To me, HN is rather anti social ( = anti forum), & prevents anything but a bunch of strangers meeting at a cafe, to discuss a piece of news for a brief moment, then leaving, to never see each other again, and being unable to message each other later.
And if you come to the cafe an hour too late, because it was night in your time zone — then it's empty already.
(Explanation: 1) At HN, if you reply to someone a bit later, s/he will never notice, because there are no reply notifications, and in his/her comments & replies list, your comment will get buried far down below other comments s/he has posted, and others' replies. And 2) if you visit a topic that is some days old, and you post a comment — no one will ever see it. Because there's no way for other people, to find the most recent comments (your comment) that have appeared since they were there the last time. Here's a way to fix that?: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... )
HN is quite different from forums because of the temporal nature of the content, the voting, and the threaded comments. Forums can foster very long running discussions, HN isn't really meant for that.
Also, there are all the components of user profiles/messaging/signatures/etc that HN completely omits (which is totally fine, but something forums are known for that HN probably will never have).
This. This is the element the 'modern web' has forgotten in its rush to 'new', 'realtime' and 'current' content.
Just because a conversation happened weeks (or months, or years) ago doesn't mean it's not relevant now. Google search results appear to favour 'fresh' over 'stale'; yet it doesn't say the content is any better, or more useful to me.
Hacker news has some awesome threads and knowledgeable people, but the threads and comments are buried in the archive. Add a comment to an old thread and no one reads it or responds. Which is the HN community's loss.
Blog comments were another: I had discussions that spanned multiple years, as people found it of interest and joined in. Because I wrote for engagement, not for pageviews.
Unless people regain a sense of place in time and realise that immediate doesn't trump everything else, I don't see us going back to longer-term discussions.
Nowadays you have a much larger internet community. 20 years ago, the number of people online was maybe a few hundred million (likely lower), now it's several billion. That increases complexity, any forum that's too broad will attract so many people that you only get noise. HN works well because it's relatively unknown (esp outside of tech). Reddit only works because subreddits are individually managed (and it's a company that can dedicate resources to it).
And if you come to the cafe an hour too late, because it was night in your time zone — then it's empty already.
(Explanation: 1) At HN, if you reply to someone a bit later, s/he will never notice, because there are no reply notifications, and in his/her comments & replies list, your comment will get buried far down below other comments s/he has posted, and others' replies. And 2) if you visit a topic that is some days old, and you post a comment — no one will ever see it. Because there's no way for other people, to find the most recent comments (your comment) that have appeared since they were there the last time. Here's a way to fix that?: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... )