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few edits I wanted to make but couldn't while HN was down: this comes to a question of intentions, right? Like are you trying to build a high-value community,

by paulmd 4y ago

few edits I wanted to make but couldn't while HN was down: this comes to a question of intentions, right? Like are you trying to build a high-value community, or are you trying to make a billion-dollar company? Photrio or Pentaxforums is never going to sell for a billion dollars like Reddit, and that's not the kind of community that Reddit is trying to build. The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. The "everyone responding to everyone" is literally engagement, and that's what those sites/companies want to drive, not community-building. It's designed to suck as a medium for serious discourse, because making 27 slight variations on the same response to 27 different comments keeps you on the site. As long as we persist in having engagement be the primary metric, that's what you will get, and as long as we persist in the idea that the objective of social media needs to be making a couple people into billionaires, engagement is going to be the focus. And again, it's a fundamental shift in "who the customers are". Are the customers the people using the site, who want a great place to discuss the nuances of parrot taxonomy, or are your customers the advertisers? Those lead to different ways you build the community. And you can still make a six-figure income being a webmaster of a smaller community too. You're just not going to make Reddit money off Pentaxforums.

GTP 4y ago
You're right that requiring a small fee to register can solve the problem for small communities (and so OP is wrong in the paragraphs that you quoted), but still this solution doesn't work for OP's case as this requires login and he says that he doesn't want to know who is using his search engine (I guess for privacy reasons) and in this case indeed the bots can harm the proliferation of this kind of small scale services.
closewith 4y ago
> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Single-threaded fora result in many conversations on various sub-topics and of varying quality being multiplexed in a single chaotic and incomprehensible comment chain. Comment trees allow sub-topics and sub-conversions to be grouped in a reasonable fashion, and voting allows junk contributions to be pushed to the bottom. It's not just webscale entrepreneurs - users love comment trees. It's part of why sites like Reddit and HN succeeded in gaining traction, and why subreddits are now the de facto replacement for fora (unfortunately, as it centralises editorial power).
- ori_b 4y ago
  It's something borrowed directly from email, at least in traditional clients, and it works.
- Macha 4y ago
  This wasn't always through - the first web forums were threaded more often than not, and even vbulletin supported a threaded mode as a user preference well into the 00s (though as it was no longer the default, others were not using linked replies, which hurt its usefulness at that point). This is probably related to imitating the way mailing lists worked, as some of these early UIs were like the older style of mailing list presentation with a few more forms attached. The flat forums were considered an innovation for a while because "normal users will never understand this nerdy threading model". Arguably to some extent they were right, as mass market products like youtube, facebook, etc. still limit to one level of replies. The real innovation of the social news sites was the voting and scoring algorithms, which made it manageable by presenting users with the most popular subthreads first, rather than the chronological order the forums had used. And gaining those points had a kind of skinner box effect on keeping users hooked on the sites, which helped their growth too - especially when points used to have a much more prominent display.
- mjr00 4y ago
  > I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Preferred by whom, and in what contexts? The Reddit/HN threaded comment styles work well in scenarios that are relatively high-traffic, ephemeral, and mostly anonymous, in the sense that you generally don't notice or care about the username of people with whom you're having a conversation. You're right that it makes it easier to comprehend because you can just read from the parent downwards to get the full context, and that's rarely going to get to double digits. But this has a lot of drawbacks. It's a method of communication that's built for a burst of posts on a topic for a day or so, then effectively archived as people move onto the next topic. This doesn't mean that users prefer this method of communication universally, though. Even though forums are dying, Discord continues to grow and offer smaller communities that actually have a "community" aspect to them. Depends on the server, but I pretty much never see extensive use of threads in Discord, if at all; most people are happy to have a constant flow of conversation in one of the channels. It's closer to how people have conversations in person.
autoexec 4y ago
> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. What are examples of websites that maintain a flow of conversation while involving everyone without letting everyone reply to each other? Being able to reply directly to others while discussing a topic has been the norm at forums, and before those, mailing lists and BBSs. The clients/interfaces just got better over time at sorting/collapsing replies. Whose got the forum where "everyone responding to everyone" doesn't happen?

by paulmd 4y ago

GTP 4y ago

You're right that requiring a small fee to register can solve the problem for small communities (and so OP is wrong in the paragraphs that you quoted), but still this solution doesn't work for OP's case as this requires login and he says that he doesn't want to know who is using his search engine (I guess for privacy reasons) and in this case indeed the bots can harm the proliferation of this kind of small scale services.

closewith 4y ago

> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Single-threaded fora result in many conversations on various sub-topics and of varying quality being multiplexed in a single chaotic and incomprehensible comment chain. Comment trees allow sub-topics and sub-conversions to be grouped in a reasonable fashion, and voting allows junk contributions to be pushed to the bottom. It's not just webscale entrepreneurs - users love comment trees. It's part of why sites like Reddit and HN succeeded in gaining traction, and why subreddits are now the de facto replacement for fora (unfortunately, as it centralises editorial power).

ori_b 4y ago
It's something borrowed directly from email, at least in traditional clients, and it works.
Macha 4y ago
This wasn't always through - the first web forums were threaded more often than not, and even vbulletin supported a threaded mode as a user preference well into the 00s (though as it was no longer the default, others were not using linked replies, which hurt its usefulness at that point). This is probably related to imitating the way mailing lists worked, as some of these early UIs were like the older style of mailing list presentation with a few more forms attached. The flat forums were considered an innovation for a while because "normal users will never understand this nerdy threading model". Arguably to some extent they were right, as mass market products like youtube, facebook, etc. still limit to one level of replies. The real innovation of the social news sites was the voting and scoring algorithms, which made it manageable by presenting users with the most popular subthreads first, rather than the chronological order the forums had used. And gaining those points had a kind of skinner box effect on keeping users hooked on the sites, which helped their growth too - especially when points used to have a much more prominent display.
mjr00 4y ago
> I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Preferred by whom, and in what contexts? The Reddit/HN threaded comment styles work well in scenarios that are relatively high-traffic, ephemeral, and mostly anonymous, in the sense that you generally don't notice or care about the username of people with whom you're having a conversation. You're right that it makes it easier to comprehend because you can just read from the parent downwards to get the full context, and that's rarely going to get to double digits. But this has a lot of drawbacks. It's a method of communication that's built for a burst of posts on a topic for a day or so, then effectively archived as people move onto the next topic. This doesn't mean that users prefer this method of communication universally, though. Even though forums are dying, Discord continues to grow and offer smaller communities that actually have a "community" aspect to them. Depends on the server, but I pretty much never see extensive use of threads in Discord, if at all; most people are happy to have a constant flow of conversation in one of the channels. It's closer to how people have conversations in person.

autoexec 4y ago

> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. What are examples of websites that maintain a flow of conversation while involving everyone without letting everyone reply to each other? Being able to reply directly to others while discussing a topic has been the norm at forums, and before those, mailing lists and BBSs. The clients/interfaces just got better over time at sorting/collapsing replies. Whose got the forum where "everyone responding to everyone" doesn't happen?