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Comment by GhotiFish | Hacker News Reader

4chan's commenting system is simultaneously more annoying, and more enjoyable to use. The backtrack style lets you follow conversations, but it doesn't become a nested nightmare. Backtracks also highlight comments of importance or significance.

the Reddit/HN system is hunting the most valuable comments through democracy, but it throws that work out because of its visible tree structure. People can ride the top post.

Also the auto updates are nice to stay current on an active conversation.

Gotta give it to 4chan, nice system. Shame about the captcha.

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I loathe nested comments and vastly prefer inline quote previews and backlinks.

Then again, I'm biased.

>Then again, I'm biased.

That's an understatement.

But seriously, I agree with everything you stand for in regards to how internet discussion should work. Flat discussion is vastly superior, even when weighing the negatives

The only time i've ever seen threading really work well is when it only includes the headers, like with email or newsreader clients, and there's a separate frame altogether for the text (which makes it in essence follow a flat style.)

But threading the text as well just makes long discussions difficult to follow and unreadable as the margin starts to get cramped.

Which on HN is apparently part of the reason they do it the way they do.

We like quasiquotes and backticks around here.

Well, they're not mutually exclusive, reddit has both a flat 'new' and 'top' comments -- new is 4chan-like and top is hn-like with an interesting strategy with fancy nonlinear time-decaying importance.

But this is of course one of those cases where they decided to make a choice, and they clearly favor the "top" structure.

Honestly I think they could have meshed the two better, though.

s/they/you/

(check the user)

nm I'm dumb, you were meaning reddit as "they" it looks like.

Can I ask if you have any views about voting and hierarchy display of comments? What sort of commentary culture that produces?

mfw.

>Shame about the captcha.

you were never on 4chan before captchas, were you?

I was. At least before that bot hit that copied a random file from someone's document folder and uploaded it along with another copy of the bot to 4chan.

That was hilarious.

I still have an archive of those files somewhere.

https://gyp.blogs.balabit.com/2009/03/anon-youve-been-infctd...

I think this was my "We've made it!" moment with 4chan. When people are writing viruses tailored to your service, you've clearly done something right.

...Or wrong.

Purchase a 4chan pass to post without captchas: https://www.4chan.org/pass

You'll also be supporting the site.

HEY GUYS DOWNLOAD THIS IMAGE AND SAVE IT AS A JS FILE!

Red squares. Red squares everywhere.

I absolutely love 4chan with quote inlining switched on. You get all the benefits of a flat conversation (which I think is much easier to follow,) but if you need context on a post, you can expand the replies into something resembling a thread without losing your place on the page. It's a win-win.

It's definitely a shame about the captcha, but like a couple of people have already said, it's necessary.

It's also a slight (human) deterrent.

I've personally found myself deleting some comments not worth being said, usually at the captchas. I can only imagine this goes for others and in other situations.

Here, the quality check is rather the wish to actually contribute.

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