Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/My two cents

I appreciate the time and effort that is being put into this project, and several of the changes from the traditional talk page format may be helpful. However, there are several major elements of Flow (as it stands now) that make me very opposed to its future use, in particular on the English Wikipedia. (I'm going to refer to the current interface used for talkpages as "Talk Prime" to same time/space.)

First and foremost, the interface is clunky. Discussions take up a lot more space than they would if rendered as wikitext in Talk Prime. From a design standpoint, the Flow interface appears drastically different from Wikipedia's default skin. When compared to the rest of Wikipedia, Flow honestly looks like it comes from a different website altogether. It even looks like it comes from a different kind of website—more like a chat forum or social network.

This brings me to my next point, which is about Flow's timestamp format. In Talk Prime, timestamps render as the UTC time and date at the moment of posting. Flow renders timestamps as "about [x] [unit of time] ago", and the exact date and time is accessible upon hovering over the text. While this may be useful for people unfamiliar with UTC, it is a huge departure from Wikipedia's current practices. It also makes it harder for those of us reading on mobile phones to get the exact date/time of posting. I imagine it would also pose an accessibility issue for visually impaired people reading Wikipedia with a text-to-voice screen reader.

I also dislike that the edit count of a user is displayed. I will expand on this and other points later, but for now I have to go as my lunch break is up. Cheers, Cymru.lass (talk) 19:35, 5 July 2013 (UTC)