Comment by hombre_fatal
8 hours ago
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.
>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.
That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving. If you disagree with that, if you think past discussion is worthless, then you're not the intended audience, so why should you be catered to? Go hang out on Discord or whatever.
>Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread.
I don't really know what you mean. 4chan threads are typically short-lived, but that's not an inherent property. You could have an imageboard or forum implementation modeled exactly after 4chan, but where threads are permanent. In fact, there are 4chan archives that let you browse past discussions at will. The only difference with a forum is that you may no longer be able to reply, if the real thread has 404'd. Those archives cost money to run, so clearly there's people who disagree with you that past conversations are unimportant, to the tune of thousands of dollars each month.