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Comment by make_me_rich | Hacker News Reader

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh

EDITED: *conversations

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I actually love threaded discussions… On HN and Old Reddit. But anything is better than whatever XDA uses, and almost everything is better than discourse.

I also prefer reading threaded discussions, but are you aware of a good way of keeping track of new messages? That’s my main issue with threaded discussions, for example here on HN.

Notifications and sorting for new like reddit has.

that only really works for responses to your comments and top level comment chains though.

Technically, you should be able to subscribe to any comment’s descendants. But that is not implemented anywhere I know, sadly.

I am the developer of HACK, an iOS, android, MacOS client app which provides push notifications for HN when someone replies to your comment or post.

The way Usenet clients and traditional email clients work is that unread messages are marked as such (usually by use of bold typeface), and you have keyboard shortcuts to navigate from one message to the next, or to jump to the next unread message.

For example, the Tab key jumps to the next unread message, Space/Backspace scroll up/down within a message, and the Up/Down arrow keys jump to the previous/next message (regardless if unread or not). A message is marked as read automatically when you navigate to it (it gains focus). There’s also a keyboard shortcut to mark a read message as unread again if you w.

The keyboard navigation means that only one message has focus any point in time. You have a threaded view of all messages, where the unread ones are highlighted (e.g. by bold typeface). Then you can decide which ones to navigate to. Usually you just use Tab and Space to jump/scroll through the unread messages. It’s incredibly efficient to use.

> Old Reddit

Important distinction.

New Reddit also fell prey to bad development practices and is without exaggeration unusable for me. It often "crashes" and the whole page goes dark-grey on my browser, and this has been happening for at least a year. After reloading I can't see all messages without navigating away, and middle click messes with the scrolling. At this point I will assume they either don't care or are fucking with me.

Which browser do you use?

Firefox mostly, but that also happens with Safari in my other PC.

I too miss the good old days where the information you wanted was buried somewhere in a 100 page phpBB thread and you had to manually search through it 1 page at a time, with each one-line comment taking up half the page with avatars and signatures.

Good times. Sad that things have moved on to systems that don't suck quite so much but that's progress for you.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.

> find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

This is not new, it just isn't applied to web based forums as much as I (someone who likes threaded discussions like that) would like. For small discussions it make little difference, for large branching threads it can help greatly when you don't care to follow all the sub-threads. It was not uncommon in Usenet clients back in the day. Of course it needs to be coupled with good UI for collapsing branches and otherwise navigating the tree, and perhaps a chronological view option for issue who prefer that (or a tree-view with posts spaced by arrival order for the best of both of you do it right - I had a reader that did that but can't currently remember it's name).

I find HN's approach very easy to read and follow. But then, each submission does not keep getting commented on indefinitely. Could get unwieldy then.

it works if you want to read a thread exactly once and then never come back to it. if it's an ongoing discussion that you want to visit even just two times, you'll just end up reading all the same comments again and struggle to find anything new

I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability.

Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem.

Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond.

Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)

My favorite kind of web forum engine is the one which keeps discussions threaded, but displays them in a flat list of messages ordered by time, but with quick navigation to parent and responses.

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other.

But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion.

Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now.

[1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952

vBulletin 3.x/4.x and IPB 2.x/3.x had threaded view as an option alongside flat.

Forum software of old actually gave users the power to choose the interface they want. We've really gone backwards with software interfaces.

Also, themes. These days all we get are "Dark Mode" and "Light Mode". Boring.

Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.

What are they using?

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Thank you. I just found it now on my own on desktop via their "About this forum" footer link, wasn't obvious to me when I quickly glanced at it on mobile earlier.

It looks like a regular flat forum with a thread display just bolted on top of the page where clicking a post in the thread just dumps you in the middle of a flat discussion

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