2 ms·

I personally prefer forums (linear, non-nested comments) to what is on Hacker News, but people disagree vehemently on this, so that will be litigated for years

by kmfrk 13y ago

I personally prefer forums (linear, non-nested comments) to what is on Hacker News, but people disagree vehemently on this, so that will be litigated for years to come. Ironically, pg has implemented measures to prevent deeply threaded discussions, so he seems to be somewhat aware of innate disadvantages to using this format of discussion. I think that, by and large, CMSes at best can serve to remove obstacles to creating content and having discussions. It still falls on the community and admins to nurture a culture and atmosphere that resulting in said content and discussions. Generally, though, there are nested/threaded comments (HN, reddit, Disqus), and there are linear (forums), and between the different CMSes in each categories, we're overstating the differences vastly, especially with regards to advantages and disadvantages. In other words, types of CMS can have a huge difference, but individual CMSes of the same type don't differ as much as the people touting them would like us to believe. Places like NeoGAF and Something Awful are practically held together with scotch tape, but they're still amazing communities in their own right.

krapp 13y ago
What would be nice is being able to choose between nested or flat layout, and to have folding. I actually like the "expand" feature Livejournal and other forums currently use which just appends the next level onto the current thread... though all of this would probably require javascript which a lot of HN users wouldn't really like. Still, I think the more users can customize their own experience, the less likely they'll be to complain about it.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. Hacker News never really has so many comments that you can't read through them all in a minute, and if a discussion would grow too large, because it's a threaded discussion system, you might as well give up discussing the story anyway. Just look at "scandal stories" like those related to Heroku and such. Because Hacker News is karma-based as any other comment CMS, I would be more inclined to write my comment as a reply to the top-ranking comment instead of posting a top-level comment myself, since I'm likely to gain more karma from this. This completely destroys the flow of discussion. Comment CMSes will always be gamed by people, but this would probably be the most significant improvement to the quality and linearity of discussions. Options for viewing a discussion differently don't work very well, because then people start discussing in wildly different ways, which makes for a huge mess. That's why, again, a linear/forum CMSes are superior when it comes to discussions, although they don't lend themselves perfectly to a link/self-oriented submission system.
  - krapp 13y ago
    The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. That actually would be really helpful, basically have a newcomments option for each thread. The URI could look like /item?id=n&newcomments

by kmfrk 13y ago

krapp 13y ago

What would be nice is being able to choose between nested or flat layout, and to have folding. I actually like the "expand" feature Livejournal and other forums currently use which just appends the next level onto the current thread... though all of this would probably require javascript which a lot of HN users wouldn't really like. Still, I think the more users can customize their own experience, the less likely they'll be to complain about it.

kmfrk 13y ago
The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. Hacker News never really has so many comments that you can't read through them all in a minute, and if a discussion would grow too large, because it's a threaded discussion system, you might as well give up discussing the story anyway. Just look at "scandal stories" like those related to Heroku and such. Because Hacker News is karma-based as any other comment CMS, I would be more inclined to write my comment as a reply to the top-ranking comment instead of posting a top-level comment myself, since I'm likely to gain more karma from this. This completely destroys the flow of discussion. Comment CMSes will always be gamed by people, but this would probably be the most significant improvement to the quality and linearity of discussions. Options for viewing a discussion differently don't work very well, because then people start discussing in wildly different ways, which makes for a huge mess. That's why, again, a linear/forum CMSes are superior when it comes to discussions, although they don't lend themselves perfectly to a link/self-oriented submission system.
- krapp 13y ago
  The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. That actually would be really helpful, basically have a newcomments option for each thread. The URI could look like /item?id=n&newcomments