Boards›Boards Feedback

If This Reddit Style Goes Live, I'm Done

Eleshakai·9/18/2013, 4:53:46 AM·346 votes·25,782 views

I don't use Reddit because I find the style unreadable, illogical, and user unfriendly. Rather than having conversations that occur in chronological order like discussions SHOULD happen, you have discussions that become sprawling messes that bloat out other discussions. It becomes drastically more difficult to follow conversations unless they happen to be the most popular conversation in the topic.

I stayed on the LoL forums because I enjoy the community here, and because I enjoy forum interactions overall - even after I've mostly stopped playing.

There is no variation of this upvote centric nested topic style that I will like, so I guess my time being a part of this fine community is limited.

Thank you Riot for creating a good community - but no thanks for thinking Reddit's popularity comes from it's format being usable. There's a reason every other site that has tried to use it has failed shortly after... Reddit's success lies in when it came about and the communities that have built within it, not in it's format.

Edited on August 30 2014: I didn't realize this thread would remain popular enough to get views a year after I created it, so I want to point out that when I made this thread 'chronological view' wasn't an option since nearly every comment in the past while has been about it ;)

203 Comments

RiotKrylhos9/18/2013, 5:32:09 AM74 votes

I appreciate your perspective, and would like to get to the root of why conversations are hard to follow, and why you feel like direct replies are a "sprawling mess".

I would however, like to challenge the idea that conversations occur in chronological order, particularly when more than one person is involved. A discussion is often a topic which spurs further conversations from different people who chose to react at different times, and also only choose to react to either the original post, or a response to that post.

In a typical chronological format, one would have to read every single reply to determine which ones were directed at you, or which ones were directed at which response you made. Quotes can only get you so far when trying to carry a decent conversation. One of our goals is to make effective use of your time, and nested replies allow for that kind of conversation to be more easily facilitated and followed.

SSH RaZoR9/18/2013, 6:49:42 AM31 votes

I would really have to agree with Eleshakai here. The old forums were not that great with the way it was setup but I preferred it more because it made any conversation go from post 'A' to post 'Z' in a sense. This Reddit style forum makes it so you almost have to read the entire thread over again if you wish to follow the conversations.

Something else I do not really care for in many forums is the fact that there is essentially no quoting or it is does poorly. *Chan websites have a fairly useful way of quoting where you can specify the post number and if you hover over it, it shows the post. Even if multiple conversations are going on, you can follow them fairly easily so long as users use the function. The function works both ways as well, so if you are viewing the first post, you can hover over the link and it would display the reply and if you look at the reply, it would have a link you can hover over to read the first post. If it doesn't make much sense, you can look at a website like 4chan.org to get an idea of it.

Another function of several forums that I really like is the ability to, given you have read the thread before and there are new replies, 'jump' to the newest post in the thread. It makes it very simple to follow threads that are very popular or if you have a hard time remembering exactly what page you left off.

I do like the ability to hide and show posts, makes it slightly easier to remember what posts you have read and to just hide them when you are done reading them.

Last thing, I promise, I do not care for the upvote/downvote system because it generally just encourages users to follow a style of use like Reddit where members post merely for upvotes. The rating system, in my opinion, should not dictate a style of post that is prevalent on sites like Reddit. Instead, there should be a system that is more like 'This post helped me!' Everyone has a voice and the upvote/downvote system basically casts out unpopular ideas from a conversation that would otherwise benefit from it.

tl;dr Hard to follow specific conversations. Implement system like 4chan to easily quote other posts without creating really long pages. Make a 'jump to' button to easily navigate to the newest post. Good job on the 'hide/show' post function. Karma whoring may become as prevalent on here as it is on Reddit and essentially is just a really bad choice when you wish to promote deep conversations.

Weeeee! I wrote an essay for a website when I should be writing an essay for my class.

Sakuri Ono9/18/2013, 1:19:01 PM22 votes

Throw me into the same boat of 'being done' if the forums EVER go down in replacement of this style of 'community'. :-\ It's tiny, it's awkward to read on all counts, and on top of that you're pretty much going to obliterate the non-SR communities in one fell swoop.

I.E: Riot already treats the Dominion community as third class citizens. You don't keep your forum moderators in check (they move anything and everything they feel like to the Dominion sub-forum and never bother going there to moderate for us), any posts Dominion players make on the main LoL Reddit have to be mass-upvoted by the community just for it to stand a snowballs chance in hell of fighting against SR-auto-downvoters, and to top it off this Reddit style doesn't even have a Sub-Community for the alternate game modes.

If this becomes the replacement all non-SR threads are just going to vanish into the ether under a hailstorm of GD-style downvotes and moderator 'because I feel like it' deletions. (We already had one of your Reddit moderators delete a DominateDominion tournament thread a few weeks prior on false accusations.) There's no point in playing the game if I don't have a central community to talk to and bond with; that's easily more than half the fun. So it won't just be a 'done with the Reddit'. It will be a 'done with LoL'.

izari9/18/2013, 3:25:49 PM17 votes

I don't think a game's official forums should have a system that encourages hive-mind mentality.

This is a large and passionate community. Sometimes controversial subjects come up (IE, female players / characters) and anybody who disagrees with popular opinion, even if it's well written and constructive, is going to get downvoted to shit even if they deserve to be heard.

And top rated comments are always going to be the cheap and easy winners. "THIS" and "Who fed xx cosplay" and "riot plz" while anything that people actually have to put effort into writing or reading is going to get lost in the noise.

I don't participate much in the LoL subreddit anymore for many of these reasons and I would be unlikely to use these anymore if it happens.

That aside, this is just hard to navigate / read. I don't like the menu-style category list - I think having the major categories and sub-forums listed under is a better and classic layout for a forum.

Forum taxonomy and style hasn't changed much in years because it works.

http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/c/beta-feedback/XNg8bwhK-idea-pros-cons-style-suggestions-image-samples-included

^ Better style / ui feedback.

Dirty Gas9/18/2013, 7:25:14 AM13 votes

It's funny that you call this forum style a "sprawling mess" when that's exactly what every large thread in the normal forums turns into. Pages and pages of people flaming about nurfs, PBE changes, or whatever; thousands of pointless posts to slog through to find anything worth reading. I love traditional style forums, but with a community as large and toxic as league I've given up posting or even reading threads and going to 3rd party sites for red post updates just so I don't have to read all the crap I report people for in game.

It's easy to follow topics on reddit if you know how to use the system. Much easier, I've found, then on large traditional forums. It's also worth noting that this isn't a replacement for the forums; it's a supplement. If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple as that.

RiotPhreak9/18/2013, 9:16:51 AM10 votes

As someone who is not involved with the development in any way:

Right at the top of each page, we have a drop-down that lets you sort by "Hot/Best" (as is the Reddit-esque style) as well as "New." It seems to me people can completely opt in to the more traditional chronological style of posting.

Is this accurate? Is this an easy enough fix for everyone?