Honestly I’m glad it doesn’t.
Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
Reply notifications may increase engagement, but I’d argue they reduce the quality of discussion, since such notifications would encourage rapid back and forth arguments.
I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
In my experience, the "hot takes" are often low quality comments. Quality comments take time and thought, and HN isn't conducive for that.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
That said, it still won't highlight conversations which have come back to life.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
I'm saying notifications would exacerbate those situations, which is why it's good that HN doesn't have that facility.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
Like, I "owe" people a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30310575#30310784
I am trying to put some degree of effort into the answer, but it feels like they might not even see my responses to their comments.
They thought it'd make a good blog post too, so you can repurpose it for that?
But I have been thinking about making one, maybe this can kick it off. Would have to be anonymous until I successfully make it back into tech.
Ux is hard. Personally, I had clicked the "comments" link and it was not what I was looking for, and then it took a moment of curiosity several years later to try again. I think the moral of the story is, if you want something to be discoverable, don't hide it behind a less obvious naming choice when the more obvious looking choice is used nearby. But who knows.
Threads are part of the HN home page header when logged in.
How does your browsers disable this link? Does it disable other header links as well?
I'm less curious about late replies than I am about late upvotes. Sometimes karma ticks upward and I can't figure out what people liked. It'd be nice to be able to figure this out — does anyone know if any of the browser plugins offer such a functionality?
If I reply to a post or comment that's over several days old there's almost no chance the author will ever see it.
That is a Good Thing.
If you ask a question, and I happen to see it a couple days later and can answer it, why would you not want to see said answer?
Especially considering somebody who's particularly motivated to find delayed answers to specific questions can always bookmark the particular comment and check it manually, or just occasionally scroll-back through the "threads" page or whatever. If they're not motivated enough to do that, then maybe the discussion wasn't that important to begin with.
This is the normal case for commenting :: if someone replies, it shouldn't be difficult to find that out
You can already flag inappropriate content. We don't have to fear it.
If I'm still curious of the answer a few days later I can check my profile a few days later
Basically too inconvenient for a troll, but usable for most probably productive purposes.
Philosophers have been answering, or at least asking, the same questions for centuries and millennia. Technical and scientific questions can span years or decades. Political and social ones, decades and centuries.
No, it's not necessary to drag all of past discourse into each individual conversation. But neither is it reasonable to demand that all discussions die within a few hours, or a day at the outside, on the most perfect text-based global communications platform ever developed.
Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.
Look at any post that gets a significant number of comments and then scroll to pick out the deepest threads. When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high. When the depth comes from a small number of people going back-and-forth, it’s usually not very interesting.
Adding more of the latter type would make HN worse and that’s what you would get more of if they made HN work more like Reddit.
So your opinion is that discussions are bad.
> When the depth comes from lots of people adding information or opinions, the quality is generally pretty high.
That's not a discussion that’s a lot if people broadcasting into the void (it’s also not true, if lots of people are replying to the same comment they’re usually adding identical or strongly overlapping information on a relatively basic subject).