Yes, I would be interested
Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
21–30 of 150 posts
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#22What is the age of a Hacker News post before discussion dies on average? It seems like having a feed for any new comments on posts posts older than that age would allow anyone interested in longer-term discussion to opt-in without requiring any additional features.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#23What is the age of a Hacker News post before discussion dies on average? It seems like having a feed for any new comments on posts posts older than that age would allow anyone interested in longer-term discussion to opt-in without requiring any additional features.
From my anecdotal observations after using this site for over a decade, it’s about a day, sometimes two, and very rarely longer than that.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#24To me, feels like more pressing issue would be to increase the ease of tagging, grouping, filtering, ranking, etc. Specifically, if you see existing coverage of a topic, it’s easy enough to revive it if you’re aware of how HN handles duplicate detection, but there’s no way to enforce users having to vote on comments with fresh eyes, hide comments that don’t have significant new sub-comments, discover significant new…
YC and dang's approach to HN seems to be more or less this: "Somehow we stumbled upon a system that really works. We don't know why it does, but it does, and so we don't want to change things too much too fast lest we break it."
And honestly, I love that approach. In my time on HN features have rolled out slowly, and you can tell that they were selected very carefully as being important quality of life improvements that don't fundamentally change the interactions.
Most features that people propose that HN needs are likely to substantially or subtly alter the dynamics, with potentially catastrophic results over the long haul.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#25I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#26I share this frustration; sometimes communities move so fast that you cannot participate.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#27I would adore an old-school forum (phpBB, anyone?) that had the HN crowd on it.
The medium is the message though, so even if you got the crowd...
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#28For 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.)
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#29I would adore an old-school forum (phpBB, anyone?) that had the HN crowd on it.
For ages that was Slashdot.
Often enough I find myself wishing hn had the "semantic moderation" of Slashdot, where posts are tagged as e.g. Informative, Funny, Flamebait. That and the pleasure of finding out that you had mod points that day.
Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
#30Creator of Sqwok here, you can have long-lived real-time conversations that will get bumped even if they're older, while also having notifications, @mentions, embeds, following, search, themes (including "hacker" https://imgur.com/a/qHkopKO), etc. The ranking algo is based off live conversation activity.
I did a Show HN back in April and have been quietly continuing to develop the site. Open to ideas/suggestions as well.