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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

Is HN a forum? What about Reddit? Facebook?

Seems like the distinction between "forum" and "social media" is mostly about user count. Forums are pretty healthy if you draw that line in some reasonable location IMO.

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The difference between "forum" and "social media" is how posts are sorted and displayed.

HN and Reddit are focused on news, the newest stuff goes to the top and disappears after a day or two.

Forums on the other side focus on topics. Threads with on going discussions go to the top. They never disappear, as soon as somebody makes a new post into a thread it goes back to the top.

This means you can end up with extremely in depth and long ongoing discussions on forums that you'll never find on social media. It wasn't unusual to find threads on IMDB forums that spanned literally decades. Meanwhile on Reddit everything gets locked from any further participation after six months and becomes impossible to find after just a few days.

I'm pretty sure Reddit stopped locking posts by default.

Personally, I'd say Reddit and HN aren't forums because of the enforced time-limited nature of discussions.

I rarely see forums that don't automatically lock old discussions, to prevent necromancy.

All of the ones I participate on specifically don’t lock old threads, and for specific discussions, it’s expected that instead of making a new post on the Prophet 12, you look up the old one and add your post to it. If found forums that lock old thread to be very annoying, and I generally don’t use them for that reason. Discussions can easily spread over a decade, and that mega thread is a wealth of information.

But it doesn't happen as fast as it does on HN.

Once something drops from HN's front page - 12 hours? 24 hours? 36 hours if it is really huge

then it's dead.

but they need to have died for that. I know plenty forums that have threads that are running for months or years - because they've never gone for $threshold weeks without a post. (and in general I tend to think locking after time is bad anyways, or at least should be able to be overridden)

Whereas even within the days where it is still possible, you are not going to see "oh, this HN/Reddit discussion from last week is still active" because it doesnt get ranked anywhere based on that.

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