Myself, I think message boards resemble fencing more than upvote-based comment threads. I kind of like that HN/Reddit mitigate the "quote piecemeal, attack pie

Myself, I think message boards resemble fencing more than upvote-based comment threads. I kind of like that HN/Reddit mitigate the "quote piecemeal, attack piecemeal" back and forth that was the norm on message boards. (You know what I'm talking about, right? - person A writes long post, B takes issue and responds to A sentence by sentence, often ignoring A's overall point to focus on incorrect minutiae, A, now incensed, refuses to concede that any of the minutiae were incorrect, and writes an individual response to each of B's sentences. I felt that this wasn't a good environment for conversation either - I think talking in person forces you to consider the thrust of another person's argument, since you can't hold all the minutiae in RAM, but my experience was that conversations in message boards degraded to many small parallel quarrels over nitpicking in a way that HN/Reddit comment threads don't (as much).)