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And I guess this is where I go into full old lady "get off my lawn" mode and mention that I still remember when forums used WWWBoard and its clones (anyone reme

And I guess this is where I go into full old lady "get off my lawn" mode and mention that I still remember when forums used WWWBoard and its clones (anyone remember CyBoard or VIPBoard?) that provided full comment threading. Any comment can be directly replied to and have its own tree of comments. Like... well, like HN, or Reddit. I really thought forums lost something when UBB and its clones (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) became dominant, because those systems only let top-level posts have replies. So you just had forum -> subforums -> posts -> non-threaded stream of comments under each post. It was honestly awful, and for much of the 00s forums just became a chore to read and participate in. And it really seemed to bring the worst out of people and of moderation policies: like, back in the WWWBoard days, if you wanted to respond to multiple comments on a thread, you'd reply individually to those comments, and they'd be threaded in the proper position. But on a UBB forum, if you replied individually to comments like that, half the forum would scream their eyes out at you for "double posting" and often the moderators would threaten to ban you if you did it again. And it also meant that any time an argument would start in a post's comments, that argument would take over any and all discussion under that post. In a WWWBoard system, the argument would be segregated into its own subthread and normal discussion can happen in other replies, but UBB didn't allow that. And when you have megathreads, a lot of times they just devolve into everyone just saying their piece and nobody having any real back-and-forth discussion (and honestly "megathreads" are something that didn't exist at all until UBB came around, because WWWBoard and its clones had no concept of bumping or sticky threads: every post was displayed in descending chronological order with no way to reorder anything) Honestly, I jumped for joy when Reddit took over as the de facto Internet-wide forums system, because it finally meant we got to have real threads again.

piaste 6y ago
I've used both kinds of forums, and I think both trees and linear threads - let's call them 'streams' - have their places. If you imagine a forum as a large dinner table, trees are like conversations that start out at one corner of the table, maybe with a few people participating, and then usually split off into individual exchanges that don't interact with each other. When that happens late in the dinner after coffee and liquor, people usually move around and form little groups. Streams are like shared conversations involving the entire table - one person at a time talks, everybody listens and replies. Sometimes people try to talk over each other, sometimes it's mostly two or three people talking and the others are nodding along for a while. But it's what makes the experience a communal one, and it's how you get to know the people in the group other than the few you directly spoke to. It also acts as a moderating influence, since if two people are getting into a heated debate over some niche issue, other attendees will usually try to mediate for the sake of the event, instead of ignoring them and letting them fight among them. Stream-based forums IME tended to form more robust communities where people recognized each other's names and avatars, whereas even in smaller subreddits I might recognize a couple of very frequent commenters but nowhere near as easily or as often. On the other side, tree-based forums make it much easier to establish a rapport with the couple of people you wanted to talk to and ignore everybody else. (Potential objection: nothing's stopping a tree system from acting like a stream by having a "main" thread where most everybody pipes up. In theory that's true, but in practice I find that threads simply don't have the staying power of streams, because they fade off into the 'click here for the next 20 replies' purgatory where only the participants and a few lurkers follow. Streams keep all the eyeballs in the same place.)
buo 6y ago
I agree 100%. Threading is essential and I can't understand why modern (and otherwise fine) tools like Discourse don't support it.

piaste 6y ago

I've used both kinds of forums, and I think both trees and linear threads - let's call them 'streams' - have their places. If you imagine a forum as a large dinner table, trees are like conversations that start out at one corner of the table, maybe with a few people participating, and then usually split off into individual exchanges that don't interact with each other. When that happens late in the dinner after coffee and liquor, people usually move around and form little groups. Streams are like shared conversations involving the entire table - one person at a time talks, everybody listens and replies. Sometimes people try to talk over each other, sometimes it's mostly two or three people talking and the others are nodding along for a while. But it's what makes the experience a communal one, and it's how you get to know the people in the group other than the few you directly spoke to. It also acts as a moderating influence, since if two people are getting into a heated debate over some niche issue, other attendees will usually try to mediate for the sake of the event, instead of ignoring them and letting them fight among them. Stream-based forums IME tended to form more robust communities where people recognized each other's names and avatars, whereas even in smaller subreddits I might recognize a couple of very frequent commenters but nowhere near as easily or as often. On the other side, tree-based forums make it much easier to establish a rapport with the couple of people you wanted to talk to and ignore everybody else. (Potential objection: nothing's stopping a tree system from acting like a stream by having a "main" thread where most everybody pipes up. In theory that's true, but in practice I find that threads simply don't have the staying power of streams, because they fade off into the 'click here for the next 20 replies' purgatory where only the participants and a few lurkers follow. Streams keep all the eyeballs in the same place.)

buo 6y ago

I agree 100%. Threading is essential and I can't understand why modern (and otherwise fine) tools like Discourse don't support it.