I also follow HN via RSS. Even if something was posted to 10 hours ago, I do still tend to reply to someone's message, and sometimes the discussion continues after that somehow!
Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#32I'd assume then we'd also need notifications of replies. Not a lot of good in replying to someone to get their (later) thoughts on something if they never see it.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#33I would adore an old-school forum (phpBB, anyone?) that had the HN crowd on it.
For ages that was Slashdot.
Kind of the same crowd but how was/is /. anything like a old school forum? Format is pretty much what HN has emulated, no? Forums are different mainly because you can shit post without the stigma.
Not that I am complaining but this place often elevates pretentious, "high brow" shit posting as opposed to the vanilla thing practiced the us commoners. As if rich tech bro's trolling is better. Gotta say, this place really like smelling its own farts.
However, there's a lot of good stuff, too, and the moderation is better than /. where the majority of visible posts are made by the same 10 guys. Been like that for past 20 years.
Sorry. Got carried away. That beer had 7% alcohol in it. How is this place anything like the phpbb (now, xenforo) style forums?
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#34For me the main problem would be thread drift. In most short discussions (10 comments) usually the comments are on topic. In long discussions (100 comments) usually the topic has drifted to one of the usual attractors. (For example in a new proposed rocket technology, after 100 or 200 comments there will be a huge discussion about how to use it to get FTL travel like in a popular sci-fi movie.)
I usually collapse those comments that drift too much because everything below it doesn't matter much. Sometimes I have to collapse all top-level comments, which is sad.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#35As a general rule, for me, the barrier-to-entry for online commentary is too low for genuinely worthwhile "longer term" discussions to occur. The vast majority of responses are "automatic" rather than reasoned and thoughtful, even in the limited cases where the commenter is otherwise "sufficiently competent" to contribute meaningfully.
Shallow, reflexive engagement (especially from a "large" number of participants) has no actual value except to platforms needing eyeballs for ad revenue, which isn't the HN model. So.
Brought to you by the letters I, M, and O.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#36Something that seems kinda unique to this community and the moderation is allowing and encouraging things to be posted again. A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if fo…
> IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great. This is where I am at. The notion that HN posts die off relatively quickly (i.e. within ~48h) is potentially a very important part of what gives them the quality they have today. If every post was eternal and duplicates were always closed, you'd wind up with effectively perma-stickied comments in these god threads tha…
Not if you sort them upside down, newest first. Old comments increasingly pushed away to deeper pages, becoming an archive.
You could have an AI to summarize the last N comments, giving an overview on the most recent opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#37I miss Usenet in the 1990's where threads would go on for months or even years. I used "slrn" to read news and it was great. It would only show me new posts. I could kill a thread to filter it so I didn't have to see it. I could just hit one button to go to the next post on the thread or to the next thread. In many ways it was superior to modern web based forums.
The group was so much smaller, and also more more homogeneous, and there we so few alternatives, it's incomparable.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#38I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN discussion from years ago and wish I could ask a question, or make a comment in that conversation today.
However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time.
Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#39If hn had reply notifications it would go a long way toward keeping discussions relevant for later readers.
In lieu of a built-in solution I've been using https://www.hnreplies.com/ which seems to work well.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#40Find a local LessWrong group! These kinds of conversations are much more productive in person.