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> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rat

> 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.

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.