[BlueTemplar]

There are some things on Reddit that I thankfully rarely experience, but that drive me absolutely mad when I do : automatic thread locking after some time and shadow bans.

Both of these violate netiquette!

As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.

And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!

[jandrese]

I'm not sure I agree about necroposting. I find it tends to increase the noise level more than simply creating a new thread about the topic in some cases, as people see a post with tons of comments and don't realize that many of those comments are out of date and no longer accurate/relevant.

There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

[BlueTemplar]

And completely unreasonable to me. Even on reddit the cutoff is... 6 months ? People not realizing that it's a necropost is either a failure of the poster not declaring it as such, or of the forum software - see how Discourse auto-highlights necroposting !

[jandrese]

How is a poster supposed to go back to the 5 year old thread starting comment and change it to note that the post is out of date?

Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.

[BlueTemplar]

Usenet would have it worse, because there you can choose your software yourself (and pick one without that feature)?

BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !