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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

This is too weird. I was typing up a similar question today, wondering if structure forums are still superior in this age of Reddit-style websites.

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I'm not a big reddit user, but I don't see how people keep up with the massive sprawl of the comment sections. I mean once you click into a story on Reddit (or HN, LN, etc), it seems like a pretty standard "threaded" affair which makes finding the latest bits of the conversation hard. And the nature of reddit/HN/LN etc make it hard for new topics to get traction, many people may never see new topics if the most popular ones float to the top.

Not to mention that discussion basically dies two days after any story.

Forums allow sophisticated discussions to occur for longer than 48 hours. My biggest complaint with HN is that discussions always terminate themselves shortly after the article moves from the frontpage. Its just too difficult to track new comments that aren't directly replied to your own.

Agreed. For serious, long-term discussions, forums work a lot better than sites like reddit. As soon as a submission on reddit gets more than a few hundred comments, it really is hard to get everything.

I'm a big fan of serious hobby forums. Places like HardForum or the late TheGreenButton have lots of in-depth, long-standing, technical discussions. Discussions that just wouldn't be feasible on another software platform.

Upvote to all of you. I hadn't realized this until today when I returned to this story and noticed that hardly anyone had responded to it. The story (and its comments) have basically died since it is off the "new" and "frontpage" sections of the site. However, if the story could somehow be found in a section on the HN site, I wonder if it would get more response and show some life. Just a thought...

For what its worth, I built a greasemonkey script to help find new comments in threads:

https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHalfLife

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