I am a member of the soon to be Sims Forum. I have also raised my concern in the Forum and will repeat it here. Perhaps this debate has already started somewhere else, but forgive me for not seeing ...
MonaSolstraale Thanks for all your feedback! Outside of addressing bugs, I also want to highlight that we are still experimenting. We have intentionally enabled many of these features, so that we can gather feedback like yours. At a forum/board level, seeing a list of threads sorted by Most Recent is essentially what's the default for forums since the dawn of time. The other options are there to potentially help find trending discussions, or popular posts. Whether these turn out to be the right thing for different contexts (say game discussion vs technical support) - we'll learn.
As for ordering replies in a discussion / thread itself, there is one global setting, which is set to "sorted by like" and cannot be changed by us yet. There's also the option to manually override this for each thread, but it has to be done every single time. This isn't user friendly.
Our goal is to provide more agency. The ideal state should look something like this:
For our team: Global setting to set a default.
For our team: Ability to configure an override at board level (e.g. to account for those different context mentioned before)
For forum members: User-profile setting to set their own preference (e.g. Use default, oldest first, newest first, by likes)
In thread: To change it on the fly without affecting your default settings.
If I may weigh in, as a story writer, most recent is horrible and newest only slightly better. Imagine reading a book where each time you opened it up, the chapters were in a new order, or reading it from the back to the front. No, you like your books in chronological order.
Now giving us options to choose a default for ourselves would be brilliant, then we could choose oldest to newest if we wanted to. However, with the current system that too is unpractical. Say you are reading Anna Karenina, a monster story of close to 1000 pages, and each time you opened the book you had to start at page one and skim through the pages until you got to where you left off, and for each page the page turning got slower. Would you finish the book? No matter how good it was? Most likely not, nor would you read a book that way. You'd put a bookmark on the page where you left off, and start at say page 678 or 712 or whatever.
We need something similar here. A way to jump to first new comment, and then read them chronologically from there, rather than start over all the time. So while I like your suggestions on how to structure threads on various level, there also needs to be a way to pick up where you last left off.
I just want to restate how important it is to easily get to new messages. I received notification that there was a new message in this thread. It took me scrolling through a few see more links to finally find this message. If there is more than one message left I never know if I read all the updates. Presently I donβt feel confident that I am following threads.
If I may weigh in, as a story writer, most recent is horrible and newest only slightly better. Imagine reading a book where each time you opened it up, the chapters were in a new order, or reading it from the back to the front. No, you like your books in chronological order.
JesLet40I completely agree with what you write. For a story writer, only a chronological order and page numbers will do. This post is already an excellent example of how everything is in a messy collection of answers and sub-answers and even more sub-answers. If it was a book, you quickly got tired of reading π₯±