The best way to have complex discussions?

we started searching for a tool specifically built for complex discussions. We found none

This was basically solved in Usenet, more specifically, in news reader software. You had a clearly arranged threaded view (you could see the thread structure of as many as 50 postings on a single screen), with unread threads and unread postings highlighted, and pressing Tab jumped to the next unread posting. Unread status was per posting/comment, not by time. Many more conveniences for quick navigation, filtering, and so on.

All newer discussion platforms have been a step back in terms of efficiency of use and ability for deep, long running discussions. Initially due to web browser limitations (though nowadays that shouldn’t be much of a problem anymore), and later due to mobile touch interfaces (still poses some difficulties).

The best way IMO is still (somehow) a 4chan-style linear timeline, with heavy UI affordances to make following >-ref’s simple. This application (and HN, and Reddit) go with the “threads on threads on threads” tree, which is awful for when you want to respond to a specific subset of replies to the same parent comment at once.

How could it be improved? I say embrace the DAG nature of the beast and allow for selecting a specific set of parent nodes a comment is in reply to, and, importantly, make that set editable so when some other person comes in and replies to a comment with a topic that has already been discussed, you can link your earlier replay to that new parent without needing a “see my reply here” comment.

In CQ2, there's no mess of unorganised comments — create threads inside threads so that each thread stays on topic and organised.

Wish this could work, but my experience is that getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people.

IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse.

The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.

As much as they have a bad reputation, I think the image board style of comments is the best for these kinds of discussions.

Each post has a unique ID, and you can insert links to other posts in the text of your post. Then each post is given a set of back-links showing all posts that quote it. In this way, posts form a hyperlinked network that you can traverse relatively easily, while also being displayed in chronological order.

I've found this quite effective for long-form discussion. My only complaint would be that structure is needlessly limited. It would be better if posts simply formed a connected graph of content which you could ask the website to present in arbitrary ways.

This project reminds me a lot of Xanadu in its layout. I don't really think this complex of an interface is necessary. In fact, it might get in the way of productive discussion. I find that the constraints on other mediums (character limits, reply depth, etc.) often aid clarity. The transmission of information between people is fundamentally linear, and so you are pretty much always just going to be composing short essays and exchanging them as the basis of any real discussion. Complicated features seem like they would obstruct this.

Instead of a long post like that I wished they had a realistic example I could experiment with.

I think those investing efforts and time developing participatory democracy systems, are trying to solve these kind of communication and reasoning problems.

Examples: https://www.noemamag.com/tomorrows-democracy-is-open-source/

and

decidim.org

Visuals are the big missing piece. Any text-based discussion will build different visions in each reader's head. Often, everyone agrees on the text description, and then, when a designer draws a picture, everyone disagrees because they weren't really aligned, they all assumed everyone shared their own personal vision. I love the concept of building a better way of discussing things asynchronously, but I would put visuals (images, videos, diagrams) at the center of that forum and overcome the biggest issue with visuals -- that they are often hard to make for many people.

All the mentioned alternatives tie comments to a particular user and relate comments (responses) to other comments. Instead, the conversation could be focused on the topic of discussion, which is often best described as a set of visuals describing the concept. Rather than responding to comments, you could organize comments around the associated component of the problem as it is described visually. This would allow multiple individuals to support a concept, rather than just amplifying or criticizing a particular user's comment. This might even help avoid defensive behavior since the problem is the focus rather than a particular person's comment.

Google Wave again?

Did anyone else find this post confusing? To me this looks like a sideways change, not a forward one.

This feels a lot like Google Docs's commenting system, and seems to have the same issue in that it requires a lot of clicks to open each side thread one at a time. It's hard to "finish" digesting a series of replies at once.

I think I'd prefer Discourse's current linear format, where all new replies are stacked at the bottom (but ideally with a quoted snippet for context). It makes catching up on updates easier, since you just keep scrolling and reading like any other document.

IMO it often isn't super useful to go through each individual comment piecemeal unless you're working on a document together (ie tracking changes and commenting on them). Otherwise, being able to read through several comments at once and THEN replying to the whole of them in a summary can save everyone time.

It's the infinite back and forth on every minor point that makes long form discussion impossible to track. That's the sort of thing that probably IS better dealt with in real time, over Slack or a call, and then summarized briefly back in the main convo. You don't need to have every sentence recorded in the main convo, just something like "Re: point 4, after talking it through with Joe and Jane, we all agreed it would be best to use blah blah".

I find that as soon as you introduce threads as a form of organization, you've already lost the plot with 75% of users.

One may argue that Facebook has threads, but I don't actually think people know how to use them. They simply click reply, say their piece, and then it's lost forever. They have no concept of structure.

How does CQ2 compare to Zulip?

I like the concept. What I would want to see is a clear path to reaching consensus documents.

Comments-upon-comments makes it hard to get an idea of what the overall consensus is. You pretty much need to read all of it and explore every comment thread to understand what are the generally agreed parts and what are the more controversial takes(?).

Maybe some hybrid between this and Wikipedia?

How is this tool different from https://quip.com/? I don't see any features that set it aside except "Conclude" button.

I hate to be that guy, but over the years I've come to the conclusion that the only way to have good online conversations is to filter out 90% of the population, which is incapable of handling that complexity.

This is not merely an IQ thing, but also requires self-control, empathy, effort and good technique in communication.

Users that have those qualities can get by with a regular forum. The only marginal situation is users that almost fit this description, where better UX such as what this or Google Wave, can make a difference.

We love complex, deep discussions.

Well, that certainly does look deeply complex, so I have no reason to think it wouldn't create deeply complex discussions.

Kidding aside, one thing I like about it is that it makes discussions start around specific snippets of a source text. That is to say, you begin a thread by selecting a piece of text. I am always very skeptical of top-level comments on HN that don't begin with a quote from the article being discussed—more often than not, I am suspicious that the person even read the text before commenting.

That doesn't address how you'd have conversations around anything except a block of text. Videos, pictures, games or applications, etc.

And they don't solve the toughest UX problem with this kind of pattern, which is how you treat overlapping excerpts: are they part of the same thread, or a new thread, and how do you define the boundary?

I worked in a department that facilitated group discussions with a custom platform based on group decision-making research. One of the killer features of our platform was anonymity. Truth could arise in group discussions when people were free to comment, upvote, etc, without fear of retribution, being accused of playing polities, or just going with the crowd. Seeing everybody's name tagged in every comment in cq2 lets me know that people with uncomfortable ideas may be hesitant to post them. So I wonder what type of questions would be appropriate for the c2q type of tracking.

A system that encoded the rules of a parliamentary democracy in it's logic and interface might work.

We're now back to email threads again it seems. (This is not the criticism it might seem, I miss the days of long-form proposals discussed through email, it promotes a kind of thinking that Slack etc doesn't).

I would be curious where Discord fits in. It's very popular on new open source projects.

did they reinvent email threading

This is something RoamResearch is squarely a good fit for.

It's very useful for personal capture (with digressions etc) but also handles the "multi-player" case if needed.

This also reminds me a little of Kialo (with a canonical holy war of Vim vs Emacs, of course: https://www.kialo.com/vim-vs-emacs-19293)

FYI This site somehow completely breaks Firefox 68.12 ESR, it's impossible to even scroll down with the keyboard and somehow hides the always visible scroll bar too.

It's how comments are ranked, and displayed based on "rank"

  >couldn't* care less

  >my..."troll metric" / rage bait/"le reddit quantification", formalized as a response's comment's conversational entropy divided by parent comment length, this is a fantastic comment.
  >
  >Pure, distilled, thought provocation.

I quite like this for the niche of "medium to slow reply rates" + "larger posts" + "participants who are willing to thoughtfully participate in structure" + "participants interested in discourse" (that is, people who want to record their fully formed thoughts in a thread, or who want to structure persuasive arguments, rather than casual conversation or sniping).

In other words, ideal for dueling essayists, technical RFC documents, or professional/academic debates.

I see there as being 1-2 additional tricky problems to solve for something like this (other than ironing out UX kinks in the implementation, of which there are many--e.g. visual signifiers for overlapping thread sources outside of tree mode; a tree mode that allows users to browse responses without manually expanding things; making "conclude" meaningful):

The first is optional, but I think it would be valuable: in many contexts, discussion and collaborative writing overlap substantially--often more than they don't. It would be interesting to see how the notion of addressing/concluding threads could be tied to changes in the document. E.g. a thread for "I'm onboard with this proposal if we alter the paragraph this is rooted at to contain X because Y" -> "If it gets you onboard, I'm happy to make this change, how about <proposed rephrase>" -> approval/conclusion causes the document to be updated and the thread archived. While that's technically not hard to add, the question is whether bringing in those aspects of mutation/collaborative editing would dilute the utility of the discussion layer, resulting in a shitty Google Docs/shitty Discourse combo, rather than a single-purpose Discourse-but-better application.

The second problem I see isn't optional: thread topology needs to be mutable somehow. In addition to all the valid criticisms of forum/Slack/email-thread discussion formats, any significantly-sized discussion of a complex root document inevitably develops redundancies. You end up with Slack (or whatever) threads cross-linking to other threads ("as I said over here, <content that either may be invalidated with time or which breaks user flow to navigate to another discussion location>"). That leads to significant confusion, and more than a few cases of people making decisions based on stale information as the cross-references get more complicated. Sure, ideally everyone would root discussions at the single most relevant point of their parent content, and new contributors would carefully browse the existing tree to ensure that their contributions were on both the freshest and most germane leaf. But that's never going to happen in practice, so a tool like CQ2 needs some way to rearrange (or embed-with-live-updating, or make rooted at multiple sources rather than one, or something...) discussion trees.

I have no idea what this would look like UX-wise. The 4chan model solves the replies-that-are-relevant-to-multiple-places issue, but doesn't help with re-parenting/consolodation after the fact to make future readers' lives easier, nor does it deal with staleness issues caused by replies linking to intermediate posts on threads which changed consensus later on. Regardless, I think functionality like this (even if it were used infrequently, by curators or administrators) would make the difference between things like CQ2 being useful only for short-to-medium-lifespan discussions with small numbers of participants, and being useful for discussions that stand as long-lived artifacts on their own.

Yes. I’ve been toying around with a similar idea and wanting to prototype it for a while, but somebody has beaten me to it. I’ll definitely keep an eye on this.

One thing I’d add is specific prompting for a participant’s intent in discussion. _Why_ are you making this point? Is it to correct factual errors in someone else’s post? To convince someone to adopt your point of view? To seek better understanding of what the other person is saying? Just to show off? This is rarely stated explicitly, to a detriment in the quality of the discussion.

We need to rethink the foundations.

Serious question: what is wrong with HN/Old Reddit style ? In my experience, that system manned by competent moderators delivers satisfactory discussion.

What does CQ2 mean? It's not an easy name to remember

I spent 5 minutes on https://cq2.co/app/demo and failed to figure out how to navigate.

This leans into threading harder, which makes ratholing and wild tangents happen and suck up all the air in the room. Going in the other direction is pol.is, which is used in vTaiwan to propose new laws. The mechanism there is twofold:

The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,”

The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simpl...

MacSOUP had the best visualization of threads.

Thought arrow keys would work. :D

Tiny UI feedback, I could not figure out how to go back easily. It took me 1 minute to figure out it was the conclude discussion button on top

In person, with a small group of people who naturally like each other enough to want to be helpful while keeping anyone senior enough to be arrogant out. That's how you get a year worth of work done in a month.

I wish this website didn’t have new ways to prevent me from scrolling tho.

Anyone else unable to scroll the website on mobile?

Having a TLDR updated in real time at the top of every complex discussion would be ideal, I hate going in to a thread where there are 30+ pages I have to wade through that can be summarized in a paragraph or two and closed once it gets off topic.

Super cool. I've been thinking about building something like this for years. I have a background in debate, and the inability to "flow" complex discussion in any sort of digital format has always bothered me. I'm excited to try this out.

I've wanted to create something like this for a long time. I've always wanted a threaded system where you can respond to a single line of text.

One thing I wonder is how this can best be extended to argumentative discourses where much of the discussion is a dispute of facts. Of course you could do that with this, but it won't be clear looking at the comment tree whether people agree on what facts, if any, are correct.

I wonder if this could be extended (or have a mode) that requires consensus on whether a thread is concluded (instead of one person deciding), which could be as simple as keeping the current UI but allowing the people the option to re-open threads; and the ability to attach summary statements to threads which percolate up to the thread's branch point.

we started searching for a tool specifically built for complex discussions. We found none

What about:

https://www.kialo.com/

Will it offer free self-hosted Docker in the future?

Kinda like the comments feature on Notion.

It's sort of like a tree, except that a node can have a main child and a connection of other children. That's neat, and another helpful step in organizing discussions.

I've always wanted something that is more like a graph structure, where you can reply to multiple comments. So a node can have multiple parents.

A great idea.

Some personal thoughts:

1. I would like to be able to see all the comments from selected people (myself by default).

2. I would like to be able to un-conclude a thread for the fat-fingered among us.

3. As I hover over the document, if there are comments, I would love to see the comment count to judge the activity (or something to show hotspots -- now or over time).

4. I would like to be able to start a discussion with an external markdown file.

5. An API to access updates (including real-time changes) would be excellent.

I've also dropped these in the Github comments.

I quite like the "conclude thread" concept (though I couldn't get that button to do anything in the demo), and I'm one of those strange people who would like infinitely nested threads in Slack too...

But the issue with threads is always that people who aren't involved the side-discussion generally never read them. I think it might be nice to have every thread "concluded" with a "result" (summary, outcome, to-do list, etc) which is then injected back into the parent where everybody will see it. It could be manual, or it could be semi-automated with a LLM - I'm not generally a fan but this seems like a reasonable use case. I'd ideally like all the nested threads to naturally turn into a single linear summary of everything important that was decided.

The CQ2 thing also looks a bit too document-oriented, might be a good fit for a wiki or something like that but I think being able to open a thread for every single word is too fine-grained for a typical discussion.

This seems to be heavily inspired by Workflowy's "fractal comments" feature: https://workflowy.com/help/fractal-comments/

At this point I am convinced any meeting with more than six people is a poor way to have a complex discussion. Any more than that is a presentation. Good meeting note taking is a good first step followed by clear and concise action items. Review action items the next meeting and anything else of note from the last meeting. I have had good experience with Miro for facilitating anything that absolutely requires more people.

This might also apply to a situation where professors and students are rewriting papers.May save a lot of times.

This seems similar to the good-old-days Usenet with threaded readers that showed only new posts and a culture of interspersing responses (with much scolding of people who top posted).

I'd love to see something like this that works more generally. I suspect it might need a more graph-like structure akin to mind maps.

Broken scroll on android/firefox.

Complex things are only for apple kids :(

You need threading and ability to crosslink posts, then each person should have a custom LLM that can summarize a thread for them in terms of: a) highest scores/most insightful points, b) common points of view that they would disagree with for balance, and c) points made that they agree with.

Hopefully c) would discourage people from reposting the same points, b) might give people alternative perspectives, and a) is just good information or insight.

I think quality discussion will come down to having less redundant discussion and rage posting.

This is nearly perfect! I've been thinking of that problem and possible solutions as well, I am very glad you've done it.

1 loaded question though: who should have the rights for concluding threads? And a sub-question: should concluded threads be locked into read-only state? Or the other party should be able to continue the argument?

The subject matter of the example used to demonstrate the interface is unnecessarily complex. It can be simple yet still stimulate a complex discussion. That would make it easier to understand the interface.

Pretty cool idea. It seems to address most of the UX issues I experience with BBS softwares. The only possible issue I see is density of information. People using mobile devices are not very motivated to read or write long sentences. This may have an impact on the overall quality of discussion. On my personal computer, this very post consumes two lines of text. On my iPhone, it consumes nearly half of the vertical space, thus appearing large (despite shallow content).

Isn't this just Google Docs with extra steps?

Half-OT: Can LLMs catch logic fallacies and rhetorical tricks?

Having fruitful complex discussions and staying factual/rational, and not succumbing to impulsive answers, emotions and knee-jerk reactions, is a social/culture problem. And I'm not convinced that this types of problems can be solved with technology.

What I'm trying to say is, that within a team with a good discussion culture, it will work, regardless of what tools you use. Even when the discussion is held in person.

When your team has a bad discussion culture though, it doesn't really matter what tool or tech or discussion structure you use - you'll struggle with straw man arguments, fanboy logic, going in circles, people not listening/understanding each other, etc.

To teach and foster a good discussion culture, you first and foremost need a genuine willingness of all participants to honestly try to improve. And this is a very interpersonal and soft-skill dependent thing to achieve.

Some piece of software might help insofar, as that the change of format can help people to change their discussion style as well. It's easier to fall back into bad habits when discussion are "as usual". Shaking things up a bit, can make it easier for willing people to adopt new behavior...

One thing that would be nice to add to the "concluded" status would be a updated version of the highlighted text that started that thread. Probably the old version striked out, and some conclusion appended after it, that way you don't even have to open the thread.

exactly what we need. computers telling us how to talk like computers.

But the Slack model is useful in its own way. Within a thread, you will see new posts at the bottom so you don't need to constantly scour all the threads to see new comments to it.

Perhaps CQ2 could do with a toggle to switch between the new views (like https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments vs looking at HN threads), with some transition to help you keep your place when you toggle between them.

I'm not a fan of threading outside chats to be honest.

I'd rather have a moderated linear discussion with quotes/references.

Curating a discussion is not a technical problem, it’s just work. Observers may be more numerous than participants. Casual participants may outnumber intense ones. Intense contributors might not be the best curators.

I built a forum in the very late 1990s to early 2006s that was threaded, topical, but most importantly kept extremely good track of what was unread. This to me is the key to structured discussions.

Doesn’t work for mobile. Tells me everything I need to know.

This is pretty interesting. Kind of like Reddit/hn comments in chat format.

Esp interesting the part where you can start threads from quotes.

Kudos.

I'd like to point out the issue with these kinds of threaded discussions for non-complex discussions, including the simpler nodes of complex discussions. And that is that people often have a hard time figuring out which thread node to reply to in a more complicated discussion system.

For the most part it's easy for engineer types, but most normies often find them confusing.

But I really like the effort to highlight leaf nodes that you haven't read/seen etc.

Discovery will probably be the hardest part when revisiting other people's discussions. When you are trying to find out what the most interesting relevant node of a discussion is.

Really curious to see where this goes.

Communication is more than reading and writing words and sentences. I would distinguish between complex discussions and discussions about complex topics.

This is brilliant and I hope every serious project switches off of Discord. I'm still traumatized by my first visit of Discord.

I must (because I'm not a fan of Reddit as a company) say that Reddit is solving a similar problem already, but I think there's room for a more focused tool like this.

I like it. Takes some effort to get used but it sure does remove much of the usual BB mess. Some breadcrumb style widget on the top to show which level you are on could also be nice.

+100, this problem with popular chat services has irked me for a long time too. Anything that forces you to be constantly monitoring the chat stream synchronously is annoying. Some people can do that and still get deep work done, but I can't. I much prefer async chat, be it email or reddit/hn or some other attempts like Atlassian's erstwhile chat client. Always glad to see new attempts at solving this problem, thanks cq2 team! Will be following the project.