cretz
commented
4 years ago - 2D hierarchical discussions (reddit, email, etc) leave a lot to be desired on focusing conversation and easy navigation
- Can allow single reply to multiple parents
- Should be movable/zoomable like a third person RPG
- Navigation potentially much faster than vertical scrolling since multiple types of interactions can be used to hop around
- Oddly enough would have been good use case for vrml due to selectable text...but in this case, probably webgl or dom tricks (is there a good rust abstraction over opengl and WASM webgl yet?)...
- DOM tricks w/ z index and sizing and fading would be kinda neat and still preserve text selection, links, etc
- Each comment can appear as cube, or billboard sprite, or whatever
- Entire thread can appear as just in floating space, on a set of topographical hills by popularity (responses on downslopes?)
- Allows further down comments to appear in distance allowing you to see more of the landscape at once since depth can be used
- Navigating from one comment to the other can use nav keys/touch or just clicking... clicking could do something like center the comment on the screen making it seem like the top of a pyramid you're looking down on from the sky with the rest appearing as downwards in background at differing depths (think how space-based RTS centers something you click on)
- Using modern rendering allows all sorts of customizing such as adding a glowing effect to a popular comment down thread (even though it may be too small to read), making recent ones pulsate, etc
- Sorting by highest voted becomes more interesting, because it's no longer limited to top-level highest voted, it can be highest voted at any depth in the thread (parents and children appear off of them in 3D)
- Can even gamify interactions such as upvotes and downvotes
- Should be simple, self-contained, framework-independent js lib (embeds WASM as necessary) so it could be used for anyone that has a discussion set formatted to a certain JSON structure