Hacker News Reader

Comment by postalcoder | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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...>

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.

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. :)

> 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))

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.

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.

> 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.

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

And we had kill files for spam.

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

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