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"Intellectual loneliness is a challenge that many people feel, but nobody talks about." From my experience I've found that to be true throughout my life. One o

"Intellectual loneliness is a challenge that many people feel, but nobody talks about." From my experience I've found that to be true throughout my life. One of my best ways of learning is to be in discussion or debate with others but in practice it's just so hard to achieve in practice. Both here on HN and elsewhere I often try to engage others in debate but to little or no avail, as discussion is often over before it's hardly begun and everyone's moved on to another topic. For whatever reason, these days very few seem to want to expend the effort to get involved in long debates or intellectual arguments and I think that this is a terrible shame as we all need to hone our thoughts and ideas by bouncing them off others - and they don't necessarily form immediately. Weeks may pass by the time we reformulate our thoughts in response to someone's idea or proposition and by then it's often impossible to respond at all let alone in any adequate way. Nothing typifies this problem more than the comments to most websites - and posts to HN are no exception. Irrespective of the importance or relevance of a subject or topic, it's all but discussed out and dead after 24 hours, and then after a week or two site moderators inevitably kill any further discussion by stopping new posts. To me, closing further discussion on subjects is the antithesis of what the internet should be all about. Why closing ongoing discussion on websites is such a common practice has always been a mystery to me. (You'd think those running websites would want and welcome ongoing discussion but seemingly not.) In many ways the internet has made intellectual loneliness even more acute, whilst it's provided us with a fecundity of information and ideas upon which we may ponder it's never really been good at letting us gain full intellectual enjoyment from those ideas through ongoing participation. Whilst we may participate in superficial ways through Twitter etc. we're still lonely. For many, short term shallow participation isn't a substitute for ongoing intellectual stimulation and fulfillment.

tux3 5y ago
I'd also like to see a platform where discussions/debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two, but the problem inherent in long discussions is the format results in terrible signal/noise ratio if you let it run for too long. Think of traditional forum threads with hundreds of pages. Closing discussions after some time is just a practical matter. When posts are organized by chronology, or even by vote count, discussion cannot scale beyond a few hundred posts without becoming very hard to navigate. Look at the incentive a new participant has when choosing whether to post in a new or an old thread. A post added deep down a reply chain, or at page 100 of a forum will have very little visibility, it'll be lost in the noise compared to a post in a fresh thread. I think the way discussion platforms organize information is far from perfect, and noise/visibility/organization is really what puts a practical limit on ongoing discussions.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Instead of just looking at the front page, they're supposed to use the search feature before (necro)posting - most forum FAQs have this front and center.
  - tux3 5y ago
    Many forums forbid reviving old threads, or proactively lock them after a few months. Searching is great when you have a common question (and when the search feature is vaguely usable!), but empirically it doesn't seem to work very well for anything broader than FAQ type content. Few people use search to navigate forums, and when you do the results aren't great.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      They forbid reviving old threads for wrong reasons (in both senses of this phrase : see again : netiquette). A forum that would prevent continuing previous discussions wouldn't be a forum any more, just another useless waste of time social media (ok, HN isn't too bad, but it's due to the very high quality of the posting here). It is indeed annoying when the search feature doesn't have something so basic as multiple word search ("in quotes"). But in those cases it can be supplemented by third party search engines (query : "site:"). FAQs, by definition, don't need to be searched (well, except Ctrl+F I guess, but you know what I mean). Learning to use search is just basic web proficiency that everybody has to learn. And it does work very well in the case of forums, if I had a nickel every time I found some priceless information about an obscure problem in a web forum...
      - hilbert42 5y ago
        "A forum that would prevent continuing previous discussions wouldn't be a forum any more, just another useless waste of time social media (ok, HN isn't too bad, but it's due to the very high quality of the posting here)." Agreed. By observation and logic what you say has to be true. What's so stupid and absurd about this situation is that it's so wasteful of ideas and human effort. If there was some way of measuring the efficiency of forums then we'd find that it'd be very close to zero. If ideas are lost or lose promenance because previous discussions are halted then we cannot easily build on them. That's why we see so much stuff unnessarily duplicated across the web. Not only do posters waste time and effort through either not having seen an earlier identical post (it having already been lost in internet noise) or that they repost elsewhere to try to continue the previously lost thread. The trouble with reposting is that not all of the important or the most relevant posts from the previously closed forum will make it into any new one. Again, this wastes the time of both posters and those who'd benefit from reading the posts. In effect, the whole damn forum edifice has to be one of the most waseful and inefficient mechanisms humans have ever devised. As I've already said in another longwinded post much of the blame falls on the designers of forum software, which when looked at from a global perspective in what it's trying to achieve then we find that it's essentially utter shit. That's to say it's not fit for purpose, and given the evidence one cannot objectively or honesty come to any other reasonable conclusion. It's also hard to figure out why we haven't seen much more of a serious debate over the serious limitations of forums and forum software. What's happened with forums is that we reached a hiatus some decades ago when it comes to thinking about about how posters' information should be presented; it seems that developers then put any further improvements in the too-hard basket and there's been essentially no further development since then (likely because they can't see much of a buck in it for the effort it'd involve). We need to rethink forums in terms of information - subject, topic etc., and in much better ways of building on earlier information without losing the historical narrative whilst simultaneously not diminishing posters' efforts. When it comes to posters, it's important that the hierarchical order of their posts be maintained if for no other reason than to show their resonses - their progression in thinking etc. - for this too is both valuable and important information. As I see it, to accomplish even modest improvements in forum presentation then we ought to be rethinking the problem in radically difficult ways such as reformulating forum software in terms of a relational database structure which over time would be supplemented by AI - AI's purpose being to keep the most important and relevant posts as the most accessible, i.e.: the most easy and quick to find. Surely, I'm not alone in thinking this way as it's so damn obvious. You're right about HN. There's an enormous myriad of valuable information in the many thousands of HN's posts and it's a terrible shame that so much of this information has just gotten lost in internet noise by virtue of the way stories age (and that's just the beginning of the matter). Moreover, it's made worse by the fact that anyone searching for information that happens to be inside forum posts will find it difficult to do so given that search engines will have deranked the results by virtue that said information is already wallowing within the internet noise. It's pretty terrible that one usually has great difficulty in just finding a HN story after it's aged several days. I've often wasted inordinate amounts of time trying to locate HN stories after I've failed to either save or bookmark them first time round. Solving this ought to be a no-brainer for the HN team. It seems to me that both HN's story listings and its forums are far too valuable to leave as they are. We users of HN's valuable service need to find ways in which we can make it even more valuable, useful and user-friendly.

tux3 5y ago

I'd also like to see a platform where discussions/debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two, but the problem inherent in long discussions is the format results in terrible signal/noise ratio if you let it run for too long. Think of traditional forum threads with hundreds of pages. Closing discussions after some time is just a practical matter. When posts are organized by chronology, or even by vote count, discussion cannot scale beyond a few hundred posts without becoming very hard to navigate. Look at the incentive a new participant has when choosing whether to post in a new or an old thread. A post added deep down a reply chain, or at page 100 of a forum will have very little visibility, it'll be lost in the noise compared to a post in a fresh thread. I think the way discussion platforms organize information is far from perfect, and noise/visibility/organization is really what puts a practical limit on ongoing discussions.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Instead of just looking at the front page, they're supposed to use the search feature before (necro)posting - most forum FAQs have this front and center.
- tux3 5y ago
  Many forums forbid reviving old threads, or proactively lock them after a few months. Searching is great when you have a common question (and when the search feature is vaguely usable!), but empirically it doesn't seem to work very well for anything broader than FAQ type content. Few people use search to navigate forums, and when you do the results aren't great.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    They forbid reviving old threads for wrong reasons (in both senses of this phrase : see again : netiquette). A forum that would prevent continuing previous discussions wouldn't be a forum any more, just another useless waste of time social media (ok, HN isn't too bad, but it's due to the very high quality of the posting here). It is indeed annoying when the search feature doesn't have something so basic as multiple word search ("in quotes"). But in those cases it can be supplemented by third party search engines (query : "site:"). FAQs, by definition, don't need to be searched (well, except Ctrl+F I guess, but you know what I mean). Learning to use search is just basic web proficiency that everybody has to learn. And it does work very well in the case of forums, if I had a nickel every time I found some priceless information about an obscure problem in a web forum...
    - hilbert42 5y ago
      "A forum that would prevent continuing previous discussions wouldn't be a forum any more, just another useless waste of time social media (ok, HN isn't too bad, but it's due to the very high quality of the posting here)." Agreed. By observation and logic what you say has to be true. What's so stupid and absurd about this situation is that it's so wasteful of ideas and human effort. If there was some way of measuring the efficiency of forums then we'd find that it'd be very close to zero. If ideas are lost or lose promenance because previous discussions are halted then we cannot easily build on them. That's why we see so much stuff unnessarily duplicated across the web. Not only do posters waste time and effort through either not having seen an earlier identical post (it having already been lost in internet noise) or that they repost elsewhere to try to continue the previously lost thread. The trouble with reposting is that not all of the important or the most relevant posts from the previously closed forum will make it into any new one. Again, this wastes the time of both posters and those who'd benefit from reading the posts. In effect, the whole damn forum edifice has to be one of the most waseful and inefficient mechanisms humans have ever devised. As I've already said in another longwinded post much of the blame falls on the designers of forum software, which when looked at from a global perspective in what it's trying to achieve then we find that it's essentially utter shit. That's to say it's not fit for purpose, and given the evidence one cannot objectively or honesty come to any other reasonable conclusion. It's also hard to figure out why we haven't seen much more of a serious debate over the serious limitations of forums and forum software. What's happened with forums is that we reached a hiatus some decades ago when it comes to thinking about about how posters' information should be presented; it seems that developers then put any further improvements in the too-hard basket and there's been essentially no further development since then (likely because they can't see much of a buck in it for the effort it'd involve). We need to rethink forums in terms of information - subject, topic etc., and in much better ways of building on earlier information without losing the historical narrative whilst simultaneously not diminishing posters' efforts. When it comes to posters, it's important that the hierarchical order of their posts be maintained if for no other reason than to show their resonses - their progression in thinking etc. - for this too is both valuable and important information. As I see it, to accomplish even modest improvements in forum presentation then we ought to be rethinking the problem in radically difficult ways such as reformulating forum software in terms of a relational database structure which over time would be supplemented by AI - AI's purpose being to keep the most important and relevant posts as the most accessible, i.e.: the most easy and quick to find. Surely, I'm not alone in thinking this way as it's so damn obvious. You're right about HN. There's an enormous myriad of valuable information in the many thousands of HN's posts and it's a terrible shame that so much of this information has just gotten lost in internet noise by virtue of the way stories age (and that's just the beginning of the matter). Moreover, it's made worse by the fact that anyone searching for information that happens to be inside forum posts will find it difficult to do so given that search engines will have deranked the results by virtue that said information is already wallowing within the internet noise. It's pretty terrible that one usually has great difficulty in just finding a HN story after it's aged several days. I've often wasted inordinate amounts of time trying to locate HN stories after I've failed to either save or bookmark them first time round. Solving this ought to be a no-brainer for the HN team. It seems to me that both HN's story listings and its forums are far too valuable to leave as they are. We users of HN's valuable service need to find ways in which we can make it even more valuable, useful and user-friendly.