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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that the tree structure of comments in which most of the discussion usually takes place under the first few most upvoted comments might not be the best to have scientific discourse, but also don't know what would be better.

On the other hand, papers/journals themselves could be seen as a ultra-high latency social network in which replies happen in the form of papers that reference the work they're replying to.

The high latency could be seen as a feature. The ability to post a reply instantly and without much thought definitely degrades quality.

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I think you're onto something! A retrospective history of science styled as an HN clone would be amazing, will any of you dare?

This is difficult. It should look more like a DAG than a tree, but we don't have a good UI for DAG comment threads yet.

Interesting idea ! That makes me think about a system where you can reply to multiple comments at once.

You mean like email and usenet's in-reply-to[1][2]?

Sure, not many, if any, clients handle an arbitrary list of message id's there, but it's clear[3] that's what it's for.

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc822#section-4.6.2

[2]: https://cr.yp.to/immhf/thread.html

[3]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322#section-3.6.4

Thanks for the links, I don't know anything about usenet beside the fact that it exists, and didn't even know it was possible for email too.

I'll search for examples of UI used for many in-reply-to, it seems interesting.

I'm intrigued - how would you envision the posts and comments working?

Magically? Jokes apart, it'd be something like Pythagoras posts a link to his theory, with threads going until a paradigm change prompts another link and thread, and so on, and then Newton, and Max Planck... you know, implementation details.

I have much more imagination than skills.

>I have much more imagination than skills.

same!

Harness the compulsive debate potential of internet forums by socially crediting discourse graphs from their sources.

For once it would be nice to be able to sort latest to oldest

How do you filter for such folks that would respond so professionally?

> but also don't know what would be better.

References. Ie. a directed graph.

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