Comment by baddox
12 years ago
Also, so much for 1-on-1 comment threads that are deeply buried and are not intended to be prominently displayed to anyone else. I've had lots of interesting conversations like that.
12 years ago
Also, so much for 1-on-1 comment threads that are deeply buried and are not intended to be prominently displayed to anyone else. I've had lots of interesting conversations like that.
As I understand it, that's kind of the point.
To kill conversations which are deemed useful by all participants and have no negative impact other than the negligible cost of hosting them?
There's something like a "scrolling cost" -- people are only willing to skim so much of a comments thread, without seeing something interesting to them, before closing it.
This is why HN dislikes humorous fluff-posts: they both easily rise to the top, and encourage humorous fluff-replies, which means the first few screenfuls of comments will be guaranteed to induce the kind of "scroll-pain" that makes people close the tab.
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I could be wrong, but I don't think this site is supposed to be for "useful conversations".
I think there's a difference between a constructive conversation and a flame war.
If the worry is that comment threads are too long, HN could implement something like reddit, where you click to read additional comments in a long thread.
If purging (substantial and interesting) one-to-one conversation is an intended effect I think that'd be a shame.
No, that's not intended. If it happens we'll fix it.
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Adding a "private message" feature could solve this for all the people who don't want to give a public e-mail in their profile.
I think for what HN aims to be, keeping everything public is a good thing. I seem to find quite a few "one-on-one" threads that get the occasional input from a third,fourth,fifth participant -- and also a few I find interesting even if I'm not participating.
When everyone knows that what's being discussed is public, it tends to keep the tone more conversational and clear -- I think. The "feel free to contact me, email in profile"-response seems to work well enough for those that do want a private (albeit not anonymous) conversation?
There's a huge difference between doing that on the front page and doing that on an article that's already 3 days old.