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Comment by kallus | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the tip! I personally use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the morning and be done.

The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?

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Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-)

How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?

I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a few hours?

Sites like MetaFilter - http://www.metafilter.com/, Edward Tufte's forum - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1, QBN - http://www.qbn.com/ - and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all single threaded (or in the case of blogs, most, but not all).

> Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-)

No, not really. There is usually ~1 article each day where I get interested in reading the discussion. When that happens, it is often disappointing to find the discussion high-jacked by a top-voted comment that goes in a direction that doesn't interest me. I'm sure there are interesting comments further down the page, but on this site it's hard to find them. I think Slashdot handles this a little better by letting you set a point threshold.

In the even fewer cases when I want to join the discussion, it is pretty meaningless to add a comment to the bottom of a page which is more than a day old.

> I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a few hours?

Yes! That frames the question much better.

> Sites like MetaFilter - http://www.metafilter.com/, Edward Tufte's forum - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1, QBN - http://www.qbn.com/ - and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all single threaded (or in the case of blogs, most, but not all).

Haven't used those sites, and it was hard to get a grip by taking a quick look. How do they solve it? I think single threaded is great, but in my experience it breaks down when the number of comments get too large.

Manually or semi-automatically curated discussions would probable be very valuable.

There is usually ~1 article each day where I get interested in reading the discussion. When that happens, it is often disappointing to find the discussion high-jacked by a top-voted comment that goes in a direction that doesn't interest me.

Do you use Twitter? If so, something like https://twitter.com/newsyc50 or https://twitter.com/newsyc20 might work for you. There's a threshold but it keeps you within an hour or two of most significant posts. (I'm not a fan as a lot of the posts I enjoy /don't/ reach these thresholds.)

How do they solve it? I think single threaded is great, but in my experience it breaks down when the number of comments get too large.

MetaFilter has been around since 1999 with the same format and surprisingly it continues to work well. Single threading has a big effect on how discussions go. It's hard to put into words.. I hope someone will write an academic paper on single vs multi threaded discussions ;-)

My personal experience is it increases the signal to noise ratio and discourages irrelevant contributions, with the frequent con of seemingly endless discussions and polarization into two opposing factions of commenters.

Edward Tufte's forum is unusual. The discussions there are glacial. Seriously, it's typical to only have a handful of responses after a month or two but they're always spot on. It's an extreme example since Tufte's staff personally moderates every comment and only the very best get through.

QBN is basically a mess. The way they make it work long term is that responding to any thread bumps that thread back up to the top of the site, no matter how old it is. There's a thread on the front page right now with 68,675 responses. This wouldn't work so well in an academic or technical environment but actually goes well in a more chit chatty "arty" environment, which is their main audience.

I think there's so much room to study this stuff formally. If they ever did, I would be the first to order the textbook! :-)

I think MetaFilter works because of the relative low number of users, and their selection, since it's a paid website (to comment, at least).

I'm only a spectator there, but I've noticed the threads are much more personal. I think you can even see the individuals that favorited a given story or comment.

Don't forget moderators who are dedicated to "doing it right". You do kind of have to figure out and fit into the culture there.

If a new user doesn't get it and causes problems the mods will usually politely PM them and talk to them about what's going on. If the user continues to cause problems (start fights and just generally be inflammatory to the community) they will have no problem banning them.

They also temp-ban users who they know are normally well behaved when they are clearly having a bad day (which usually just means that a particular thread on a particular topic hits too close to home and they just can't be civil about it).

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