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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

> A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation.

This is not high on my list of complaints, and I'd even venture to say it is an advantage. Asynchronous forums like HN / StackOverflow attract much higher quality (as in, self-contained, thoughtful, informative, and searchable) answers than the Discord servers I'm a part of.

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I would agree. On a high-traffic discourse-based forum I peruse, both the automatically updating thread pages and the "soandso is typing…" indicators make for posts that are short, IM-like, and generally more combative.

The endless scroll is a problem too. Because nobody wants to scroll through n-hundred posts, you also end up with the same handful of posts being re-made ad infinitum. Old paged style forums suffered from this to some extent but pages being bite-sized lended to more people reading the whole thread.

To say nothing of it being impossible to search. Ctrl-f + pagedown + f3 + pagedown + wait + f3 + pagedown + wait + f3…

and god help you if you're trying to read a thread in reverse order, any images popping in via infinite scroll will make what you're reading jump out of place

That is true, Discord is generally thought of (and used) as voice/chatting platform, more than a message board platform, but people still write random garbage even on those... as evidenced by things like Youtube comments or Disqus comments. So, the target community is still the king when it comes to the quality of the conversation. (BTW I didn't mention Twitter because that is the worst PLUS all the spam. Trying to read something like a response thread for a Musk Tweet is a nightmare.)

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