Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 376 posts

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#341

Post by IIsi50MHz »

fluoridation wrote: post #333
hombre_fatal wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the key here is, if you don't want to read what other people have to say, why are you here? It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. And only a fraction of it is relevant. Yet you have to scan each post to check. Maybe that's useful if you have a very specific technic…

>It's not reference material. It's a conversation people who aren't around anymore had days, weeks, months, years ago that is no more important that what anyone today might be saying. That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone…

> That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving.

At first I thought the complaint was that long threads can have numerous irrelevant fluff posts, outdated posts, and off-topic posts getting in the way of reading the useful bits. But treating a forum thread as a live conversation was somewhat surprising to me. And specifically excluding that a thread could be reference material perhaps reflects a difference between the sorts of places GP and I prefer to browse.

But about long threads: stepping through a 30-page or 300-page thread, where rarely is a post an update about the project, while the rest add nothing substantial, discourages looking through the whole the whole thread is not always practical. And search often doesn't return anything useful.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#342

Post by saguntum »

salaryman777 wrote: post #192
prmoustache wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.

Could you list a few?

Bogleheads forum is great: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

There's a Spain equivalent forum also if you poke around

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#343

Post by econ »

dredmorbius wrote: post #337
econ wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer. Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a with some sensible attributes. And with highlighting. It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way. You could also have an that poi…

What kinds of forms do you have in mind? Another ask of mine would be standard page formats, such that there could be standard styles which could be consistently applied to them. Article, index, search, gallery, discussion/thread, off the top of my head.

Stop everyone from reinventing the registration form so that it can be filled out without all the fuzzy business. You specify the fields you need and where it should post. Then have no further control over it.

Have the browser bar show it is a standard form for site: example.com which means no [3rd party] js listening in on personal information. Validate and format all countries adresses correctly. Get email addresses and names right

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

If you let me (or random Joe) design it it will no doubt be wrong in multiple ways. It will probably zoom annoyingly on iphones, I will ask for the state name outside the us and I should really ask for your mum's birthday and maiden name. I will disable right click, mess up tab index and ruin accessibility with a gray on gray font. Should I wrap table rows in labels?

Why should everyone have to implement this if 100 million people already tried and mostly got it wrong?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#344

Post by mune2gu-chan »

xandrius wrote: post #220
mune2gu-chan wrote: post #128

I really miss the slower pace of those old, isolated forums. There was a unique kind of focus when your thoughts weren’t constantly competing with a global, real-time algorithmic feed.

Was that only the forums, the Internet, the world or maybe your age?

Probably a bit of everything. But I don't think it's only nostalgia. The design of those communities made it easier to stay focused on one conversation instead of constantly jumping to the next thing.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#346

Post by KajMagnus »

throw0101a wrote: post #188
Findecanor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic. It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread. Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of post…

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long. Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.: * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-... Is there any reason…

> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable

I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing).

Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar.

See: (incl demo video)

https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve...

(Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#347

Post by KajMagnus »

krapp wrote: post #308
abruzzi wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but cla…

You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links t…

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861

If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context.

> You can have a chronologically sorted tree view

Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#348

Post by shoobiedoo »

sph wrote: post #331
coldpie wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SA forums are still there, happily chugging along. It's been my main hangout for 20 years.

I didn’t participate in its heydays but made an account during covid era and it has disappointed me greatly. Let’s say that if you wish BlueSky were a forum, it’s the place for you. All I found were a bunch of americans that were simultaneously playing edgy, touchy and uncurious with anything in their cultural blindspot. Dreadful stuff. But the shadow of its greatness was palpable and made me nostalgic for something…

yeah it's nothing like it used to be. back in the old days it was like the wild west. nothing was off the table unless it was illegal or grossly against the forum rules. now it's just a forum version of reddit or bluesky like you said

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#349

Post by MrJohz »

cogman10 wrote: post #296
MrJohz wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more…

The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.

In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#350

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #235
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.

How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way. Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary…

Because humans are a legacy system that has a hard time adapt, so even if a situation is novel, the legacy system turns it into a subset of legacy "system encounters problem" problem..

If you gun a dog into space, the situation is novel, but the situation for the dog is not novel. Its just another kennel, just another day with the pack absent and smells of home absent.

Post reply on HN