Hacker News Reader

Comment by doginasuit | Hacker News Reader

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different.

I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society.

The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.

View on HN

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.

What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.

In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.

Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic.

It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread.

Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.

Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:

* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...

Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?

I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.

The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.

Usenet, effectively ;-)

Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.

Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer.

Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting.

It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way.

You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like:

   <index src="index.json" max="100"> 
     <h3><title/></h3>
   </index>

Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible.

Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.

What kinds of forms do you have in mind?

Another ask of mine would be standard page formats, such that there could be standard styles which could be consistently applied to them. Article, index, search, gallery, discussion/thread, off the top of my head.

Stop everyone from reinventing the registration form so that it can be filled out without all the fuzzy business. You specify the fields you need and where it should post. Then have no further control over it.

Have the browser bar show it is a standard form for site: example.com which means no [3rd party] js listening in on personal information. Validate and format all countries adresses correctly. Get email addresses and names right

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

If you let me (or random Joe) design it it will no doubt be wrong in multiple ways. It will probably zoom annoyingly on iphones, I will ask for the state name outside the us and I should really ask for your mum's birthday and maiden name. I will disable right click, mess up tab index and ruin accessibility with a gray on gray font. Should I wrap table rows in labels?

Why should everyone have to implement this if 100 million people already tried and mostly got it wrong?

Now the hard part:

Which fields are allowed?

Which aren't?

It's not so hard but does require some debate and research. Only the sensitive info needs to be contained. For [say] a webshop you have at least the name, address info, email and phone number. Perhaps payment info or coupon codes could be included.

Gradually make it more sophisticated.

It's just an example. The point is for stuff used often enough to find its way into html and improve.

The time date picker was a fun idea but needs work.

Search suggestions was a good idea but the implementation is still horrific.

Basic table sort doesn't seem very exotic but you could add many data types.

Everyone is using toggles rather than checkboxes. I know how to doctor this with css and labels but its an ugly hack.

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_switch.asp

Thanks.

Coming up with a standard form is of course the hard part, but the basics you suggest are probably in there. There is of course all the bit about falsehoods programmers believe about names, addresses, emails, and the rest:

<https://ctemm.me/falsehoods/>

<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=falsehoods%20programmers%20believe...>

If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior.

To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.

You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier.

* It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861

If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context.

> You can have a chronologically sorted tree view

Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well.

I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript.

Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time. Only a very fringe subset of nerds (myself included, I still weep for my HN clone in Hack that will never be finished, and my Godot client that will never be released) considers forum UI design to be interesting.

> no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time

Not sure about that. To me it looks as if Facebook is self sabotaging, for example their local events page is broken and has been for years. FB-the-company seems defunct internally, and if they start fading away (slowly over many 10s of years), maybe forums will make a comeback (slowly). Also, if AIs destroy Reddit, this might be an opportunity for smaller forums that have ways to block boring AIs.

> Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point

Definitely not :- )

> With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to […]

He says as he replies to a commented that did quoting. :)

The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.

You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.

And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.

Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).

And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading.

Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.

Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more cohesive. You had at most 2-3 separate trains of thought happening at once, as opposed to in a threaded forum like HN or Reddit, where the fringes of a conversation feel much more spread out.

The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.

In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

I actually strongly prefer to read such forums WITHOUT "responsive design," even on my phone. Strongly.

Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.

> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable

I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing).

Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar.

See: (incl demo video)

https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve...

(Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))

Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations?

It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB

That new thing could be possible, though

That's literally just how imageboards work.

You’re describing one view. We want two.

USENET with a threaded newsreader like "trn" provided the optimal experience here.

You saw things in their threaded context, but it remembered what you've read and there is a direct action to "go to next unread" that will jump around and follow the fringe. You don't have to open individual root posts.

It wouldn't work so well if you expect to read sparsely though. People used moderation and killfiles to prune out garbage. The death of USENET was in many ways the flood of posts that made this no longer feasible.

The other missing thing here is topics, i.e. newsgroups. HN is not as broad as USENET as a whole, but also not as narrow as one newsgroup. These groups are what you would open, then skim through all the messages in that forest, catching up on what is new since last visit. HN topics are too narrow to want to bother reopening each one to catch up, but there is no collective layer above them to help find your own sparse subset of worthwhile HN conversations.

But replies in forum topics weren't a single chronological conversation either. Especially in those huge threads with many posters. It was people replying to posts who knows how far back in the stream, maintaining a bunch of smaller conversations, or just interjecting a top-level comment based on the 1st post or title.

The upside is that ideally these subconversations can split and merge into a larger conversation. But then you also have the problem of 99% of a topic's history being fluff nobody is ever going to read again, especially not in that 20 year long topic. It only created the illusion of a convo people would follow because it was a stream of posts with a reply box at the end.

Of course, I haven't seen a solution that addresses both sets of issues between tree vs. forum linear pipe, though I think the tree maps better to human interaction and attention.

You bring up an upside of the forum style topic though: the chronological view gives it more lifespan since new posts are given maximal visibility.

On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read, so I think creating new Reddit submissions with fresh participants is better for conversation. The limited lifespan is a feature.

The idea of "dupe threads" never made sense when the "dupe" is a 30 page topic from 6 months ago. We're here to talk and exchange our views, not scan for our views in a conversation others already had. That there could be some sort of canonical discussion or master thread on a topic was probably the worst superstition had in the forum era.

>On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read

I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here? Suppose it's a discussion on a technical topic. Maybe people have gone off on a tangent that should have been split off into a new thread/topic, or maybe the discussion being had is necessary context to get an idea of where the real answer lies. Reddit-style threads make it easy to have back-and-forth discussions, but at the cost of punishing long discussions with less visibility, or even with worse UX (given the increasingly narrower horizontal screen space as the conversation goes on).

Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan. See a comment, besides it inherently linking to the comment/s it's replying to, you can see at the top of its box a list of child comments that have replied to that comment, and if you hover over the links you can get a quick view of the comment to decide if you're interested (before committing to changing the scroll position), but comments are still listed chronologically, so if you just want to see the newest comments on a thread, it's still possible to do that. Famously, few years ago a stickied thread on /trash/ went on for months and tens of thousands of replies. Something like that would never work on Reddit or HN. Well, I mean, people can still make top-level comments, but after a while no one will see them.

> I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here?

It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. And only a fraction of it is relevant. Yet you have to scan each post to check.

Maybe that's useful if you have a very specific technical question to see if anybody found a solution for error E193A8 on version 1.02.1223b2, but otherwise people are trying to have a live discussion.

> Honestly, want to know who actually has this figured out? 4chan.

Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread. I think short-living discussions (Reddit, HN, 4chan) model the realities of human interaction better.

>It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying.

That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving. If you disagree with that, if you think past discussion is worthless, then you're not the intended audience, so why should you be catered to? Go hang out on Discord or whatever.

>Yeah, but it's ultra-ephemeral, definitely not the model of a forum thread.

I don't really know what you mean. 4chan threads are typically short-lived, but that's not an inherent property. You could have an imageboard or forum implementation modeled exactly after 4chan, but where threads are permanent. In fact, there are 4chan archives that let you browse past discussions at will. The only difference with a forum is that you may no longer be able to reply, if the real thread has 404'd. Those archives cost money to run, so clearly there's people who disagree with you that past conversations are unimportant, to the tune of thousands of dollars each month.

> That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving.

At first I thought the complaint was that long threads can have numerous irrelevant fluff posts, outdated posts, and off-topic posts getting in the way of reading the useful bits. But treating a forum thread as a live conversation was somewhat surprising to me. And specifically excluding that a thread could be reference material perhaps reflects a difference between the sorts of places GP and I prefer to browse.

But about long threads: stepping through a 30-page or 300-page thread, where rarely is a post an update about the project, while the rest add nothing substantial, discourages looking through the whole the whole thread is not always practical. And search often doesn't return anything useful.

Yes, and this is especially true of enthusiast communities, which usually have evergreen topics. A user who is new to the Leica M system can head to rangefinderforum.com and get value out of lens reviews or camera comparisons that might be literally 20 years old.

I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.

I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion (which RES can do for old.reddit) than attempting to automatically sort a discussion into subtopics.

Many chronological forum software also can already display reply/replied-to chains (though perhaps not first-class in terms of UX) if people use the reply function, which is often an option.

> I feel like the problem is more easily solved by adding a chronological view or filtering to an existing tree-based discussion

I built this (both chronological view and new comment filtering) into the comments presentation on https://hcker.news. Check it out, I’d be interested to know if there’s any way I can make it more useful.

> Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.

News readers of the NNTP/Usenet days often had toggles on whether you wanted threading or not. Further they would update your .newsrc file to mark which articles in which newsgroups you have already read, so when you launched them after a few days only unread articles/threads would appear.

And we had kill files for spam.

This. I only dealt with a non-threaded take on usenet for about 1 week in the early 90s.

That becomes a question of discoverability and the "what about bumping ancient threads".

Consider trn and rn of old. I recall the first news reader that I used wasn't threaded and it was neigh incomprehensible unless you were following all the posts and what was going on. For smaller newsgroups, that was something that was possible. For larger ones, a flat structure was very difficult.

Threaded news readers (while I can't find any for trn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_%28newsreader%29#/media/Fi... is old enough and shows the interface) was useful and captured the structure... and bumping old threads was something that provided discoverability for new comments on old.

However, news readers had a lot of other features that Reddit and HN style comments don't have. I could plonk an entire post, or all the followups to a specific comment, or a specific person.

Without the ability to provide personal moderation (arguably something lacking on HN and Reddit), the weighted to current activity to try to discourage comments on old posts is useful. They're ok with collapse and hide... but NNTP clients had much more that allowed it to support different types of discussions and never-ending comment trees. ... This also made them very difficult to search for content.

I'd absolutely love a NNTP interface to HN. Without it, the interface that HN has (allowing collapsing of comment trees) and downranking old posts is useful. If you want to still find things that are active (rather than downranked), https://news.ycombinator.com/active or https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments are useful for surfacing where people are commenting - even if it's days old.

I agree for the most part, though it's worth pointing out that HN specifically has a mitigating characteristic in this case, which is that repeat posts are not moderated away, and are in fact encouraged.

Case in point, one if today's top posts is on knoppix. Definitely not early adopter material! :)

I agree more generally though. While I understand the benefits of a 14day response window, it really does destroy the ability to find a thread that is useful in a more anachronistic manner.

Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments

Bring back nntp

> the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day

Yeah "bumping" of threads is a major feature lacking on algorithmic forums.

The shelf-life of a day is because of the abstract voting aspect. Old crappy forums used comments, vs an abstract notion, as a vote.

This allowed for long running conversations. It did require stronger protections of posting rights though.

If it seemed useful enough someone could make an HN app that sorted by activity, maybe weighted by a person’s karma.

> The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.

A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.

> the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.

Perhaps even worse. It’s really whatever was posted at that moment you loaded the page unless you are actively responding. There are features to show unread messages only but it becomes a mess. The flat forum posts are great and sub-conversations can always split off into its own thread. Spinning off us how we use slack after all.

Old style forums were better because fewer people were on them, there was no monetary incentive to contribute (you just cared) and the community wasn’t toxic.

Reddit-style sites can also be this - you just need to build the right community. (This is very very hard)

Anyway my hypothesis here is clearly the community is the value and not necessarily the method of posting.

I'm reminded of this amusing comment by dang on this subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

A bunch of people skim the article (or just the title), post hot takes, then there's responses to those, and so on...

I had some hilarious moderation experiences by deleting all negative responses from topics specifically chosen attract negativity. People got so mad that they couldn't rub their poop on the conversation. I respond to their mails with some of the funniest trolling in my career. Meanwhile the conversations were all love and peace among the like minded.

Could you transcribe and condense fleeting discussions into the forum shape?

One thing I think Slashdot got right was capping the upvotes on a post to 5. This provided the desired effect of letting quality content sit on top of the discussion without turning it into a game. They also were fairly stingy with the letting people upvote and especially downvote content. Plus there was a whole meta-moderation system that may or may not have made an impact, I was never sure about that part.

I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.

This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.

It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).

That's how GitHub discussion works :- ) (or did you know?)

Look here: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/ — by default, sorted by last activity. But you can also sort by newest, or by votes.

For comment threads, look at e.g.: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/5509?sort=old — sorted by time, by default. But you can also sort by upvotes.

***

The forum software I'm developing, https://www.Talkyard.io, is also threaded, and can sort by time or by votes. (Both discussion topics and replies.)

F.ex. go here: https://forum.talkyard.io/-9qb49/solving-problem-first-comme... and scroll down to the replies section and click `Oldest first` to change order.

In addition to oldest/newest/"best", you can sort top level comments by time descending, and deeper comments by time _ascending_ or by votes — creating a kind of "micro blog feed" where each top level comment is the most recent "micro blog post" — but replies don't have to share the same sort order. "Newest, then popular" and "Newest, then oldest" I call these sort orders.

Also click the "Recent posts" in the upper right corner, to see the most recent comments sorted by time descending.

***

Anyway. There's people who think the hybrid approach you mentioned is an good idea.

Thanks! I don't tend to use the GitHub discussion very much (just commenting on a few Issues) so I didn't know!

The Talkyard example is interesting - how does it differ to the algorithms Reddit uses to sort by "Best" or "Hot" when looking at comments (I think Best is the default now too, not Top, so presumably it takes recency etc. into account somehow).

you make a good point on the discussion over time. I do miss that aspect of old forums, felt like you could have conversations as opposed to chats, in a way? It's unheard of for discussion to re-ignite on an old HN or Reddit post.

Also gotta love the long-term discussions that happen with 3-4 people saying serious things and then one complete rando coming in dropping an absurd conspiracy theory while the rest of the convo continues around them xDD

Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.

The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.

With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.

I'm curious, where would you prefer to go for a discussion like this one with people you've never heard from before? It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.

Speaking for myself, I don't know another place I can go to hear thoughts about the topic of the day from a random set of voices, some of whom impact the way I think. I don't think it is an accident, I think it is supported by the design. They don't read like quick takes to me, it is possible and likely to find perspectives from people who has spent time thinking about the topic or have unique experience or knowledge to share.

> I'm curious, where would you prefer to go for a discussion like this one with people you've never heard from before?

That's my point: HN/Reddit/etc serve a different purpose than phpBB-style forums. The format isn't improved or superior, it's just different. I suppose it was originally popularized by Slashdot, so it isn't even "new".

> It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.

I never said I didn't?

Bogleheads (made up of investors who follow Bogle's indexing philosophy) recently had a thread about the decline in traffic to the forum, which some people attributed to AI. (https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=470287&star...)

It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.

In addition to the "gamified" aspect, the votes allow special interests to trivially control the perceived public opinion on an extremely broad scale. Opinions with downvotes are perceived as unpopular, and this has a chilling effect on free discussion.

A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.

Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.

And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.

The 'like' counts in places like YouTube and Instagram comments have made clear to me the idea of tyranny of the majority.

Could you perhaps, suggest an index directory that can lead to quality board discoveries?

In my experience, finding a quality board has always been topic focused. I.e. if you have a Toyota Corolla and want to communicate about that, just look for Corolla forums, and it'll quickly become obvious if one is lively / your vibe.

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.

The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.

I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.

>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.

I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.

There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.

The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.

the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.

    > top comments can be gamed for profit

This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?

you pay for upvotes from a third party upvote service.

Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.

There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.

IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.

That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.

Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.

"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"

Except that most people just go with best. Tons of new comments are shouted into the void, never to be heard by anyone except for a handful of the curious.

Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.

BYOND forums used tree comments in chronological order with an unread marker

While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.

Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.

Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.

An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.

Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.

Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.

The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.

How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.

Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.

There's arguing from fictional evidence[1] and there's being "driven nuts" by the suggestion that more people are entertained by fighting than by stoic political discussions. Look at current day TV and stadiums (boxing, wrestling, glatiators, Mixed Martial Arts, martial arts generally, action films) and audience sizes (and engagement) versus how many people go to local council meetings, it's hardly an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/generalization-from-fictional-ev...

Because humans are a legacy system that has a hard time adapt, so even if a situation is novel, the legacy system turns it into a subset of legacy "system encounters problem" problem..

If you gun a dog into space, the situation is novel, but the situation for the dog is not novel. Its just another kennel, just another day with the pack absent and smells of home absent.

That argument only works for half of my comment. I argued that people conflate the novel with the legacy, but I would also argue that people conflate the legacy with the novel. People are just as likely to see something very old and say "wow, we are the first people to think of this."

The real culprit is the naturalistic fallacy. Whatever is good must be natural and whatever is bad must be some aberration. It's more complicated than that but I think that explains 75% of it.

Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.

I do oftentimes find myself missing the ability to respond to multiple comments at once when perusing other sites like HN. It's super handy being able to quote a multitude of posts all asking the same question and respond with one answer. Or being able to redirect one poster to look at another.

The forced anonymity/lack of account names is also a big plus. Misinformation can obviously be perpetuated by appealing to bias (look at /pol/) but you lose the “forum celebrity” shit that gives power users the ability to gain credence simply based on name and eventually derail discussions simply by showing up

Defining superfluous as off-topic, the format does not inherently invite superfluous content. In both the traditional forum and engagement ranking schemes, the off-topic post will be ignored and the poster has the same experience in both settings. I argue that the culture of some forums may invite noise, but the forum has several mechanisms to make this invitation a net-positive attribute.

If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.

The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.

The superfluous content I was thinking about is all the extra content besides the discussion. Forum signatures and gratuitous UI layouts that take up a significant part of the screen. I think the minimalism of the comment tree is partly why it works so well.

What I'm hearing from you and the other people who prefer the old format is appreciation of a tighter knit community and a thread of conversation that lasts more than a day. I can appreciate that too.

> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions

I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".

Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?

>Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?

Here is a HN clone I made.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

Oh that looks awesome, I'll have a play!

Im having fun with it, even though my instance is just me.

I have one running 24/7 on my cell. In my about page I detail where to find it...No one has made post though. I thought at least one curious person may post but no avail yet haha. I also am pretty sure any considerable load may not fair well beyond 3-5 people connecting at one time with these resources.

Right now the most useful thing about it is just browsing the HN mirror and the ability to search HN from any of my devices. Having a live DB of HN served from my own device has is fun.

If I recall correctly most forum software such as phpBB and vBulletin had an option where you could toggle between viewing a thread in nested BBS/Usenet style or the newer linear view.

> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion

On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.

E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.

Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.

After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...

Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?

On the other hand, comment trees encourage shallow content highjacking the top comment thread with little to no regard for preceding comments.

You can have both threaded discussions and chronological ordering of top level comments. It works really well.

Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.

This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.

The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.

The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.

A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.

And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.

But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.

> This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried

This had been the case for a while on big subs, but there has apparently been a further change. When I returned to Reddit this year after a break, I found that most new posts on the smaller subs would draw all their comments in the first 30–60 minutes, and then virtually no comments after that. I haven’t seen the Reddit app, but it must somehow discourage people from revisiting posts older than an hour or so (by hooking them on engagement with continual new content via an endless-scroll algorithm?).

Posts used to draw a flow of new comments over the course of the day, and sub regulars would look in on older posts, so if you were from a different time zone or woke up late, you could still participate in a discussion.

I believe I heard that reddit has started a different kind of feed to replace r/all and it does introduce some kind of algorithm that "suggests" content differently from the straightforward upvote system. Although the popularity contest aspect of it was always somewhat regrettable, I liked that it was a really simple algorithm that supported an entirely human driven curation of content, so it seems like a regression.

As someone who usually shows up to the thread after most of the energy has moved on, it is always a little disappointing. It seems open for some kind of innovation that could keep the conversation alive and give it the longevity that comment trees generally lack. I always try to reply to these straggler replies to my own comments.

Personally: forums are mostly about one subject, have a community and you have to invest some time learning the lay of the land to get the most out of it, get some reputation. Reddit? It's just drive-by commenting. I get points? Cool. I get banned? Next account. No avatar, pseudonyms almost hidden it is not a social media, it's unsocial.

> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions.

But very difficult to have those conversations.

I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.

Do they roll their own software, or is it a purchased solution? I'd love to know more about the application powering it.

It was their own software; and it was long time ago, so I didn't think it was still functioning, but, to my surprise, it still is:

https://vif2ne.su/nvk/forum/0/0.htm

>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

The original battle.net forums featured a threaded view much like HN/reddit. Actually, in retrospect it was like mailing list archives.

IIRC they switched to a more orthodox phpbb-like layout because users preferred it.

Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces interleaved replies.

> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement

You are talking about content discovery. But for a sense of community I have never seen or been able to replicate the feeling of belonging and building a shared experience like old crappy forums.

I do think people are gradually starting to see why reddit comment tree is bad.

> is a clear improvement

I remember going from usenet, with it's tree comments (when the worked) to flat forums and being annoyed at the change.

25+ years later flat threads are correct threads, and tree comments are just a bad idea.

Don’t forget moderators getting tired of seeing new threads on a popular topic and inevitably creating the “megathread”: a thread that (by the time you arrive) has 900+ pages and the first post that is edited to include highlights and important new info hasn’t been updated in 2 years because the OP has moved on or become inactive

Even better when it contains potential fixes for problems. The solution you need is on page 672 but you’ll never know because the poster phrased the problem weird and even if they didn’t search is absolutely garbage (and outside search tools won’t work because most subforums are locked behind needing an account so they aren’t indexed). Have fun reading page after 40 post page where the overwhelming majority of the comment amounts to “I upvote/downvote this”

That's exactly the problem.

Colocating everything in one place basically invites the internet riff-raff to shit all over everything. You have some asshole who spends most of his time lying about solar panels by cherry picking links wandering into some area where people talk about potato chips doing his thing there to everyone's detriment.

And then you start keeping score and it incentivizes all sorts of bad drive-by contribution behavior, circle jerking, etc, etc which very clearly has an un-diversifying effect.

All that shit combines to create a community where 99.999% of the content and the same amount of the discussion is about the same quality, accuracy and honesty of a grocery store tabloid.

Your take would have been defensible in 2016 but with a decade of hindsight I don't see how any honest person can think all that.

Ok, but is this because of tree-style discussions or is it because of up/downvote mechanics? Or because of their combination?

Or is it completely unrelated and has more to do with the size of those communities?

In my experience, it is the upvote/downvote mechanic in combination with critical mass. I was a long time paid subscriber to a popular tech/science news site that had an active comment section and a moderately sized active user base. I really loved it, checking in several times every day as new articles were posted. The discussions were great, even though I commonly disagreed with many users point of view. Posts felt genuine and ideas were well thought out and defended.

I like to think that because of this, the site grew in popularity. As it did, the comment section degraded in post quality and thoughtfulness of responses. The sites news editors more and more catered to their audience, and the quality of the articles likewise declined until it was one giant groupthink echo chamber, all chronologically organized without using a tree system.

I gave up and unsubscribed. I would like to try removing the arrows from forums so that no one can offload their thinking to the group. Everyone will be forced to decide on their own if a post is good or bad without the benefit of the group telling them what to think.

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