Some integral philosophy/analysis behind TreeView. Forums like Reddit and Facebook are essentially "Orange" interaction paradigms—there's a static "original post" and a fixed hierarchy. Some benefits of this are that you get some sense of coherence to a conversation, and if you're ten layers deep in replies, you can quickly navigate your way back to the original post to try and reclaim some context. Some drawbacks are that really cool content deep in threads hardly sees the light of day. Also, it's really confusing to navigate, and especially confusing as the tail winds up. (Facebook tries to avoid the contextlessness and lostness of orange by imposing a limit of three deep, but this curtails conversational flow which often goes in strange directions to find the good stuff).
Twitter and all of its clones are essentially "Green" interaction paradigms—you get a personally tailored feed of content that comes from anywhere in a given lineage/conversation. The first post you see could be from twelve layers deep in a convo, the next a reply to a post, and the next an original post. Some benefits of this is that deep content gets surfaced—a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply might be the most interesting bit of the conversation, and on twitter it gets to your feed immediately. Some drawbacks are that it often lacks context, and sometimes is purposely removed from context to be more inflammatory. I believe this contributes to the sound-bite post-truth world we're in today, where context, nuance, history don't matter, only quick dopamine hits.
We believe TreeView is the start of a "Teal" interaction paradigm which allows deep content to be surfaced while retaining the context of the conversation it is birthed from. We believe this will integrate the benefits of both hierarchical forum interactions and pluralistic twitter feeds. I say "start" because right now it still leans Orange; we haven't yet built out the bits where whenever you click onto a reply, it becomes the top-level thingy in the TreeView; nor the feature where you can link "original posts" to each other in playlists, or to multiple originals, and see that there's not really such a thing as an "OP" because all of us are proverbially standing on the shoulders of giants. So where we're going is you'll be able to get a relative hierarchy (a holarchy) of what conversational lineage content is nested inside of. We believe this is models more of "in person" conversation actually works than any of the current paradigms. And even just this start has helped me understand longer threads!
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