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Comment by eternityforest

3 years ago

Newsgroups have obnoxious hierarchal branching replies, unlike any normal human conversation, unlike what forums do, and they lack lots of minor forum features.

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eternityforest

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eschaton  3 years ago

Huh? Things like message threading are not only common on forums (like HN and Reddit and Slashdot and…) but with newsgroups and mailing list they’re entirely up to the client application you’re using to access them.

I use Mail for email and Thunderbird for news on macOS: Mail only presents one layer of hierarchy, while Thunderbird can show replies hierarchically _or you can turn that off_.

With a forum, you’re making that decision for me, instead of letting me make it for myself.

I can’t believe how ignorant people are about how things work.

  • eternityforest  3 years ago

    Reddit is not a forum, HN almost is but not really... The community is

    Having hierarchy exist at all changes the way it's used, just like having pointer arithmetic exist in a language at all changes it. You can't just not use it, other people will, and you'll attract more users that like it and fewer that hate it, etc.

    I would guess hierarchy appeals to the people with more active minds always running many loosely connected tracks at once, but doesn't do much for everyone else.

    Linear threads are a social convention as much as a tech feature. They emulate real life conversations, they encourage separate threads for anything off topic, or catch all randomness threads. They create a linear history you can read through and know the order of events, like a collective story.

    Note that chat platforms, which is where the article says all the lore is now, are much more linear, even moreso than forums.

    We also have "Flat is better than nested" in the zen of python.

    The only thing I can see being beneficial is the ability to mix in random off topic banter and memes and make everything a bit more personal and less like stack overflow... But somehow, platforms with linear threads seem to have a stronger sense of community anyway.

    Also, linear threads create a sense of responsibility with every post and topic. Everyone sees them, and the format allows for the users avatar to be prominently visible. It's not just a message to one commenter and the few who dig that deeply. That seems to discourage random low effort fart joke reposts, aside from a small number that one feels are quality enough to merit a post.

    Plus, pagination is basically impossible without linear threads, or mostly linear threads. You can paginate top level stuff. But ultimately it's unstructured. Stuff will be buried in the 300th reply to the 12th reply to the 80th reply and you can't navigate if you don't have a bookmark or a spare hour.

    You can't jump back about a week or so ish if you're new to a long running thread nobody could read all of.

    And maybe most importantly, the target audience of many forums either doesn't know how to, or isn't interested in using special news reader settings. Minimalism and flexibility are themselves, features not everyone needs.

    • eschaton  3 years ago

      Are you really, honestly suggesting that mail and news supporting the `In-Reply-To :` header and some people choosing to use clients that leverage it to order messages is an almost unbearable burden for community formation?

      How is using `In-Reply-To:` to aggregate and order related messages any different than having individual threads in a forum? In a modeling sense they’re effectively identical, one represented by a linked list and the other by a vector.

      If anything is adding hierarchy, it’s forums, because people tend to create boards and sub-boards and sub-sub-boards etc. and even there individual threads will develop their own cultures with a critical combination of user mass and time.

      I just want the option to interact with fora in a way other than the web, I don’t want to take the ability to interact with them via the web away from you (regardless of my own opinion of it).

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