8
votes
Should comments be locked after a topic is inactive for a period of time?
Since activity is the default view when looking at tildes, it seems like bumping a topic all the way to the top after each new comment can get a little abusive after the topic has existed for quite a while.
I'm thinking there should be some sort of restriction that after a topic has been inactive for a certain amount of time, it does one of four things:
- It closes. New comments cannot be added, but votes can still be added.
- A warning appears upon clicking the reply or add new comment button, warning the user that this will bump the topic, maybe giving the option of a silent reply. (no bumping)
- As topics progress in age (think more than a week), new comments bump less and less on the list as the topic becomes less relevant.
- As a plugin to the trust system, only users with high enough trust can bump topics after a certain date.
I personally love seeing old topics pop back up, so much so I even have my default sort set to 'activity - all time'. And I definitely don't see it as abuse of the system in any way since that's exactly what it was designed to allow for.
If you don't like seeing old topics pop back up you can always set your default activity sort to a shorter time period or to another sorting method entirely. You don't need to keep the 'activity - 3 days' as your default. And at some point a 'hide' feature for topics will likely be implemented too, so even if you keep the activity sort the same, you can always just hide particular topics you have no interest in seeing pop up again.
I do think it would be nice to have the option to reply without bumping but I don't think a warning is necessary. Perhaps that bump evasion can even be a feature of the whisper reply that's been talked about before.
I agree, I like it when older threads get bumped with updates. Just not when it's something like a news item and the update doesn't add anything but is just something like "ah ok".
Not sure if it could be implemented easily but maybe if the comment that brings it back to the top is something like that like 'bump' or 'agree' where it doesn't add anything new it could be tagged as noise and at a certain threshold that topic would be send back to where it was before the comment since there's no new worthwhile activity.
The tags could possibly help for that, but that would be a slow solution. There's stopgaps such as requiring minimum comment length for a bump to occur or checking against some common phrases but those are always going to be limited in their effectiveness.
Maybe we could allow users to set if their comments will bump the topic up. Maybe we could have "Post silent comment" button which wouldnt affect sorting.
I believe "whisper comments" was the name given to the hypothetical comments that would self-hide within threads (like the "offtopic" and "noise" labels hide comments) - so someone could reply to a comment without cluttering up the thread. I don't know that the hypothetical comments which wouldn't bump threads were ever given a name.
Did we reach any consensus on that?
Nope. The "whisper" comment is still just a hypothetical concept that may not even be planned for implementation, let alone have any agreement about how it might work if it were implemented.
I'm not a fan of closing topics simply because they're old. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with Reddit and many other internet forums. If a discussion is interesting enough to persist, let it persist. For this reason, of the options you proposed, #2 is by far my favorite. I think the option for a silent reply should always be available; it's especially useful for side conversations.
I think auto-closing old threads is a pretty big mistake. I get that sites want to have people discussing the most recent things, but it seems to me like there are certain topics where an old thread is the only place to discuss them, or ask follow-up questions with any hope of getting them answered. Another option in those cases is to DM people, but then the DMs just get lost in the ether instead of being searchable in the future.
The one problem with old threads is that they no longer have an influx of new eyes to respond to any new comments. I think some sort of broader unread tracking system for older content or all content you've participated is a missing component to making old threads work on a reddit-style site.
TLDR: Old threads can still get new views.
You'd be surprised, actually. As someone who loves to just search on google for “site:reddit.com random_topic” I often find myself ending up on months old threads where I post a comment and often get replied; and not necessarily by OP but also by people who ended up on that thread the same way I did.
I also get replies to comments and posts that are months old. It doesn't happen everyday, of course, but I also believe if Reddit didn't lock threads after only 6 months it'd be far more common.
Sometimes I even get random replies on random comments by someone who wanted to reply to an old comment of mine but couldn't because it was locked by Reddit.
Ah this is cool to know, gives more more hope in reddit-style sites than I've had in the past. :)
Oops-- misspoke there!
I meant that it could be easy to abuse the system through this means.
I'll rephrase @apoctr's question: how is it abusing the system to bump a topic by adding a comment to it?
By kidnapping the top post and not letting new posts with fewer comments be visible?
I don't really know either. Just suggesting possible answers.
No way.
There is nothing abusive about "activity" if you don't like the sort don't use it, but we do not need to be locking topics.
No. I don't think there's ever a time a thread needs to be locked if there's more input to be made. A question or topic always has room for another perspective.
Now whether or not commenting on older threads should be bumped is another question..