Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting.
This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online.
The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...
Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments").
(B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites.
Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon.
Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation).
If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.)
Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article.
Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason.
In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.