Order without authority: How Yoomoot makes long and complex discussions navigable

Categorised in:

The problem: long discussions are unreadably messy
Along online discussion amounts to an enormous list of undifferentiatedtext. There are no dividers or subheadings, no logical progression ofarguments or groupings of opinion and no distinction between unique,intelligent insights and throwaway expressions of approval andopposition. In contrast, a Yoomoot discussion may have a thousandposts and a hundred tangents but will always be as structured and asquick-to-browse as a Wikipedia article.

Solution 1: Replies restricted to nested Q&A
yoomooters can only reply to each other via questions and answers. This unique restriction means that, without any outsideintervention, everything said is clearly grouped together by topic.Instead of labouring through an enormous list of undifferentiated text,we need only glancethrough a list of questions to find the points that interest us.

Solutions 2 & 3: Summarized versions and discussion browser
Secondly, everything on Yoomoot has a detailed version and a 111-charactersummarized version. Our optional 'discussion browser' shows only the summarized versions. Via the discussion browser, we canget a convenient overview of long and complex discussions.

Solutions 4: Question-specific labels
Sometimes a question will end up with a large number of answers. Userscan work together to organise such answers by labeling them. Theselabels help users to make sense of large numbers of answers and focuson the kinds of answers they're particularly interested in. Labels aresimilar to 'tags' but, unlike on other sites, each question has its ownunique set of labels. This avoids the problem which other sitesencounter with collaboratively-managed tags, whereby tagsbecome too overwhelmingly numerous to be useful. (This solution is not fully implemented yet)