Replace blogs with a forum for long discussions

Nov. 5 2013: Replace Blogs with Forums

After three years struggling with Facebook, I realize that it is the technology that creates many of the bad outcomes in social media. This is beyond the complaints about privacy or its lack.

It is the blog itself that creates the problem. If Facebook has solved the problem of getting an audience, somewhat, most blogs and web pages remaining undiscovered, the length of the ensuing discussions defeats the utility of the design and frustrates users, many of whom do not understand what is happening and take out that frustration in rude behavior.

When discussions elicit more than around ten replies, a model more like that of a forum or an e-mail reply needs to kick in. This means context reply with quoting from the article being replied to, and use of a WYSIWYG editor. There are pages on Facebook that have gotten thousands of replies, and yet Facebook sticks with a textarea widget, stupid.

Facebook's design is an impediment to free speech, to discussion, to good on-line mental health. One cannot deal with large numbers of replies without some help and it doesn't take much to overwealm a user.

Some other services handle these problems better than others, but it is the form of the blog as opposed to the forum that is the biggest problem. As long as there is no threading of conversation with the ability to select one subthread and hide others, and have context replies, blogging is doomed to be self-limiting.

Google's own USENET archive, is a good database that shows the advantages of forums over blogs. It is clear that the blog is OK for a few replies to a web article. It even works on some well-read sites, but that it quickly breaks down when lots of replies are made. It fact it becomes an impediment to real discussion and debate at that point. It may be a major factor in the sorry state of public discussion in the world. Go compare a current web page with its blog comments to some of those USENET threads. I'm not saying that people were any less rude or more reasonable, but at least there was a means to do something about the destractions which does not exist on many social media sites .