Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2010 Not too long to read: The tldr Interface for Exploring and Navigating Large-Scale Discussion Spaces Srikanth Narayan Coye Cheshire School of Information, UC Berkeley School of Information, UC Berkeley [email protected] [email protected] Abstract the practical purpose of answering questions, these We present a new interface for exploring and systems also encourage open-ended discussions navigating large-scale discussions on the internet. Our between stable and ephemeral groups of users. Once system, tldr, focuses on three primary user goals: viewed as revolutionary, the ubiquity of chat rooms finding, navigating and filtering content based on the and web boards over the past few decades has made users’ own relevance criteria. We employ a these large-scale discussion spaces an ordinary and progressive design approach that combines user conventional way to communicate with others on the research from the popular web site Reddit.com and internet [19]. visualizations from existing discussion data. Based on The number of large-scale discussion spaces lessons gleaned from previous research and our own continues to grow on the internet, in large part because user studies, we argue that the tldr interface can lessen many web destinations incorporate discussion the problems of information overload and inefficient components into their existing systems. Discussions on navigation in large-scale discussion spaces. Current popular websites grow proportionally with traffic, and implementation and next steps for wider deployment as a result, it is not uncommon to encounter are discussed. discussions with hundreds or thousands of messages. This phenomenal growth can be observed on a wide variety of websites—news outlets, blogs, social media 1. Introduction websites, community websites and support forums to name a few. While most of these discussion spaces are The internet allows millions of people to easily usually able to support smaller discussions, usability exchange information and participate in numerous and manageability are greatly reduced as the conversations with others around the world. Many discussions grow in size. Communication systems that different platforms currently exist on the internet to support interactions in very large numbers (e.g., facilitate both long-term and fleeting conversations. hundreds to thousands of unique participants) are quite Web forums, message boards, Usenet newsgroups, different from those that support smaller conversations. instant messaging, and email are just a few of the most Indeed, the dynamics of massive conversations are popular systems for online discussions. While some poorly understood due in large part to the complexity systems such as instant messaging and email are that comes with size. primarily used for one-to-one exchanges, other online Web-based discussion spaces have become a discussion spaces are used for shared public popular way to communicate on the internet yet they conversations between many different people at once. are technologies that have not seen consistent advances These large-scale conversations are asynchronous or improvements for user exploration and navigation. communications and thus enable interaction between Currently, most websites present discussions as a linear participants without requiring simultaneous or list of messages that require users to scroll and read continual presence among all participants [13]. through tens of thousands of lines of text across Many large-scale discussions are user-initiated, multiple linked pages. Popular tools such as phpBB user-maintained and user-moderated. A user can and vBulletin primarily manage large discussions by create a topic or present a question and reach a wide breaking content into increasingly smaller parts such as audience while keeping up with additional, ongoing forums, topics, threads, posts, and pages. Few if any conversations. Large-scale conversation systems foster systems incorporate any type of visual interface to aid discussions on every imaginable topic and bring in exploration and navigation. opinions from a variety of perspectives. In addition to 978-0-7695-3869-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 1 Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2010 A consequence of compartmentalizing distributed hierarchies that support endless numbers of conversations into categories, hierarchies and threads is threaded conversations in publicly viewable that it makes it difficult or impossible for a user to gain conversations. The quick growth and ubiquity of an overall view of where she is located within a given Usenet was due, in large part, to the fact that it was a discussion space. Among the smallest units in the completely unregulated system for mass interaction hierarchy are specific conversations—which may have [19]. Like email, Usenet was designed for many different branching trees that extend for asynchronous and persistent communication. A single thousands of lines of text or more. As individual conversation thread can last as little as a day, or as discussions grow longer, it exacerbates the existing along as a year or more. By the 1990’s the Usenet limitations of the interfaces. Users are left with a was, “the third most widely used form of interaction suboptimal dichotomy: they are either overwhelmed by media on the Internet (behind email and the World the sheer amount of information presented at once, or Wide Web)” [15]. they are offered micro-views of specific content with little or no connection to the larger conversation space. 2.1. From Usenet to Web-based Flash Forums The chasm between viewing specific content and appreciating the surrounding discussion space would Although the Usenet was the first large-scale public seem to implore designers to create informative discussion space on the internet, its popularity as a visualizations of large-scale discussions for users. As platform for asynchronous conversations began to Sack argues, an important part of successfully wane as web-based forums and message boards navigating large-scale discussions involves linking the emerged. One of the biggest changes in the landscape “forest” of the discussion space to the “trees” of of computer-mediated communication at the end of the content [13]. 1990’s was the increasing reliance on the web browser In this paper we introduce tldr, an interface for as a primary interface, ultimately providing a exploring and navigating large-scale discussions on the convenient and easy way to participate in online internet. The interface is named for the internet slang communication such as asynchronous discussion term for extremely long threads, messages or stories, forums [6]. “tl;dr”. Literally, “Too long; didn’t read”. In the Most large-scale discussion spaces currently exist context of a discussion space, tldr is used to indicate a on the internet within specific websites as web forums, summary for those who don’t want to read the entire message boards and threaded comment systems. From message. the perspective of users, the specific technologies We begin by contextualizing the problem of usually differ in terms of relatively marginal cosmetic reading and traversing large-scale discussion spaces. features. Examples of some of the most popular large- Since different systems have their own design features scale discussion spaces include Reddit.com and and idiosyncrasies, we focus our efforts on a single Digg.com (user-maintained news aggregation large-scale discussion system, Reddit (Reddit.com). websites), Slashdot.org (a site based on user-submitted To better understand the landscape of expectations and stories with appointed moderators), NYTimes.com behaviors on this system, we present the results from a (discussion of stories published in the popular large survey of current Reddit users. In addition, we newspaper), and Engadget.com (blog of current gadget use data from existing conversations on Reddit to and technology news). define the scope of our visualization design process. In their investigation of Slashdot forums, Dave, Drawing from these two sources of data we show the Wattenberg and Muller argue that many of the web- primary user-focused design goals for the visualization based forums that are becoming popular on the internet interface and explain the key stages of our design are significantly different from Usenet discussions [2]. process. Finally, we provide results from user testing The Usenet organizes disparate topics into categories and discuss the future directions for the tldr interface. and hierarchies into one system. However, web forums on sites with clear objectives such as Slashdot, Reddit, 2. Large-Scale Discussion Spaces: The Digg, etc are located within these web sites. The result Dynamics of Asynchronous Online of this arrangement is that people who come to the main website can jump in and out of the forums Conversations whenever they like. Unlike most Usenet readers, this is done without leaving the browser interface. The The topic of large-scale discussions has been of primary characteristics of these quick and often interest to researchers since the emergence of the fleeting web forum conversations are their diffuse Usenet in the late 1970’s. Usenet was the first internet authorship, large size, focused topics and constrained system to organize topics and newsgroups into widely time frames [2]. 2 Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences