Not Too Long to Read: The tldr Interface for Exploring and Navigating Large-Scale Discussion Spaces

Abstract

We present a new interface for exploring and navigating large-scale discussions on the internet. Our system, tldr, focuses on three primary user goals: finding, navigating and filtering content based on the users' own relevance criteria. We employ a progressive design approach that combines user research from the popular web site Reddit.com and visualizations from existing discussion data. Based on lessons gleaned from previous research and our own user studies, we argue that the tldr interface can lessen the problems of information overload and inefficient navigation in large-scale discussion spaces. Current implementation and next steps for wider deployment are discussed.

Reorganize Your Blogs: Supporting Blog Re-visitation with Natural Language Processing and Visualization

“…The life documentation and expression aspect of personal blogs makes them rich and valuable materials to reflect on the past and generate new ideas [1]. However, prior studies investigating the "reading" side of blogs noticed that many blog explorers tend to quickly skim through most recent posts [18,19]. Some readers appear to be casual and passive; they rarely reflect on knowledge gleaned, nor do they care about the freshness of the content [6].…”

ConVis: A Visual Text Analytic System for Exploring Blog Conversations

“…Thus, being able to browse the conversations based on different possible topics and sub‐topics can effectively support this variety seeking behaviour ( UR-4 ). Many users also exhibit skimming tendency [Zin11, NC10], i.e., they seek to quickly scan through a set of posts to understand what the authors are saying. This behaviour might be explained by the exploratory nature of blog reading.…”

“…Here, the topics and the sentiment are added, since they can be useful for performing almost all of the tasks in Table 1. The position of the comment in the discussion space, and comment length are added since they have been found to be useful cues for navigation [NC10, BST08] ( UR-6 ).…”

“…Various interaction techniques, such as highlighting user‐specified search terms [WM03] and zooming into an area of the thread overview [PCK09] were proposed to deal with space constraints for larger threads. Other works visualize various system and user generated metadata such as timestamp [Don02]; comment length and moderation score [NC10]. Metadata‐based visualization has also been applied to blog archives [VG*08], as opposed to a single blog conversation, which shows the history of social interactions to help users identify potentially useful blog entries.…”

Interactive Exploration of Asynchronous Conversations: Applying a User-centered Approach to Design a Visual Text Analytic System

“…Note that some questions may additionally require to know people-centric information and relate such information to the visualization design. We also identify a set of metadata to be useful cues for navigating a conversation (the position of the comments, thread structure, and comment length) (Narayan and Cheshire, 2010;Baumer et al, 2008). We choose to encode the position of the comments (ordinal) as opposed to their timestamps (quantitative); since the exact timestamp of a comment is less important to users than its chronological position with respect to the other comments (Baumer et al, 2008).…”