5 ms·

I think only Reddit has mastered the large-scale discussion involving thousands or ten of thousands of people at the same time.

fredsted 8y ago
Eh, maybe for people who've been using it for years. When celebrities do AMAs without guidance by experienced users, they constantly reply to the wrong threads or even the thread itself. Formatting being hard (e.g. you have to press enter two times to do a single line break) also doesn't help.
- lmm 8y ago
  Markdown is the worst kind of formatting except for all the others. I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    I don't tend to agree with this, the biggest issue with Markdown is pretty much the double newline, and it only makes sense in places like email where you want single newlines ignored. On Reddit/HN where nobody writes comments with hard newlines unless they mean to change paragraphs, that feature could have been omitted.
  - DCoder 8y ago
    And yet something as basic as a preview is missing. Reddit's community-driven browser plugin ([0]) at least adds that, HN's counterpart [1] sorely needs it. --- Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented. [0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
    - Sean1708 8y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc It's hidden behind the FAQ.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Or you could, you know, gasp, have a visual editor usable by 99% of the world's population, on Reddit. This is a solved problem. Word solved it back in 1990.
    - lmm 8y ago
      When has there been a visual editor that wasn't awful?
      - oblio 8y ago
        Despite the widespread techie comments against it, I've always found Word to be perfectly usable. I could always do my job with it, with minimal fuss. Regarding rich text editors for the web, surely there must be one that's ok after all these years.
StavrosK 8y ago
You're downvoted, but I tend to agree. Regardless of the community, reddit's full-width, compact layout is the easiest way I've found to follow a tree-based conversation.
- u801e 8y ago
  The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader). Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Reddit does have that, although I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by? I agree that Usenet is fantastic for discussion, too bad it fell out of popularity...
    - u801e 8y ago
      > I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by? By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like: Subject Some Author Date Re: Subject Another Author Date Re: Subject A third Author Date Re: Subject A fourth Author Date Re: Subject A fifth Author Date Re: Subject Some Author Date in one window pane. Then you could click on one of the the messages and the body would be displayed in another window pane. Scrolling through that index is much faster than having to scroll through a lot of comments on reddit or Hacker News. And finding a new message was simply looking for ones that were in bold font.
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        Ah I see, you mean a newsgroup-style tree. With comment collapsing, I never missed that, but to each their own.
Asooka 8y ago
I prefer 4chan's system with automatic reply linking. The issue with Reddit and HN is they model conversation as a tree, but real written conversation between several people is usually a DAG with one person replying to several posts at once. The UI can definitely be improved, but trees ain't it.
- Jorge1o1 8y ago
  Agreed, it’s so much better. Just being able to reply to two people at once is incredible.
u801e 8y ago
Usenet did that long before reddit came around.
icedchai 8y ago
Usenet achieved this in the 80's and 90's.
imh 8y ago
Hacker news does some parts of that better, like promoting new comments higher. On reddit, a new comment is unlikely to be visible enough to get traction.

fredsted 8y ago

Eh, maybe for people who've been using it for years. When celebrities do AMAs without guidance by experienced users, they constantly reply to the wrong threads or even the thread itself. Formatting being hard (e.g. you have to press enter two times to do a single line break) also doesn't help.

lmm 8y ago
Markdown is the worst kind of formatting except for all the others. I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  I don't tend to agree with this, the biggest issue with Markdown is pretty much the double newline, and it only makes sense in places like email where you want single newlines ignored. On Reddit/HN where nobody writes comments with hard newlines unless they mean to change paragraphs, that feature could have been omitted.
- DCoder 8y ago
  And yet something as basic as a preview is missing. Reddit's community-driven browser plugin ([0]) at least adds that, HN's counterpart [1] sorely needs it. --- Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented. [0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
  - Sean1708 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc It's hidden behind the FAQ.
- oblio 8y ago
  Or you could, you know, gasp, have a visual editor usable by 99% of the world's population, on Reddit. This is a solved problem. Word solved it back in 1990.
  - lmm 8y ago
    When has there been a visual editor that wasn't awful?
    - oblio 8y ago
      Despite the widespread techie comments against it, I've always found Word to be perfectly usable. I could always do my job with it, with minimal fuss. Regarding rich text editors for the web, surely there must be one that's ok after all these years.

StavrosK 8y ago

You're downvoted, but I tend to agree. Regardless of the community, reddit's full-width, compact layout is the easiest way I've found to follow a tree-based conversation.

u801e 8y ago
The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader). Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Reddit does have that, although I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by? I agree that Usenet is fantastic for discussion, too bad it fell out of popularity...
  - u801e 8y ago
    > I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by? By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like: Subject Some Author Date Re: Subject Another Author Date Re: Subject A third Author Date Re: Subject A fourth Author Date Re: Subject A fifth Author Date Re: Subject Some Author Date in one window pane. Then you could click on one of the the messages and the body would be displayed in another window pane. Scrolling through that index is much faster than having to scroll through a lot of comments on reddit or Hacker News. And finding a new message was simply looking for ones that were in bold font.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Ah I see, you mean a newsgroup-style tree. With comment collapsing, I never missed that, but to each their own.

Asooka 8y ago

I prefer 4chan's system with automatic reply linking. The issue with Reddit and HN is they model conversation as a tree, but real written conversation between several people is usually a DAG with one person replying to several posts at once. The UI can definitely be improved, but trees ain't it.

Jorge1o1 8y ago
Agreed, it’s so much better. Just being able to reply to two people at once is incredible.

u801e 8y ago

Usenet did that long before reddit came around.

icedchai 8y ago

Usenet achieved this in the 80's and 90's.

imh 8y ago

Hacker news does some parts of that better, like promoting new comments higher. On reddit, a new comment is unlikely to be visible enough to get traction.