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Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

It drives me nuts that all the current forums default to closing threads. Reddit and Discourse are the worst offenders if only because they are so common. Answers to questions change, you need to able to leave a response years later that the info in the thread is out of date. Add to that over zealous admins that close everything as a dupe even though you the topic you want to discuss or contribute to is closed.

AFAIK the original reason to close old threads was comment spam but that seems like it's a somewhat solved problem or solved enough it's no longer a valid reason to close threads.

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Stackoverflow used to be very guilty of that too, back when I was active on it and paid attention. I tried to cause a public stir to remedy the following absurd situation:

Question and Answer is top Google result due to well formulated Q, keywords, Google algo, whatever. OK, start to see interesting responses. Closed as Off Topic or Duplicate by randos.

I argued, how can it possibly be a duplicate or off topic if it's a top search result. You're rewarding overzealous types. I suggested drastically increasing the points required to mark posts like that. I doubt I influenced anything, but it was worth a shot.

Reviving old threads was also a reason. I like those that add new information but 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit, etc. I see no reason to do it other than what I mentioned on discourse, phpbb, vbulletin, etc.

I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a new question on an old thread that's about the same topic. My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on that thread, then just replied because it was in front of them, or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

I don't see the problem with "omg me too!" on an old thread as long as "omg me too!" is acceptable on a new one.

Overzealous admins do see big problems with that.

>or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread. Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior.

Just last week someone posted a question on a thread from over a decade ago asking what the end result of building something was.

I and several other people party to the original discussion explained the result, the performance of the system over the past decade and that options were different now

Let's see Reddit do that.

Bumping threads from a long time ago is a feature. Not a bug.

Oh sure. I think it's important too. Just that people misuse it which is probably why they get locked.

We handled this on our forum just by having an indicator that it's a revived thread. Worked well.

> 99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

Comments could be marked by mods (or voted on) to not bump a thread, making it a minor occasional annoyance rather than a real problem.

> I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit

Reddit also just stopped working on UI (other than to make it worse) a long time ago. Why not have an additional view to "new", "top" etc. that sorts threads as if new comments bumped them?

That one should only talk about what a lot of other people currently want to talk about, or only for a certain amount of time, is really a dead end to me.

I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage.

Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that.

There’s no cost benefit for a small forum to remove old threads. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.

But reddit doesn't remove anything (AFAIK), it just makes it read only.

"hundreds of terabytes" of actual pure text. I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case.

Likewise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25165393

I can tell you why reddit does it. Because their entire architecture is built around new data being hot and old data not.

The tiny tin-pot hobby forum can keep every single post in memory and it's not really a problem. They can also do a full database scan pretty quickly.

But reddit can't do that. If it's not in the cache, it takes a lot of work to pull the data from the database. And there is no way to cache the entire dataset. That's why threads get locked at 6 months. So they can be statically archived for quick access.

Economies of scale isn't really part of it, it's more about moore's law.

The amount of actual user text content on even a comparatively large forum is ... surprisingly small.

When Google+ was shutting down, I did estimating of the total amount of public content within the Communities feature. Median size of a post was pretty close to Tweet-sized --- 120 characters or so. (G+ could ingest very large posts --- I never hit a limit though I wouldn't be surprised if it was book sized.) The highly active user population was maybe 12 million (another 300m or so posted at least once). Volume seems to have been about a million posts per week, for six years.

Which works out to less than 100GB of actual user-contributed text.

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/afbnvd/so_how_big...

Adding in the rest of G+ multiplied that out a few times, but likely still well under 1TB data. Images were asssociated with about 1/3 of posts and weighed in at a few MB each, call it 3 MB --- so a picture is worth 24,000 posts.

Rendered and delivered, page weight was just under 1 MB (excluding graphics), for a payload-to-page ratio of 0.015%. (Ironically, about the same as the ratio of monthly posting users to all accounts.)

But if you wanted to extract and store just user content and metadata, excluding video, storage requirements are surprisingly modest.

Facebook data aren't clear, but:

> There are 2.375bn billion monthly active users (as of Q3 2018).

> In a month, the average user likes 10 posts, makes 4 comments, and clicks on 8 ads.

> Hive is Facebook’s data warehouse, with 300 petabytes of data.

> Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data per day.

https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/

I'm going to assume much of the 4 PB is system data, not user-generated.

2.4 billion users posting 4 x 120 byte comments/mo works out to ~15 TB of textual data per year.

Values are extrapolated, unconfirmed. Corrections or suggestions welcomed.

There is no reason unless you do some aggressive caching but forum software did not do a good job of making it clear that it's an old thread that has been revived.

If you can render an old thread (as opposed to pre-rendered HTML and I doubt that is done for forums), there is no storage cost or performance benefit to preventing comments on it.

New comments don't need to live in the same read-only storage as the old ones. They just need to be found when the old ones are rendered, and that's easy - the new comments are in hot storage after all.

I agree with the first half of this. The second half implies that the original designer felt that historical comments were important, which I think any social MVP will disagree with.

So much this. The only engagement I'm allowed if I want to say thank you to someone who posted something really useful a year down the track is to pay for Reddit credit and apply a token of some kind. (Which I have done.)

It's really sad that some great threads aren't allowed to live.

With reddit, I'm sure it's just for performance reasons. They can barely run their servers as is, even with people shelling out thousands for literal cosmetics

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