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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years.

It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.

The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.

I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.

[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.

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My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new feature or something to show the passage of time, but found nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum signatures still exist.

I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality". Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever interacted.

Time to dust off my Fark account.

I’ve long felt that recursive/threaded replies were the death of intelligent online discourse. It’s just endless debate club: everyone proselytizing stodgy talking points from their individual soapboxes without any genuine back-and-forth happening. If someone loses an argument, they usually just disappear instead of facing the music. No accountability, no reflection, no real sense of community.

Quite good at being addictive, though.

It goes all the way back to Usenet, if not earlier.

When did Usenet really fail? I left by 2007 but it was in bad shape before that.

Spam killed it

I agree. It also means you likely need some way of sorting replies. And that means upvoting, which is a horrid system.

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones.

In my experience, well-moderated forums like Metafilter tend to have much more intelligent discussions than anything you’d find on HN or Reddit.

On the other hand, threading makes it possible for one group of people to spin off into a subtopic like discussing the relative merits of threaded vs linear boards, in the same general post about what Zuck said, without annoyingly hijacking the main topic. On HN I often find it useful to collapase the child responses and just read the top level, until something like this pulls me into a rabbit hole.

The annoying hijacking of a thread was a visible faux pas and helped keep the order of the message board with downward social pressure as opposed to an unbreakable rule (like forcing threaded boards).

Meritocracy vs. benevolent dictatorship

Threading isn’t an intrinsic sin, I think — sorting by upvotes is. The Discourse forum software allows sub-threads while still preserving a linear conversation style. You could also empower mods to spin off discussions into their own, separate threads. Points is what turns it into an inherent pissing match.

I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize certain people. Also the completely linear threads means people will actually see what you post and not just ignore any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded replies.

Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and people who post crap content. People don't just make an account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.

At the very least the few weirdos that seem to create daily accounts just to get banned after 2-3 posts are funding forum by doing so.

I spend much more time on three old school web forums related to poker and the KC Chiefs than I do on social media.

> [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.

Did you get teased by the San Jose Shark when you tried to make smash mouth eat the egg?

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