4 ms·

I feel the opposite. I hate discussions that show comments in a flat list in the order they were posted. I much prefer the tree structure that reddit and hacker

I feel the opposite. I hate discussions that show comments in a flat list in the order they were posted. I much prefer the tree structure that reddit and hacker news uses. Examples: The Ars Technica comments. People that want to reply to a comment have to quote the other comment, which makes following a discussion more trouble than it is worth. The Steam forums are usually worse than a game's subreddit. Although that is also caused by poor moderation.

CM30 3y ago
That's fair, it's definitely a matter of preference which you prefer. I'd say both have their upsides and downsides. > Although that is also caused by poor moderation. And sadly poor moderation is kinda the default online in general now. Going on many forums and social media sites makes you miss Dang and his work here.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
Tree comments would be good without reordering from upvotes or whatever. The first child is the first one posted. Since I want posts to be ordered by recent activity maybe comment trees should be too.
djellybeans 3y ago
Some of the oldest web forums (circa '98) I've been to use the nested comment format you see on Reddit or on here. The flat timeline format because much more popular from what I've seen. Reddit style forums are not great for posts intended to log something in progress (like a computer build) because they require the user to make a new thread multiple times instead of making a new comment that automatically brings the thread back to the first page. But flat list threads are great for that. They usually try to compromise with comment replies shown in "comment pyramids" but they can get unwieldy quick. It's a reasonable tradeoff for the flat chronological layout.