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Comment by hugatest | Hacker News Reader

This is quite cool, but I'm wondering why we need to re-invent the wheel for all those threaded discussion platforms.

The OG is definitely email. What would really rock would be an IMAP gateway which you subscribe to with your favorite email client which then gives you threading, read/unread markers etc. It could abstract different front-page days as folders and each submission as the root of a thread. Then you could use whatever email client you like the most, with all their decades of polishing. It could even support replying to threads. And it could support different "backends", like HN, reddit, whatnot.

Anybody? That's something I'd pay for. Or do I need to keep dreaming?

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For me the OG for threaded discussions is Usenet.

I remember reading threads using a UI like this (not my screenshot but this is the client I used, MacSOUP): http://www.fen-net.de/mac/bilder/macsoup/Thread.gif There were also keyboard shortcuts to make navigating efficient.

Having a Usenet gateway seems like it would make a lot more sense from a technical standpoint than an email gateway

Email has terrible thread navigation and I consider old.reddit.com with reddit enhancement suite the best in class.

> Email has terrible thread navigation

This doesn't make sense. Email is a protocol, not a UI. It would be fairly easy to make a UI that displays email like Reddit threads (the hardest part is probably stripping quoted replies). Thunderbird can display the discussion tree, but doesn't inline the message content. GMail inlines message content but linearizes the thread. I am not aware of any clients that inline the discussion content in a tree view.

Then you need a better mail client.

I've been using an incredibly stupid bash script to do this; you've finally given me the push to publish it here: https://github.com/krsiehl/hn2mdir

Run mkdir -p /path/to/some/directory/{cur,new,tmp}, then ./hn2mdir.bash /path/to/some/directory/, and it'll crawl Algolia's HN API to dump a bunch of emails, one for each post/comment. You can read it with mutt -f /path/to/some/directory. Syncing with IMAP left as an exercise to the reader (I'm using mbsync).

Note that it gets large, fast, and may break your IMAP server; I periodically run find ~/Mail/HN -type f -mtime +30 -delete to clear it out.

Edit: should clarify, this is read-only, I've never bothered to set up any kind of response functionality

Wow, this is brilliant!

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