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Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

People miss the quality of discussions on Usenet, but don't ever think about why the discussions were better.

Biggest factor I think that made the discussions better is that folks were not connected all the time so discussions would span days or weeks. You had time think between posts. Folks would log on once or twice a day. Obviously there were exceptions. Today a reddit thread has about a 24 hour shelf life because of its global nature, and then it dies. Furthermore the most intense discussions will happen in bursts and then flame out. People aren't engaging in discussion they are shouting their opinion into the ether and moving on.

Second factor obviously is the tremendously larger and more diverse population on the internet. More people mean more new topics posted and less time to discuss topics. The actors are less technical overall than those who had internet in the 90s and early 00s.

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I think you're very right about the slower pace fostering better discussions.

It plays out in other places, too. I've noticed that, since moving to Slack, the quality of electronic communication at my company has taken a serious nose dive. I think precisely because Slack makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation over a long period of time.

I've also noticed that the quality of discussion in face-to-face meetings tends to be inversely proportional to the number of people present. The more people, the quicker you need to be to speak if you want to get anything out there before the flow of conversation moves on and whatever you have to say becomes a non sequitur. The less time you can take to compose your thoughts before presenting them. The people who place the highest value on measured speech generally don't open their mouths at all, unless someone puts them on the spot.

The worst incarnation of this phenomenon that I can think of seems to be Twitter. Twitter doesn't host conversations. It hosts a conversation-themed massively multiplayer live action game in which participants compete for scorekeeping tokens known as "likes" and "retweets".

I agree. I am less glib and more quiet now than when I was younger and get crowded out of meetings quite quickly. I used to just speak my mind, but now I prefer to mull things over.

Reddit is also like Twitter. Karma has certainly evolved into a game. The focus on Reddit has always been to shift content to the "new" topics as well.

The primary difference between Reddit and Twitter, at least for me, is that I somehow became addicted to the former and could care less about the latter, despite trying.

Or look at twitter. It encourages extra small glibe comments as the standard instead of long thoughtful posts.

Possible, instead of only small posts it should be only long posts or none at all.

True, kind of why love letters (and letters in general) were better back in the day. People took more time to think about things, and magnus opus was a thing.

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