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IMO The best way to encourage this is through better (default) notifications. Or, this solution, for a platform with (tens) of thousands of users like HN, seems

IMO The best way to encourage this is through better (default) notifications. Or, this solution, for a platform with (tens) of thousands of users like HN, seems to automatically bring the specter of flame war (and intrusion and what else ?) Is there a middle ground? I don't know. Edit : Daily/Weeky email (=slower) updates ? As for old threads getting bumped, I think this is here equivalent to reposting the link (or re-asking). The old thread is almost "dead", but this is how it works "in real life discussions". So maybe that is not so bad. This is (as a call it) a (fast) stream model, where there is no (direct) accumulation : it is more twitter than Stack Overflow, more blogs than Wikis.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
More chat than forum, with the exception that the comments stay on the Web instead of being hidden in the logs. Forums and chats do have a solution to too big size : they can just split into others (or subforums) once the linear discussion becomes unmanageable.
- LunarAurora 4y ago
  Yeah. More chat than forum, in the sense that people rarely venture to reply on what is older than a day (apart from Ask/Show HN; both hang a little longer) I don't get your solution. It seems to me that HN threads are already tree-like.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yes, but they are a bit too easy to split, which means that a good chunk of comments end up getting ignored. I sometimes read the new ones by first reading all of them, and later manually scanning every comment newer than X hours, but it's tedious. I guess a system that would automatically hid old comments (except their immediate parent) might work ?
staindk 4y ago
Took me a while to realise there are no "your comment has been replied to!" type notifications on HN. Seemed weird to me. I know there are a couple third-party services that you can sign up on to monitor that for you (they email you when someone replies to you, AFAIK), but I opted to just go with the flow and hit my "threads" link every now and then to see if someone has replied to something. Agreed - built-in, opt-in HN notifs (or easy-to-opt-out) would be good to help with what OP is asking about, IMO.

BlueTemplar 4y ago

More chat than forum, with the exception that the comments stay on the Web instead of being hidden in the logs. Forums and chats do have a solution to too big size : they can just split into others (or subforums) once the linear discussion becomes unmanageable.

LunarAurora 4y ago
Yeah. More chat than forum, in the sense that people rarely venture to reply on what is older than a day (apart from Ask/Show HN; both hang a little longer) I don't get your solution. It seems to me that HN threads are already tree-like.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yes, but they are a bit too easy to split, which means that a good chunk of comments end up getting ignored. I sometimes read the new ones by first reading all of them, and later manually scanning every comment newer than X hours, but it's tedious. I guess a system that would automatically hid old comments (except their immediate parent) might work ?

staindk 4y ago

Took me a while to realise there are no "your comment has been replied to!" type notifications on HN. Seemed weird to me. I know there are a couple third-party services that you can sign up on to monitor that for you (they email you when someone replies to you, AFAIK), but I opted to just go with the flow and hit my "threads" link every now and then to see if someone has replied to something. Agreed - built-in, opt-in HN notifs (or easy-to-opt-out) would be good to help with what OP is asking about, IMO.