Not really. Megatopics just get treated as a giant chat room.
Nobody reads any of the old messages in a megatopic, and who can blame them? Are you really gonna read through five thousand earlier posts to make sure you aren’t repeating a point raised and discussed to death hundreds of posts upstream?
Yeah, the farther we went down this path, the less sense megatopics made; after a certain point the quality of the topic seems to decline with each new reply. Basically, if people want a chat room, give them a chat room.
(We are adding a chat feature to Discourse for a variety of reasons, and pressures around megatopics is one of them.)
I don’t have loading issues. Any such issues that you may have would also manifest when transitioning between one “page” and another in the pagination model. I’m with @codinghorror on the continuous scroll design. Pagination makes no logical sense because the pages have no logical meaning and are just a way to work around primitive technical limitations, the way that books have pages because it’s more practical than parchment scrolls. But computer displays don’t have those limitations. Besides, “pagination” is a misnomer anyway. You still scroll through posts, but the scrolling is segmented into so-called “pages” of arbitrary size for implementation reasons that have nothing to do with usability, and are in fact counterproductive to usability.
Yeah if I’m in a huge topic and want to skip through it without doing some crazy scrolling I just click the scroll bar on the right side of the thread and I can skip to the end or any other point, it’s at least as fast as it was when we had pages. It works the same on my PC and my phone.
Don’t forget you can press # to jump to any arbitrary post number or date within a topic. This obviously only works on devices with physical keyboards; press ? to see a full list of keyboard shortcuts.
If on mobile, click or tap the scrollbar docked to the bottom of the screen and there is a jump option which appears when you expand.
I don’t understand the complaint. Asking why someone would engage a particular poster could not be more directly attacking that poster by implying that his contribution is so meritless as not to deserve a reply.
Because it is literally an omni-thread for an entire Presidency, but not made in the style of breaking news. For all the sometimes-interesting discussion in there, that topic is the antithesis of the P&E rules, specifically this one:
Keep threads specific and debatable. No wide omnibus threads. We want to see clear, specific topics and thread titles. Large omnibus threads are actively detrimental to the long-term success of the boards. A thread entitled, “Tax Policy” is too broad. One entitled, “Should a National Sales Tax be enacted” is better. Keep it clear and specific. This also requires participants in the thread to remain on specific topics as well.
A topic entitled, “The Biden Administration - the first 1,500 days” is too broad. A topic titled “What should the Democrats do about this debt ceiling crisis?” is better. Participants in the topic can’t remain on a specific topic if the topic isn’t specific to begin with.
ThelmaLou’s original topic asked what the Biden Administration might do/accomplish. It was opened in November of 2020 whereas Mr. Biden wouldn’t be sworn in until late January 2021. If the intent was to speculate at a high level before Biden actually took office, the topic should simply have been locked once people continued discussion after the swearing-in.
I don’t want to keep hammering on it because I’ve expressed my opinion on it already, but I think omnibus threads on “discussions” are a bad trend. A lot of people shy away from them once they hit a certain size because the sense is…this thousand+ post thread is just too much for me to wade into. They also can operate somewhat like fly paper, trapping discussions that might have themselves made interesting threads into the muck of the big omnibus thread.
My opinion is the GOOD examples of topics that make a lot of sense as omnibus threads are things like this:
I don’t agree with @codinghorror on a lot, but he’s correct here: omnibus threads are functionally chat rooms. It’s rare I poke my head into one (usually, someone has to have linked to some aspect of it), and I rarely bother to participate. I’m a read-the-thread-before-posting kind of guy, and it’s just impossible in those threads. If we let chat rooms choke off real threads that could have actual, contextual discussion where most posters have read most of the thread, that’s a loss to the board.
