Comment by keiferski
14 hours ago
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. I comment "I love my new <Ninja Creami>!".
2. Ninja Creami is my own company, or company I have a financial association with, either shareholding or I'm a paid employee of them.
3. I pay a lot of bots/people to upvote my comment from 1.
4. Lots of people see Ninja Creami at the top of the comments, apparently with lots of grass-roots support, and go and buy one. (Something that would be less possible or less effective if votes didn't move threads to the top).
[Or, instead of buying one, when I saw a Reddit thread suspiciously full of Ninja Creami endorsement, went to look what it is and found it was a combination of bench drill and food processor that screechingly grinds a pre-frozen block of flavoured cream into an icy slush, and from what I can tell apparently doesn't "make ice cream" in any ordinary sense of the word].
There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.
BYOND forums used tree comments in chronological order with an unread marker
IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.
That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
3 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.