Streamlined experience

File: 1435553346575.png (1MB, 746x718px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 746x718px

When it comes to how "streamlined" using 4chan is versus the effects on community I believe there is a dip in the middle of that graph that we're currently stuck in.

When 4chan was more non-user-friendly it tended to slow things down (no watcher, no (You)'s, no auto-updates, no alerts) You'd basically have to just remember everything you wanted to monitor or keep a tab open, and refresh each thread yourself manually

It worked for the time, but now that we DO have a bunch of streamlined features I can't help but think the combination just brings out the worst of both worlds. Despite being very user friendly now it still has those tendencies of needing you to keep a bunch of tabs open and constantly manually monitoring everything. The combination shifts 4chan toward the "chatroom" paradigm more than ever.

But we don't have to go back to the old 4chan functionality we could also go forward. Adding a few more comforts could actually have the effect of moving away from the chatroom feel.

What we might want to consider is shooting for the goal where typical users only have to keep 1 or 2 tabs open to monitor everything. Maybe a single page that gives a list of all new threads made since you last checked on all the boards you want to monitor at once, and maybe a list of all posts made in threads you're watching.
When you only have 1 page to check for updates instead of having 20 tabs open you might find you can monitor everything just as effectively but also have time to take a break from 4chan every now and then and go do something else. I don't think this will make people post on 4chan more it would actually probably have the exact opposite effect. Hell, some people might even close their browsers sometimes. This could slow things down a bit and make conversations more interesting because people will actually have things and hobbies to talk about other than just 4chan BEING their hobby, and also alleviate a lot of pointless bickering and baiting.