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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc.

Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.

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This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.

Significantly more personable, almost incomparably so. I've never built any form of relationship on Reddit, unless being abused by other Redditor's counts and that's a big part of why I left it.

It's an issue with HN, but people generally don't get away with the same kind of nasty stuff on here.

On the other hand I have real world friends that I originally met on forums 15 years ago.

The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years.

There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.

Nested replies are definitely better as a way of consuming a post and its comments once and then never thinking about it again. For an asynchronous discussion between several people they get unwieldy after a few rounds of replying. They also make it harder to coherently reference points made cross-tree. That plus algorithmic ranking gives a constant feeling of "gotta refresh to see if there's new stuff" that serves a site like Reddit well, but it makes it much harder to have a longer discussion with more back and forth.

Having recently started participating in a community where most useful discussions are on a PhpBB forum, going back to linear posting was actually refreshing. It's easy to stay on top of because you can check in once a day or so and see just the conversations that have updates since you've last checked them. Threads being sorted by most recently updated means you focus on where there's active discussion. And once you've read those things there's no reason to stick around. "That's it! Get back to doing something useful."

Obviously, this doesn't really scale to a community the size of reddit, but I think it's really pleasant for medium-sized communities.

I think you can mostly solve these problems by changing how the trees are sorted rather than eliminating them entirely.

Here's the usability problem: You're 40 pages deep in a 100 page discussion and you see someone asked a question that you also want to know the answer to. How do you weed through the comments in the remaining 60 pages to find only answers to this question and relevant tangents? I've yet to see a conventional forum come up with a solution that doesn't involve a lot of friction or potential for missed information.

It is far too common for a forum's built in search tool to fail me for some reason or another, leading me to manually scan the entire thread. I may be willing to do that work if the information I am seeking is very important, but will I still feel that way if I just have a hunch that maybe I can provide my own input for someone else?

An upside of linear threads is synchrony, you've pointed out. But the linear thread format isn't incompatible with nesting necessarily, with quoting you're effectively having soft-nested conversations. What's lacking is UX that emphasizes this mixed threading style, and thus benefits from the best of both.

It might surprise you that, I think 4chan explores mixed threading like no other website does. Threads are linear, but quoting results in backlinks meaning isolated conversations are easily navigable, filtering out the "firehose". There's also a button that looks like [-] that can hide a post and all its nested replies, this can hide a specific reply chain from the linear view of the thread. I gave the system a bigger eulogy over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33567593

The flat sequential thread was a reaction to threaded messages as seen on Usenet and mailing lists. It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.

Super interesting, I didn't know it was a reaction. Looking at Usenet thread screenshots, I think the UX issue with their threads is that they actually listed the title, not the actual message in a branch format. Whereas Reddit has the actual message content in a branch format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/...

https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b...

I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.

I'm sure slashdot showed the messages in threads (at least in some modes) at least 5 years before reddit was a thing.

In fact here's a screenshot from 2005

https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796

The web based forum I ran in the late 90s was threaded, then things like UBB came along and the flat structure seemed to win out.

Usenet and mailing lists had different UX problems, unrelated to tree vs. linear model - starting with all the little friction associated with browsing threads and replying to messages. Web forums improved on that. I suspect that back then, the linear model got popular incidentally, because of aforementioned UX improvements. Later on, however, people ported the tree model to the web, which gains all the same UX improvements while still not having the drawback of linear threads.

> It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.

Unsurprisingly, they mostly weren't. Linear threads worked reasonably well when you were participating in or following a discussion as it unfolded; otherwise, they quickly became impenetrable.

> The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum.

I really liked how slashdot's threading defaulted to collapsing low-scoring replies down to one line with a short (expandable) excerpt of the reply. It really helped you take in the interesting parts without the fluff and snark hogging your screen.

> There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur

my most beloved communities are still on phpbb. A "dinosaur" platform with a couple thousand tight knit members is way way more valuable than the nightmare we're seeing unfold with Reddit or any of the other social platform. When people prefer these platforms what they're really preferring is a high user count in their "community". Stable, quality, long term, online communities are better built off the major platforms.

not really, it results in people being forced to hijack the top comment if they want any chance of their post being seen. And upvoting mechanism typically make things worse as well

With OAuth they can reuse one of many common identity providers they may already have, albeit an extra click or two.

That is not a problem with the Fediverse-based solutions. You can navigate from your instance to the content of the other ones, and subscribing/following a remote actor is seamless.

See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites.

I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.

OpenID does exactly that and has been a thing for something like 15 years now.

Quite a few big sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL Verisign would provide a URL you could login with (they were identity providers) and there were lots of independent providers too. You could easily host your own with as simple PHP script.

Sadly, fewer large sites would actually accept OpenID as a way of logging in, but you could used OpenID for authenticating Blogger comments. Stackexchange supported OpenID logins for 8 years [until July 2018](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307647/support-for-...).

The BBC wrote quite a good summary of how things stood in 2008: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/openid_found...

It's another one of those sad parts of the web we lost.

It sucks that often our only option for this kind of authentication is Facebook or Google, since they only see this as a way to harvest even more data about their users.

Apple's implementation is a lot better on this front, but you're still placing your trust in a trillion dollar company. And lots of sites choose not to implement it because Apple's design makes it harder to track users across domains.

https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth

All we need for "identity" is a webpage that the world reasonably expects us to control.

For an extreme example, my "identity" is simply my page at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer.

Because I "control" the page, and because most people have reason to trust dang/Hacker News to not manipulate my "About Page", it serves as an identity.

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That being said, Hacker News "About" pages probably isn't the best place for a general web identity. But maybe a static-page at "neocities.org", or "Github", etc. etc. serve as an identity in practice.

Is it really a lot of effort "managing" a password when your browser will literally create, pre-fill, and save those credentials for you?

Valid argument in 2003. Not so much in 2023.

Sadly outside of the HN crowd something like 5% of people use that functionality of their browser - and maybe 1% use a password manager.

> It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that

It exists, it’s a web standard, and it’s called WebAuthn

https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/

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