[Chathamization]

There are good and really useful comments on here. But there's also a lot of fluff. Beyond that, the way things are set up encourages compulsive behavior. If you take several hours to comment on something, there's a good chance your comment will get buried. Wait a few days, and there's a good chance no one will read it. After making a comment, there's a certain urgency to check to see who's replied to you, because if you wait too long chances are the person has moved on.

You'll also notice that people start making the same comments and having the same conversations over and over again. Instead of having an ongoing conversation about, say, space exploration, you have the same beginning of a discussion happening whenever the topic comes up, and then stopping before it really matures.

That's not to say that the comment section here is bad, but it's still worth paying attention to some of its drawbacks. Particularly because it shares the urgency and compulsive aspects that permeate a lot of current sites.

[overcast]

HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.

The only real addictive bit is the points system on HN. I'd be fine with that just going away. It wouldn't be the first time I've refreshed posts I've made repeatedly to see the tally go up.

[Chathamization]

> HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.

The old style of forums didn't have the same kind of compulsive pressure, since you could always respond the next day/week/month and the topic would bump back up to the top of the post. If you don't respond on HN or Reddit quick enough, no one is going to see your comment. I frequent some sites that has the older system, and I'll find myself occasionally saying "This isn't that important; wait a few days and see if you feel like responding." But that's not really much of an option here - how many people are going to read your comment if you make it several days later?

And it wouldn't be hard to devise a system that actively discourages compulsive posting behavior. If you, say, had a web forum where everyone could only post once a week, you'd have much less of that urgency (and you'd get a discussion with more users, not just the fraction that habitually post everywhere).

[wott]

Yes, HN and Reddit are very-high-traffic forums, so it is mostly read-once--write-once--do-not-come-back. Not only the comment go by hundreds on each thread, but the threads themselves have a life expectancy of 24 hours only, 48 hours max, before they are buried and reject to the infamous page 2 where no one goes. So there's generally no point in coming back.

The fact that the 'shape' of the threads changes all the time does not help either (the way the messages are ordered, depending on the upvotes, the freshness, and whichever mysterious other criteria may be involved).

Conversations at a depth higher than 5 or 6 levels is also difficult to follow, so I think not many people read them, let alone take part in them (on Reddit, such deep threads even suffer a penalty twice, and the second one, which requires opening a new tab or window if you don't want to have to reload the whole page once you come back, is probably fatal to almost all of the readers).

(I won't tell how much I miss Usenet and newsreaders once more, I promise :-D )

[overcast]

Yeh I see what you're saying. HN has a gaming aspect to it, which buries posts if they aren't being accelerated.

[eduren]

Do you think it would help to have a comment reply notification built into HN? Most of the time if I decide not to add a follow-up comment it's because the user I'm replying to has no way of being notified that I did. Or do you think it would just exacerbate the urgency issues?

[Chathamization]

That might be somewhat useful, but the thing is after a few hours your conversation with the other person is going to be no better than a private message (since no one else is going to see the topic). Web forums bump the topic back to the top, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the "news" angle. It might be interesting separating the two - have the submissions act like they do know, but have the comments for the submissions be in individual threads in a separate discussion forum.

[overcast]

Something other than the awful threading would be nice. It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations.

[krapp]

>It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations

It's been implied that this is an intentional means of keeping engagement low, as the quality of comments tends to diminish over time, while the likelihood of flamebait and spam increases as comment distance diverges from the root. This is also apparently the reason there are no notifications for new comments. I don't know if it's true or one of those features the community is reading too much meaning into, which only exists as it does because pg wasn't interested in expanding on it.

In any case, I really hope they consider adding more ways to sort the threads - sorting by time rather than karma would be very helpful. They could even keep the karma sort the default so no one else has to complain about the layout changing.