Srikanth Narayan, a grad student at UC Berkeley School of Information is investigating better designs for large-scale discussions -- the kind of conversations reddit is rife with. To do so, he's put together a short survey that he'll share the results of later. We wouldn't ask you to take a survey we haven't taken and this one is a breeze.It's also for his masters final project; help a fellow redditor graduate.
Here's the blurb from the introduction page of the survey:
Discussion spaces on the internet have grown to become an overcrowded place in the past few years. With increasing user participation, it is not uncommon to encounter discussion spaces with hundreds to thousands of messages (or even more). While most of these discussion spaces are successful in helping the user navigate through small discussions, their effectiveness for large-scale discussions is questionable. To provide a brief orientation, some problems include inability to follow conversations, inability to get a sense of the breadth of the discussion, discursive commentary, low signal-to-noise ratio among many others. This project is aimed at investigating ways to design better interfaces for navigating through large-scale discussions.
