Feature proposal: Shortform reset
Shortform comments are displayed separately on the main page, but technically they are implemented as top-level comments of an automatically created article that has a title “{userName}’s Shortform” and an empty body. You can find this article either directly in the list of user’s articles, or indirectly by clicking on a shortform comment’s permalink.
(By the way, it seems like you can edit the shortform article’s title and body afterwards. No idea whether changing the title would interfere with its functionality.)
This is a smart solution that adds extra functionality by reusing the existing mechanism, so the shortform comments automatically inherit all functionality of the regular comments, such as replies, voting, etc. That is great!
My objection is that the current mechanism does not scale well. Some people use the shortforms more frequently than others. Some people’s shortform comments start long discussions. As a result, although most people’s shortform articles are easy to view, some people’s shortform articles have over thousand comments (including the replies to the shortform comments), which exceeds the longest debates under regular articles. And of course, the length of a shortform debate will only keep increasing.
Now, maybe this is actually not a problem. With regular articles, if I am interested in the article, I often want to see all the comments, no matter how many of them there are. With shortforms, this makes less sense. Maybe. Depends on how other people feel about this.
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Anyway, my proposal to address this problem (of too many comments under one shortform article) is the following:
When the user clicks New Shortform, the algorithm considers the situation, and optionally decides to automatically perform a “shortform reset”, that is to create a new shortform article called “{userName}‘s Shortform #2“. The new shortform comment would then get posted in the new article, and so would the following shortform comments… until at some moment in the future another “shortform reset” happens and a new shortform article “{userName}’s Shortform #3” is created.
On the main page, the shortforms will look exactly the same. Under the old shortform article, it will still be possible to write replies to the already existing shortform comments; the only change will be that the new shortform comments would now no longer appear here, but at the new place.
The new shortform article may contain links to the previous shortform article(s) in its body. (I also thought about creating a sequence “{userName}’s Shortforms”, but that seems like an overkill. Users who like this idea can still do that manually.)
I propose that the “shortform reset” should be done automatically to keep things simple from the user’s perspective, but also to avoid the possiblity that some users will do the reset after each five shortforms and some other users will never use it (and some users will spend too much time overthinking this).
The decision to do the reset should be made based on the number of total comments (that is, including the replies) at given moment. It should probably be somewhat lower than the actual number of total comments you think is resonable, because people can still write replies in the future. That is, if you think that 500 total comments is the largest reasonable number under one article, you should do the reset at 400.
There’s currently additional motivation for this to enable agreement-voting on shortforms, which doesn’t work for old posts (like this one). So in particular it doesn’t work for shortform posts that were already created a bit in the past.
There is no empty shortform article listed on the page I get by clicking my name. I had assumed that people made these manually. If not, what is the procedure?
The article is created automatically, when you post your first shortform.
If you want to do so, click your name, click “New Shortform”, write the comment text, and click “Submit”. The comment will appear on the front page in the shortform section, and also as a top-level comment in the automatically created article.
When I click my name, I get a page on which the words “New Shortform” do not appear anywhere. “New Post”, yes, but no “New Shortform”. I tried turning on experimental features in my account settings, but it made no difference.
Sorry, wrong explanation.
When you scroll the page to the top, on the upper right corner there is your name, and also the icons (magnifying wheel, star, bell). If you move your mouse over your name there—not click, just position the mouse over your name—a pull-down menu will appear. One of the items is “New Shortform”.
I see it now, thanks.
Is the functionally to change the shortform article title officially supported? If yes, then we need to be careful about creating the new shortform title.
I propose the following: if the latest shortform article name contains something like “#N” (where N is a number), replace it with “#(N+1)” and if such article already exists then try “#(N+2)” etc. If the latest shortform article name does not contain “#N”, then append ” #2“ and if such article already exists then try ” #3” etc.
It is (as is giving the shortform container a body).