenting system reddit has had for over a year…
It works pretty damn well over there.
Is it news worthy people ask? Probably not.
But my question would be - what benefit does it really give to anyone???
I’ve heard that if you use digg you pretty much get a few visits to your site and thier there to judge you.
Example: Techcrunch gets a lot of criticts ….. that mention grips that have little to do with the news story……..
It makes more sense this way, but it’s a little frustrating to constantly be clicking to view comments especially since it isn’t instantaneous.
Granted, it’s nice to not have everyone just reply to the first comment so there’s would be at the top of the page.
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