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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

And the two big reasons to move to Reddit were (a) single interface and login and (b) threaded conversations. Which is to say, Reddit (well, Slashdot really) reinvented the things that Usenet had had but which had been lost in the migration to traditional web-based forums.

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At least my journey was more slashdot => digg => reddit. Reddit seemed to really take off when digg self immolated during their redesign.

Add Compuserve => AOL => Newsgroups to the beginning and same.

Fun. Let me try:

cave paintings => petroglyphs => pictograms => writing => printing => telegraph => telephone => wireless radio => television => compuserve => aol => newsgroups => digg => reddit ===> VR=====> neurolink ==========> “quantum ascension”

How’s this? Amazing how things have changed and how little foresight I have to see what comes next.

Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet.

I do wonder though, why on earth are so many communities moving to facebook and Discord, the two platforms that are decidedly worse than either usenet or phpbb. Some have come to realize facebook was a mistake, but may be committing an even worse one by moving to Discord.

At least there's competition, like Mastodon for the Twitter-like approach and Lemmy or Kbin for something more Reddit-like. I'm thinking these are our best way out if Usenet can't be rebooted.

> Cool! I didn't know threaded conversations were a concept from usenet.

Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading

I wrote a lengthy reply and then deleted it because I realized that I too used threaded email conversations. I think I forgot about them because Gmail doesn't have them, and it's been ages since I used Eudora or Thunderbird. (Or text-only Pine, but I honestly cannot remember if it showed threads).

GMail does not support threads?!

It's called "Conversation View" and it DOES exist! It's just disabled by default. You can find it in: Settings -> All Settings -> General.

When they introduced labels they claimed threads were a thing of the past. I didn't even know you could still have them, Google certainly didn't advertise it (since they wanted us to use labels instead).

Both of those formats suck, but people moved there because the reach is strong with mobile access.

Yeah, I know what you say is true. But it sucks doubly: you cannot really have long, detailed conversations on Discord mobile like we used to have on web forums. Mobile favors typing short replies, usually memes.

Kids these days don’t have email and SMS or app messaging is pay to play.

Facebook and Discord sort of just work.

Also consider that unless you’re a professional SEO spammer, google doesn’t really discover websites anymore, and buries the results that it does yield under various other things.

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