Comment by doginasuit
16 hours ago
> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.
I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.
The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
Bogleheads (made up of investors who follow Bogle's indexing philosophy) recently had a thread about the decline in traffic to the forum, which some people attributed to AI. (https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=470287&star...)
It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.
Could you perhaps, suggest an index directory that can lead to quality board discoveries?
In my experience, finding a quality board has always been topic focused. I.e. if you have a Toyota Corolla and want to communicate about that, just look for Corolla forums, and it'll quickly become obvious if one is lively / your vibe.
In addition to the "gamified" aspect, the votes allow special interests to trivially control the perceived public opinion on an extremely broad scale. Opinions with downvotes are perceived as unpopular, and this has a chilling effect on free discussion.
A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.
Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.
And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.
The 'like' counts in places like YouTube and Instagram comments have made clear to me the idea of tyranny of the majority.
The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.
What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.
In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.
Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic.
It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread.
Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.
Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:
* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...
Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?
12 replies →
USENET with a threaded newsreader like "trn" provided the optimal experience here.
You saw things in their threaded context, but it remembered what you've read and there is a direct action to "go to next unread" that will jump around and follow the fringe. You don't have to open individual root posts.
It wouldn't work so well if you expect to read sparsely though. People used moderation and killfiles to prune out garbage. The death of USENET was in many ways the flood of posts that made this no longer feasible.
The other missing thing here is topics, i.e. newsgroups. HN is not as broad as USENET as a whole, but also not as narrow as one newsgroup. These groups are what you would open, then skim through all the messages in that forest, catching up on what is new since last visit. HN topics are too narrow to want to bother reopening each one to catch up, but there is no collective layer above them to help find your own sparse subset of worthwhile HN conversations.
But replies in forum topics weren't a single chronological conversation either. Especially in those huge threads with many posters. It was people replying to posts who knows how far back in the stream, maintaining a bunch of smaller conversations, or just interjecting a top-level comment based on the 1st post or title.
The upside is that ideally these subconversations can split and merge into a larger conversation. But then you also have the problem of 99% of a topic's history being fluff nobody is ever going to read again, especially not in that 20 year long topic. It only created the illusion of a convo people would follow because it was a stream of posts with a reply box at the end.
Of course, I haven't seen a solution that addresses both sets of issues between tree vs. forum linear pipe, though I think the tree maps better to human interaction and attention.
You bring up an upside of the forum style topic though: the chronological view gives it more lifespan since new posts are given maximal visibility.
On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read, so I think creating new Reddit submissions with fresh participants is better for conversation. The limited lifespan is a feature.
The idea of "dupe threads" never made sense when the "dupe" is a 30 page topic from 6 months ago. We're here to talk and exchange our views, not scan for our views in a conversation others already had. That there could be some sort of canonical discussion or master thread on a topic was probably the worst superstition had in the forum era.
2 replies →
Yes, and this is especially true of enthusiast communities, which usually have evergreen topics. A user who is new to the Leica M system can head to rangefinderforum.com and get value out of lens reviews or camera comparisons that might be literally 20 years old.
I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.
2 replies →
That becomes a question of discoverability and the "what about bumping ancient threads".
Consider trn and rn of old. I recall the first news reader that I used wasn't threaded and it was neigh incomprehensible unless you were following all the posts and what was going on. For smaller newsgroups, that was something that was possible. For larger ones, a flat structure was very difficult.
Threaded news readers (while I can't find any for trn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_%28newsreader%29#/media/Fi... is old enough and shows the interface) was useful and captured the structure... and bumping old threads was something that provided discoverability for new comments on old.
However, news readers had a lot of other features that Reddit and HN style comments don't have. I could plonk an entire post, or all the followups to a specific comment, or a specific person.
Without the ability to provide personal moderation (arguably something lacking on HN and Reddit), the weighted to current activity to try to discourage comments on old posts is useful. They're ok with collapse and hide... but NNTP clients had much more that allowed it to support different types of discussions and never-ending comment trees. ... This also made them very difficult to search for content.
I'd absolutely love a NNTP interface to HN. Without it, the interface that HN has (allowing collapsing of comment trees) and downranking old posts is useful. If you want to still find things that are active (rather than downranked), https://news.ycombinator.com/active or https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments are useful for surfacing where people are commenting - even if it's days old.
> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.
News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.
And we had kill files for spam.
This. I only dealt with a non-threaded take on usenet for about 1 week in the early 90s.
The shelf-life of a day is because of the abstract voting aspect. Old crappy forums used comments, vs an abstract notion, as a vote.
This allowed for long running conversations. It did require stronger protections of posting rights though.
If it seemed useful enough someone could make an HN app that sorted by activity, maybe weighted by a person’s karma.
I agree for the most part, though it's worth pointing out that HN specifically has a mitigating characteristic in this case, which is that repeat posts are not moderated away, and are in fact encouraged.
Case in point, one if today's top posts is on knoppix. Definitely not early adopter material! :)
I agree more generally though. While I understand the benefits of a 14day response window, it really does destroy the ability to find a thread that is useful in a more anachronistic manner.
Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments
Bring back nntp
> the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day
Yeah "bumping" of threads is a major feature lacking on algorithmic forums.
> the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.
Perhaps even worse. It’s really whatever was posted at that moment you loaded the page unless you are actively responding. There are features to show unread messages only but it becomes a mess. The flat forum posts are great and sub-conversations can always split off into its own thread. Spinning off us how we use slack after all.
> The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.
A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.
Old style forums were better because fewer people were on them, there was no monetary incentive to contribute (you just cared) and the community wasn’t toxic.
Reddit-style sites can also be this - you just need to build the right community. (This is very very hard)
Anyway my hypothesis here is clearly the community is the value and not necessarily the method of posting.
One thing I think Slashdot got right was capping the upvotes on a post to 5. This provided the desired effect of letting quality content sit on top of the discussion without turning it into a game. They also were fairly stingy with the letting people upvote and especially downvote content. Plus there was a whole meta-moderation system that may or may not have made an impact, I was never sure about that part.
you make a good point on the discussion over time. I do miss that aspect of old forums, felt like you could have conversations as opposed to chats, in a way? It's unheard of for discussion to re-ignite on an old HN or Reddit post.
Also gotta love the long-term discussions that happen with 3-4 people saying serious things and then one complete rando coming in dropping an absurd conspiracy theory while the rest of the convo continues around them xDD
I'm reminded of this amusing comment by dang on this subject:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
A bunch of people skim the article (or just the title), post hot takes, then there's responses to those, and so on...
Could you transcribe and condense fleeting discussions into the forum shape?
I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.
This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.
It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).
While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.
Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.
Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.
An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.
Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.
The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.
I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.
>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.
I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.
There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.
The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.
the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?
1 reply →
There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.
5 replies →
Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.
Defining superfluous as off-topic, the format does not inherently invite superfluous content. In both the traditional forum and engagement ranking schemes, the off-topic post will be ignored and the poster has the same experience in both settings. I argue that the culture of some forums may invite noise, but the forum has several mechanisms to make this invitation a net-positive attribute.
If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.
The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.
Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.
I do oftentimes find myself missing the ability to respond to multiple comments at once when perusing other sites like HN. It's super handy being able to quote a multitude of posts all asking the same question and respond with one answer. Or being able to redirect one poster to look at another.
The forced anonymity/lack of account names is also a big plus. Misinformation can obviously be perpetuated by appealing to bias (look at /pol/) but you lose the “forum celebrity” shit that gives power users the ability to gain credence simply based on name and eventually derail discussions simply by showing up
Personally: forums are mostly about one subject, have a community and you have to invest some time learning the lay of the land to get the most out of it, get some reputation. Reddit? It's just drive-by commenting. I get points? Cool. I get banned? Next account. No avatar, pseudonyms almost hidden it is not a social media, it's unsocial.
> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion
On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.
E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.
Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.
After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...
Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
On the other hand, comment trees encourage shallow content highjacking the top comment thread with little to no regard for preceding comments.
You can have both threaded discussions and chronological ordering of top level comments. It works really well.
Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.
This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.
The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.
The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.
A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.
And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.
But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.
> This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried
This had been the case for a while on big subs, but there has apparently been a further change. When I returned to Reddit this year after a break, I found that most new posts on the smaller subs would draw all their comments in the first 30–60 minutes, and then virtually no comments after that. I haven’t seen the Reddit app, but it must somehow discourage people from revisiting posts older than an hour or so (by hooking them on engagement with continual new content via an endless-scroll algorithm?).
Posts used to draw a flow of new comments over the course of the day, and sub regulars would look in on older posts, so if you were from a different time zone or woke up late, you could still participate in a discussion.
I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.
Do they roll their own software, or is it a purchased solution? I'd love to know more about the application powering it.
I do think people are gradually starting to see why reddit comment tree is bad.
Don’t forget moderators getting tired of seeing new threads on a popular topic and inevitably creating the “megathread”: a thread that (by the time you arrive) has 900+ pages and the first post that is edited to include highlights and important new info hasn’t been updated in 2 years because the OP has moved on or become inactive
Even better when it contains potential fixes for problems. The solution you need is on page 672 but you’ll never know because the poster phrased the problem weird and even if they didn’t search is absolutely garbage (and outside search tools won’t work because most subforums are locked behind needing an account so they aren’t indexed). Have fun reading page after 40 post page where the overwhelming majority of the comment amounts to “I upvote/downvote this”
> is a clear improvement
I remember going from usenet, with it's tree comments (when the worked) to flat forums and being annoyed at the change.
25+ years later flat threads are correct threads, and tree comments are just a bad idea.
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.
Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.
The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.
How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.
Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.
1 reply →
Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces interleaved replies.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions
I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".
Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
>Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?
Here is a HN clone I made.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
Oh that looks awesome, I'll have a play!
1 reply →
If I recall correctly most forum software such as phpBB and vBulletin had an option where you could toggle between viewing a thread in nested BBS/Usenet style or the newer linear view.
> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions.
But very difficult to have those conversations.
>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
The original battle.net forums featured a threaded view much like HN/reddit. Actually, in retrospect it was like mailing list archives.
IIRC they switched to a more orthodox phpbb-like layout because users preferred it.
>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.
That's exactly the problem.
Colocating everything in one place basically invites the internet riff-raff to shit all over everything. You have some asshole who spends most of his time lying about solar panels by cherry picking links wandering into some area where people talk about potato chips doing his thing there to everyone's detriment.
And then you start keeping score and it incentivizes all sorts of bad drive-by contribution behavior, circle jerking, etc, etc which very clearly has an un-diversifying effect.
All that shit combines to create a community where 99.999% of the content and the same amount of the discussion is about the same quality, accuracy and honesty of a grocery store tabloid.
Your take would have been defensible in 2016 but with a decade of hindsight I don't see how any honest person can think all that.
Ok, but is this because of tree-style discussions or is it because of up/downvote mechanics? Or because of their combination?
Or is it completely unrelated and has more to do with the size of those communities?
In my experience, it is the upvote/downvote mechanic in combination with critical mass. I was a long time paid subscriber to a popular tech/science news site that had an active comment section and a moderately sized active user base. I really loved it, checking in several times every day as new articles were posted. The discussions were great, even though I commonly disagreed with many users point of view. Posts felt genuine and ideas were well thought out and defended.
I like to think that because of this, the site grew in popularity. As it did, the comment section degraded in post quality and thoughtfulness of responses. The sites news editors more and more catered to their audience, and the quality of the articles likewise declined until it was one giant groupthink echo chamber, all chronologically organized without using a tree system.
I gave up and unsubscribed. I would like to try removing the arrows from forums so that no one can offload their thinking to the group. Everyone will be forced to decide on their own if a post is good or bad without the benefit of the group telling them what to think.
[dead]