I can’t stand the move “communities” have made to chat interfaces. It’s like if someone said “what if we replaced all libraries with just a warehouse full of people talking”. Chat communities are a significant step back in terms of knowledge transfer and creation and I think are more a highlight of how anti social the world is becoming.
> Also chat platforms can't bring valuable discussion like hn . Most chat devloves to dramas and fight.
This to me seems more like a function of the aforementioned people involved. I've personally had plenty of valuable discussions in random chatrooms. Even in more active ones.
Meanwhile on HN, a decent portion of the comments also is drama of some kind. (rude remarks, off-hand comments, FUD spreading)
Mind you, either medium has it's high's and low's, but I just think they don't differentiate themselves much in that regard. It probably depends significantly on the specific communities one engages with.
> Because there's no topic to follow, nobody read back original posts and it became personal.
To me this same issues exists on HN, possibly even more prevalent by virtue of being a news aggregator. People frequently do not even appear to read the article before arguing about things (mostly the title).
This sometimes makes comments feel like they are done in bad faith, or out of hostility towards the topic/author. Which I don't think makes a good climate for discussion.
On some topics even going slightly against status quo can result in gray or dead comments, even when the comment is well argued. Meanwhile, some hostile comments are not pushed against enough.
I think the value of the discussions within a community depends far more on how much the community polices it's standards by discouraging unwanted behavior rather than the medium in which it happens.
But ignoring that, the lack of notifications on replies, which is something I don't really mind, also seems antithetical to the concept of discussion.
Some threads don't end by merit of their arguments but because one of the parties involved did not reply, possibly because of a lack of visibility.
Personal opinion: Without many tools to promote and demote messages, I'd argue group chat is one of the least valuable forms of communication, if your goal is to read something thoughtful or educational.
For me, HN already has the attention span of a goldfish; making it more synchronous would not be making it better.
There may be garbage but this is public forum anyways, still garbage here is a lot better than top gold post of reddit.