Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

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>On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read

I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here? Suppose it's a discussion on a technical topic. Maybe people have gone off on a tangent that should have been split off into a new thread/topic, or maybe the discussion being had is necessary context to get an idea of where the real answer lies. Reddit-style threads make it easy to have back-and-forth discussions, but at the cost of punishing long discussions with less visibility, or even with worse UX (given the increasingly narrower horizontal screen space as the conversation goes on).

Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan. See a comment, besides it inherently linking to the comment/s it's replying to, you can see at the top of its box a list of child comments that have replied to that comment, and if you hover over the links you can get a quick view of the comment to decide if you're interested (before committing to changing the scroll position), but comments are still listed chronologically, so if you just want to see the newest comments on a thread, it's still possible to do that. Famously, few years ago a stickied thread on /trash/ went on for months and tens of thousands of replies. Something like that would never work on Reddit or HN. Well, I mean, people can still make top-level comments, but after a while no one will see them.

> I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here?

It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. And only a fraction of it is relevant. Yet you have to scan each post to check.

Maybe that's useful if you have a very specific technical question to see if anybody found a solution for error E193A8 on version 1.02.1223b2, but otherwise people are trying to have a live discussion.

> Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan.

Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread. I think short-living discussions (Reddit, HN, 4chan) model the realities of human interaction better.

>It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying.

That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving. If you disagree with that, if you think past discussion is worthless, then you're not the intended audience, so why should you be catered to? Go hang out on Discord or whatever.

>Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread.

I don't really know what you mean. 4chan threads are typically short-lived, but that's not an inherent property. You could have an imageboard or forum implementation modeled exactly after 4chan, but where threads are permanent. In fact, there are 4chan archives that let you browse past discussions at will. The only difference with a forum is that you may no longer be able to reply, if the real thread has 404'd. Those archives cost money to run, so clearly there's people who disagree with you that past conversations are unimportant, to the tune of thousands of dollars each month.

> That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving.

At first I thought the complaint was that long threads can have numerous irrelevant fluff posts, outdated posts, and off-topic posts getting in the way of reading the useful bits. But treating a forum thread as a live conversation was somewhat surprising to me. And specifically excluding that a thread could be reference material perhaps reflects a difference between the sorts of places GP and I prefer to browse.

But about long threads: stepping through a 30-page or 300-page thread, where rarely is a post an update about the project, while the rest add nothing substantial, discourages looking through the whole the whole thread is not always practical. And search often doesn't return anything useful.

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