Fragmented Fiefs

It's been at least a week since I chose Disqus as my comment host, not that anyone would know (still). Why bring it up now? Because I get another opportunity to post some meta, as well as an excuse to send a pingback from an interactive Python session.

Disqus is relevant to the second of three questions posed, and tangentially to the first. I don't pretend to have the answer, but think of it more as a vision.

Bringing forum back

I'm basing my view on the concept of the forum. Way back in the day, anyone who had matters of great import to discuss, and wanted them heard, went to a place where large numbers of people got together for precisely that purpose. If the existence of online forums is any indication, as a model for discourse it has held up very well.

There are drawbacks to a forum, though, and a lot of it stems from the fact that it is highly centralized. People went to the forum, were members of the forum, and the challenge of maintaining some semblance of order given the numbers in attendance meant that there were rules and protocols, and some authority figures to enforce them.

Not much has changed when it comes to online forums. If you are a member, then you have an account. You are subject to restrictions on what you can say, how you say it, and even matters related to expression of individuality, which impact traffic quota.

Avatars must be so many pixels by so many pixels and less than some number of bytes. Ditto for hosted signature images. Failure to comply with these restrictions could result in being censured, and then censored, temporarily or permanently, by moderators and admins.

The rise of free/self-hosted sites, was a swing away from centralized discussion. When you own your own site, you can spend as much effort as you wish decorating it. No one can moderate you on your own e-turf; in fact, you are the moderator. Free as in beer and speech, coupled with a certain level of anonymity, this was heralded as revolutionary, and it was.

It also made discussion a touch harder.

There were comments, of course, but the chain of discourse was broken and fragmented among however many speakers, who each held court in their own little throne rooms. Threads of discussion could be had within these fiefdoms, but that meant journeying to a myriad of small kingdoms. The irony was and is that the Internet facilitates global communication, but among the so-called blogosphere(s) the discussion is remarkably local.

Some time later there came Trackbacks and Pingbacks, simplistic bridging constructs that allowed people to pursue a thread of discussion between entries on a multitude of sites. But a funny thing happens when you try to turn a comment into an entry: instead of talking to each other like in comments and local discussion, people wind up talking at each other.

When it comes to local atmosphere with global reach, forums still have the advantage because social networking has yet to catch up. Now I'm very skeptical of social networking in general, but I think that some social networking is required to strike a balance between the struggle for individual expression and the centralization needed to break down barriers to discussion.

If any community, not just the anime/manga/j-pop/j-culture community, wants to turn into a global forum, they must use some form of social networking for comments. Without any precedent, I've gone with Disqus for the time being. Meanwhile, Automattic has acquired IntenseDebate so we may see mass adoption in the future and this whole issue will be moot. We'll see what happens.

In its current incarnation, there is no support for spoiler tags, which can be a dissuading factor for some sites. Nevertheless, I'd encourage anyone who wants to see a mature community to give some serious thought to social commenting, and think about what kind of platform they'd want to use.

I'd be remiss not to mention this blurb about Disqus, although it's really to do with someone more interested in issuing decrees than participating in discussion.

Not so simple syndication

Collaborative sites are the forum clique. In theory, it doesn't matter whether or not the team advances a common theme. Aggregation is convenient for an audience, which explains why feed aggregators and feed readers have not killed the collaborative site. You could try to organize a bunch of similar authors together in one folder, but it's extra work and people are lazy.

In reality, a common theme trumps doing whatever, because people also like some correlation between entries. United under a common flag — or header image in this case — a team is expected to advance not so much an agenda but a brand, and should act accordingly. A potpourri site stands a very real chance of being perceived as noise, and since we tend to want to maximize the signal to interference-noise ratio, our lives are much easier if there was more signal to begin with.

I'd like to advance an alternative to the current crop of collaborative ventures. It's slight, but fundamental at the same time. Rather than write entries exclusively for that one site, authors should focus on writing for themselves, and then cross-post material that they deem appropriate.

You could argue that that's no different than authors writing for the team and then posting their entries onto their own sites, but the point is that the focus should be on the individual first. What we would have is small-scale aggregation, a balance, I believe, between individual expression and centralized efficiency. This is a familiar notion, although applied in a different context.

No doubt this could cause some grief to feed aggregators, but it's probably a boon to the authorial team as a whole. I envision a simple work flow where authors export their entries with zero or almost zero modification. Transfer of material boils down to a transfer of text, and it's all presented through CSS anyway.

Choose Confederation

Decentralization creates local pockets of discourse, while centralization inherently places pressure on individual expression. Soft or small-scale aggregation aims to strike a balance between the individual and the collective, between innovation and efficiency. This is relevant to both comments and entries, so give some serious consideration to the above proposals.

I end this entry by directing your attention to the Disqus API. It considers a site to be a forum, an entry a thread, and a comment a post. Bring the forum to the doorstep of each and every site. If that is not the spirit of balance, I'm not sure what is.