Some opinions as a relatively happy Flow user seeing room for improvement. Just picking Svetlana's first point:
On Monday, September 1, 2014, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop up
if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
Yes, this might become a problem. I don't think we need to change the principle, though. Most users are not active in six discussions at a time. Let's look at how things could be improved for the very active (and therefore very important) group that do.
Flow already supports unsubscribing from a single thread, which is a feature traditional Talk pages don't have and I'm finding very useful. You get less notifications, and definitely less notifications not interesting to you.
Currently Flow subscribes you automatically to any new thread created in a page you watch. Maybe there could be a preference to send you notifications only when new threads are created? Then it would be up to you to subscribe to a thread or not.
Also, Flow makes evident a problem that was more subtile in traditional Talk pages: maybe I want to watch a page for changes, but this doesn't necessarily mean that I'm interested in related user discussions. Would this workflow make sense?
1. User watches a page; the related Talk page is automatically watched as well. 2. If the user unwatches the Talk page (clicks big green Flow star at the top, turning it white) then the user doesn't receive more notifications for discussions, but still will watch the article itself.
Most LiquidThreads users already know how easy is to end up with +100 notifications waiting for your attention, which in practice means that you stop paying attention to them altogether. This is bad, and we shouldn't allow Flow to go down that same road. It's not a problem needing a redesign, "just" good fine tuning.