Comment by Findecanor
12 hours ago
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?
If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior.
To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.
You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier.
* It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.
I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.
The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.
Usenet, effectively ;-)
Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.
Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer.
Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting.
It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way.
You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like:
Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible.
Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.
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The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.
You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.
And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.
Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).
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Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.
Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations?
It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB
That new thing could be possible, though
That's literally just how imageboards work.
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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.
>On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read
I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here? Suppose it's a discussion on a technical topic. Maybe people have gone off on a tangent that should have been split off into a new thread/topic, or maybe the discussion being had is necessary context to get an idea of where the real answer lies. Reddit-style threads make it easy to have back-and-forth discussions, but at the cost of punishing long discussions with less visibility, or even with worse UX (given the increasingly narrower horizontal screen space as the conversation goes on).
Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan. See a comment, besides it inherently linking to the comment/s it's replying to, you can see at the top of its box a list of child comments that have replied to that comment, and if you hover over the links you can get a quick view of the comment to decide if you're interested (before committing to changing the scroll position), but comments are still listed chronologically, so if you just want to see the newest comments on a thread, it's still possible to do that. Famously, few years ago a stickied thread on /trash/ went on for months and tens of thousands of replies. Something like that would never work on Reddit or HN. Well, I mean, people can still make top-level comments, but after a while no one will see them.
> I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here?
It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. And only a fraction of it is relevant. Yet you have to scan each post to check.
Maybe that's useful if you have a very specific technical question to see if anybody found a solution for error E193A8 on version 1.02.1223b2, but otherwise people are trying to have a live discussion.
> Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan.
Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread. I think short-living discussions (Reddit, HN, 4chan) model the realities of human interaction better.
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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.
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.
I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion (which RES can do for old.reddit) than attempting to automatically sort a discussion into subtopics.
Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.
> I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion
I built this (both chronological view and new comment filtering) into the comments presentation on https://hcker.news. Check it out, I’d be interested to know if there’s any way I can make it more useful.