4 ms·

Same - there is just something about the forums style experience (and especially SA) that appeals to me more than other forms of social media.

imiric 4y ago
I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.
- ta8903 4y ago
  Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments. 2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO. 3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion. You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.
  - account42 4y ago
    I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction. I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones. For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions. For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post. The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
  - leeches 4y ago
    I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments. The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back. * https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
  - pezezin 4y ago
    I have spent many years in many forums, both hierarchical and flat, and while I might agree with you on points 1 and 3, I find point 2 to be just the opposite. In my experience, flat forums devolve into a jumble of overlapping threads which are extremely difficult to follow. Or in CS terms, whereas a hierarchical forum is a simple tree, a flat forum turns into a DAG.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.

imiric 4y ago

I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.

ta8903 4y ago
Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments. 2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO. 3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion. You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.
- account42 4y ago
  I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction. I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones. For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions. For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post. The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
- leeches 4y ago
  I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments. The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back. * https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
- pezezin 4y ago
  I have spent many years in many forums, both hierarchical and flat, and while I might agree with you on points 1 and 3, I find point 2 to be just the opposite. In my experience, flat forums devolve into a jumble of overlapping threads which are extremely difficult to follow. Or in CS terms, whereas a hierarchical forum is a simple tree, a flat forum turns into a DAG.
rchaud 4y ago
> There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.