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I disagree completely. When you have threaded comments, what happens is that people post their (often reactionary) opinions in response to OP, and then other pe
by archagon 13y ago
I disagree completely. When you have threaded comments, what happens is that people post their (often reactionary) opinions in response to OP, and then other people respond in kind to those opinions. On occasion you get a witty quip or a good story, but there's just no meaningful flow of conversation. It's soapbox vs. soapbox. On the other hand, non-threaded discussions, while more difficult to follow, read like actual, real-life conversations. You have a chance of having a pleasant discussion (or even changing someone's mind!) on those sites.
I post on HN or Reddit when I feel like adding a point of data to a debate. I post on MeFi when I want to talk to my peers.
(Admittedly, even sites like MeFi can't compare to talking with people in real life. There's something to be said for taking control of someone's locus of attention while you're talking, which you simply can't do when you have to talk in discrete, comment-sized chunks.)
- Metapony 13y agoWith Mefi, one could always quote someone in reply to make things clear. Some of the best discussions online happen over at Metafilter. (I find HN interesting due to it's SV audience, but it functionally feels like an old version of reddit.)
- dredmorbius 13y agoWhat hurts both G+ (and HN) is the absence of a specific blockquote markdown. None of italicize everything quoted, "put quotes in quotes (especially for long passages)", nor > prefix quotes with a greater-than sign work particularly well IMO. Though I suppose they generally suffice.
- dublinben 13y agoBlockquotes have been supported in markdown as the ">" prefix since the very beginning. It's a mystery that HN doesn't support it when even reddit does.
- dredmorbius 13y agoPrecisely my point. I've raised the issue specifically with Yonatan Zunger, and got a very typical Google NIH response.