Talk:How To - Exchange Messages

From The Socknet

The larger a message tree is, the greater its impact on providers of the users who reply to it. Those repliers will (in the worst case) receive every message, even if they don't care anymore. There can be two solutions to this:

1. The provider or service controlling the root (or any particularly large branch) can completely cut off communications when it grows too large. Users' friends should still receive updates and they can all lol at each other. This works because replies are usually sent to (a) the writer of the message being replied to and (b) all of the reply writer's friends.
2. A new method can be introduced, unsubscribe-message, which will explicitly tell the message's owner not to send updates to this user. This can be used automatically by a provider that wants to limit bandwidth use, or it can be sent when a user indicates that he's tired of a message tree.

I am most greatly in favor of the first option, because it keeps the Socknet protocol slim and it requires less user input.

--Dan 20:32, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Maybe we could create a function to indicate that we will not be sending future updates in relation to a specific item. The provider may request them at its will. (IE, we're switching from PUSH to PULL.) I vote for ignoring this until its proven to be a problem.

--Dan 20:45, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Just to further elucidate the issue:

YouTube is essencially a forum with millions of topics (videos) and thousands of threads (comments+replies) per topic. YouTube is a particularly annoying example, because, users rarely use the reply feature when replying to comments. Instead they just add new comments. (I assume this is a holdover from a time when YouTube comments couldn't be replied to directly, idk.)

Ideally, replies would be nested appropriately so the Socknet users involved could receive updates about replies to their comments and the comments they've replied to.

In fact, it is difficult or impossible for YouTube to determine programmatically which new comments are actually replies.

The options are:

1. act as if the world is ideal and only forward replies to comments, maybe people will shape up
2. forward all comments (probably unwise)
3. attempt to match new comments to old comments by grepping for user names

The problem for the designers of the Socknet is "What can we do to make the issue simpler and reduce confusion/bandwidth usage?"

I haven't thought of anything. I'm not sure there is, or needs to be, a simpler messaging system than the one already in the specification.

--Dan 20:24, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Messaging functions should deal with multiple items?

Maybe the functions involved with messaging should be changed to accept and return multiple items at a time. find-message is an example that already does this. --Dan 03:38, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Meh. It's a necessary feature in find-message, but it's not that important in the message delivery functions. Let's consider this again after a few Socknet implementations are made, but before too many exist to make it a requirement. --Dan 20:50, 3 October 2009 (UTC)