posted on Jul, 20 2009 @ 10:25 AM
In terms of solutions, there are a lot of possibilities ATS is not willing to consider because they raise the bar - and though quality is much
appreciated, being an open community seems to be more important.
However, there are still things we could try.. For instance, I've seen some people 'categorizing' their thoughts, so they do not need to reiterate
them, but simply refer (using a link, a word, a number, a symbol - anything works). If your framework of thoughts has been categorized nicely, people
may feel invited to use these indications. As the level of the conversation gets a bit more abstract, newcomers to the discussion will often feel like
they need to read up before they can even make sense of the conversation.
Of course it's quite a task to do the above - it would be easier if you could reply to a specific post in a thread, instead of to the whole thread
(similar to the comments on YouTube for example). This way, you can easily see when someone is just replying to the idea in general - and when someone
has a specific reply to a theory that derived from the concept of... you know where I'm going. I'm sure we could benefit incredibly from structured
threads - we could even have complex voting systems to 'validate' or 'verify' a post's place in a thread, or tie two 'trees of replies'
together when they hit the same point again, or w/e.
Either way, the crux to me is always present in two ways: 1. structuring the information in a thread so a reader can quickly get deep in it, and 2.
coordinating the replies of new readers so they fit in the structure of the thread. If either of those fails, there is no structure, and the
conversation in the thread will reflect it.
Not sure what to think of my thoughts.. how about you?