Verbiage: Hierarchical vs Top-Down forums

Journal Chacham's Journal: Verbiage: Hierarchical vs Top-Down forums 3

Journal by Chacham on Sunday January 13, 2019 @03:26PM

I've been hanging out on reddit, all while hating it. I've known for years it was a cesspool and avoided it, until eventually TIL pulled me in. I have noone to blame but myself.

Sometime back, Storium popped up on Kickstarter. I loved it so much i pledged $40 and played it quite a bit. I got a lot of time to let my imagination run free, and it was fun; it really was a good forum for creative outlet. But there was no forum. I asked the owner if there was to be one or for permission to create one, and he asked me not to, and pointed me to reddit. I accepted his request and eventually gave up on Storium. I figured, no forum, no real product. Storium was the type of product that needed a decent forum to support it, and reddit was a cesspool.

Traditionally, forums were hierarchical. The reason was simple. There were so many divisions or subdivisions for what you want, that you ought to find the right one for your question. Hierarchies help with finding the right place because it is like a flowchart. All that works well on paper.

Windows 95 created the Start Menu and replaced the Program Manager interface with a hierarchical one. It was a great idea, but noone used it. Everyone stuffed what they needed in the Start Menu, there were no established subgroups, and start menus everywhere were not navigable. Microsoft could have had a place for everything, but they did not. They never fixed the problem, instead they rolled with it. What did they do? They added a search bar for the Start Menu. It was as if they said, dump your program hewre, then search for it when you need it. They copied Apple yet once again.

When i used Windows, i had my own rules about the start menu. In general, no more then 5 folders per level, and everything used often had a hotkey. I was able to find or start nearly any program with seconds, simply because it had a hotkey, and the ones that did not, i was able to find quickly. To me, that was what the start menu was for. People would see my organization and compliment me, but noone would copy it. Even more, when they tried using my system it would take them a while to find things. They were not used to my way of thinking.

My takeaway was, that most people don't care about how they get their program started, they just want to memorize it and move on, and for the ones that care about a decent method, it is not usually worth the effort to design and maintain. Fwiw, Debian implemented a half decent one in their menu, so a company doing it for many people seems to be acceptable. This left people with unkempt menus and a simple search to find it. I hated it when that was introduced, because it was "wrong," even refusing to use that lazy feature. I use it now on other people's systems, it just is.

Reddit and other top down forums follow the same idea. There's no reason to split into a hierarchy, because searches will find most things. And, for people who want to see everything, the top down approach lets them see what is new. But that only helps if you know what to search for, or you want top watch everything. What if you don't? Ideas came up for tags or pseudo-hierarchies. None really caught on, and a simple top down style is the new approach.

Over time, i realized that like many things, forums could be split into three groups. Groups where only recent things truly matter and a history is kept just in case (like a help forum), top down is the best approach. Conversely, forums where multiple items are discussed or historical discussions are still of value, hierarchical is best. But for forums that do not cleanly fit into either, it comes down to personal preference. If that is true, reddit's TIL or many of their help forums are best as top down, because historiocal posts don't mean much. But r/jung, where the same questions are asked over an over again, would fare better hierarchically.

Storium had both. It was for people to discuss what they were doing (top down) and for discussion of how the system works and is best used (hierarchical). They preferred top down, i preferred hierarchical, hence the conflict. Meh. I'm making much too big a deal over it.

I guess that's it. That's what i wanted to say. I admit that the top-down style has its merits. But that they replaced the hierarchical style instead of adding to it, just replaced one broken system with another one.

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