[Pilottwave]

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know" people), this old forum style will never return to its former glory.

[newaccount74]

The popularity ranking suffers from a few problems.

One problem is that the 1% most popular comments get dozens/hundreds of replies, and no-one responds or even looks at the bottom 90% of comments.

The most popular posts and comments are usually very strong, divisive statements. If you don't have a strong opinion, noone will upvote you, and it will seem that everyone is either strongly for or against something.

Then there's the problem that time is a strong factor in the rankings, which means that there is rarely any long-term followup.

In old forums, there used to be threads that went on for years. Long term follow-up is close to non-existant on HN and Reddit.

[ivanhoe]

What to you describe quickly grows into full-blown recommendation engine.

And IMHO the beauty of the old-school chronological/category organization over the recommendation engines is that it's super simple and predictable, making it a lot less stressful to me, as it's not constantly trying to push your buttons, playing with your FoMO instincts and engagement metrics. If I don't feel like reading something now, it'll still be there in 2 weeks, I can find it easily if I wish.

[Zak]

Recommendation engines aren't all bad. I think one of the keys to making it good for users is to derive recommendations from stated preferences rather than supposed revealed preferences.

That is to say a good recommendation engine would not use viewing, replying to, or otherwise interacting with content other than using a button that says "show me more like this" as an indication the person wants to see more like that. This is, of course not compatible with short-term profits for a site that monetizes time-on-site, but could work with such a profit model over the long term.

[Lolaccount]

I cannot tell you how much I disagree.

I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.

[Pilottwave]

Reddit supports rank by reply date. Which i often use, because it can be useful. My argument is that in most cases its not the most useful ranking option.

I can also remind the old forum rules like: "No useless posts. This includes: Necroing, Thread bumping, useless one liners, Flamewars, Trolling and Spamming."

The above is no longer an issue in the more modern forum ranking methods in combination with nesting. Its frankly just sub-par any way you slice it, since the new ways have the features of the old and add to it. There is no regression only progress, you could argue.

[yywwbbn]

If you have <= 100 people actively posting on the forum than yes.

[wil421]

I’ve been an on and off member of car forums. Lots of forums are broken down into sub forms based on model and years, and then sub topic like general discussion, engine problems, mods and so on.

It’s much easier to have a few 100s of people commenting on various parts of the forum than a one single feed like HN.

[Lolaccount]

Exactly the example I was thinking of. Same.

You get to control the direction per your interests rather than being sprayed by an algorithm.

[yywwbbn]

Yeah, I guess I should’ve added at least another 0

[bnralt]

The vote ranking system is good if you want a steady stream of new curated content and your taste largely coincides with the user base. For instance, you go to “r/catpictures” daily and find the most upvoted cat pictures that users have submitted for that day.

But the vote ranking system is absolutely horrible if you want any sort of in-depth conversation or to have multiple points of view. Conversations on forums might go on for weeks or even years, and people have time to dig up information, view media, ruminate on a point, etc. and come back and add to it later. If you don’t make a comment on a Hacker News post within a few hours, it’s likely that no one is going to read it. Come back a few days later, and you’re just shouting into a void.

Even if you do comment within a few hours, most people are going to just reply to the first couple of comments that were made. Very few people are going to scroll down and read the comments at the bottom.

And if a controversial opinion is split 52%/48%, it’s quite possible for all the comments that are in the 48% are downvoted. Even if one side isn’t 52%, but there’s a small but fanatical fanbase. IE, /r/soda is 10% coke fans that will downvote everything that’s pro-Pepsi, 15% Pepsi fans that will downvote everything pro-Coke, and 75% people who just don’t care. This will lead to all the pro-Coke posts being downvoted and all the pro-Pepsi votes being upvoted. Worse still, since Reddit and HackerNews only use the aggregate score, it will simply appear to most users like no one supports the pro-Coke position.

Of course, neither solves the problem that the most mentally unhealthy individuals are often the ones who spend the most time online, and they’ll be the ones who dominate either style of forum.

[dgb23]

I personally got in contact with nested / tree structured forums before the flat, chronological ones. I remember a discussion around 2000 where the flat model got traction. There are up and downsides to each.

Of course this is a pure display issue, there’s no reason one couldn’t switch between both in the same forum.

However there’s something about seeing the same thing others see and interacting with that context in mind.

[account42]

The issue with having both linear chronological and tree views is that users of either still need to respect the conventions of the other. For linear views it is common to just reply at the end while tree view users will be a lot more tolerant of diverging discussions as those not interested can simply ignore that subtree.

Replying to multiple posts in one comment is also something that tree view discussion boards generally don't support - although it should be possible to do it.

[rob74]

Yeah - if you are old enough to remember the days before StackOverflow, you might remember trying to find answers to (programming-related or other) questions in forums. Where you would have to scroll through pages and pages of more or less (typically less) on-topic replies, and if you were lucky you would find some relevant suggestions, but with no indication if they actually worked for others...

[petemir]

Classic https://xkcd.com/979/

[timeon]

Some Czech and Slovak [0] forums of early 2000 had (and still have) this feature as separate page with posts / comments ordered by 'karma'.

[0] nyx.cz kyberia.sk ...