Social media style feed experiment

I liked it better the way you had it. Just titles.

This isn't going to be a replacement for the forum. Just an alternate experience.

Yes, just the two of us. Perhaps consider a poll rather than allowing people to comment? That is less likely to be influenced by the other's responses.

As this is a very fresh experiment, I'd prefer to hear the opinions in detail. I personally prefer social media style on my phone. Vs just a bunch of titles. The natural reply nesting also makes more sense to me vs seeing replies later in the feed, out of context, like the traditional feed.

I see value in this. I think a one line summary of the contents, like you get in some email clients could be something to consider.

Very similar to Facebook's...err Meta :P... and some of the groups I see (I run into some when I'm googling questions about Otico, bluetooth and whatever else.

Quick way to see more than the title though some of the posts are super long- don't know if there's an ability to limit the size of the post "card" with enough room for readers to get a quick idea of what the topic is about in addition to the title.

I tend to stick with the titles styoe listing, but can see using this format in a pinch (if there's a way to easily switch back and forth).

Need to look into that a bit.

@DeafDucky said:

some of the posts are super long

Yes, this was a tricky thing because images can appear anywhere in the post, unlike Facebook etc.

I prefer the current style over the social media style.

Having the ability to easily jump around different categories is nice.

Liking what you've done so far.

I prefer the current format. Just to add I only look at this with a desktop PC. I can see where the other one might be useful with a phone.

I have mixed thoughts on the feed.

I don't think a social feed exactly like the example proposed is desirable as posts are all different lengths (particularly mine lol). So, it would just create a huge amount of scrolling on phones in particular. It would also just make the site too busy, overwhelming people with too much information. It would just make everything look cluttered to have a social media feed like the example displayed.

Having said that, I do see value in having 2 or 3 line snippets of each topic shown (similar to an email snippet), because sometimes the title is not enough information for you to see if the topic would be of interest to you. So, a 2-3 line snippet makes sense for the new forum - a full length social media style feed does not.

The second point - about the reply nesting - which I assume would be similar in concept to Reddit, does make sense in that people can divert a discussion into it's own thread without derailing the main topic. However, I do dislike the inability to making all pluses on reddit expand by default, so I can read the nested threads as well as the fact that often it ends up showing the answer on a new tab really irritates me. So, conceptually I like the idea that Reddit has, but their design implementation is really poor and user unfriendly.

But the problem with nested threads is that generally I want to read them all as sometimes interesting things are said, even if I am not strictly interested in the diverted topic itself per se.

So, yes I see the value in both options, but how it is implemented would either make or break the site.

I quite like it but think a few lines for each post then a ‘read more ‘ would be good so you can still quickly move through anything you don’t want to read in full. Having said that I also like the title line layout.