[marbletiles]

Like the article says, threading can be tolerable with a programmer mindset but in more general audiences you often end up with just nests of essentially unthreaded conversations.

Even here it’s a major drawback on the very big threads, because it’s impossible to see what posts are new or keep current on the big discussions.

As soon as you see Dang posting a link to page two and promising software updates in future, you know you’ve no chance of understanding what’s being said.

None of these things are problems with unthreaded conversations, which easily scale to thousands of comments.

[krapp]

None of those things are inherently problems with threaded conversations either. Hacker News is designed to discourage long-term engagement because the quality of conversation drops and the likelihood of flamewars increases over time. It's just a matter of implementation design and goals.

[dsr_]

I would argue that the quality of conversation drops and flamewars increase because HN is discouraging long-term engagement with an article.

Threading, new-only, relevant context displayed systems without point systems but with personal killfiles encourage discussion and viewing other participants as people.

What HN has makes only a relative handful of high-frequency commentators visible as people; everyone else is marginalized.

[ngrilly]

> Threading, new-only, relevant context displayed systems without point systems but with personal killfiles encourage discussion and viewing other participants as people.

What do you mean by "new-only"? And how would you show relevant context with personal killfiles and without a point system? :)

[ngrilly]

How would you solve the problem of keeping track of new comments in the HN model (threaded), assuming you'd like the conversation to continue over a few days or weeks?

I think the HN model is superior in almost every ways, except when it comes to following new comments, which is painful.

[krapp]

I have a browser plugin that does it - when a thread I've read has new comments, it shows the number of new comments and highlights them in the thread. HN could also have some way to inform someone of new comments. Literally HN should just do what Reddit does, because this is not an issue there.

Of course, the phrase "do what Reddit does" is blasphemy here, so I'd suggest finding a plugin or a third party service like hnreplies[0] or just put up with the pain. Or do what most people do, resign yourself to forgetting about a conversation as soon as it drops off of your threads page.

[0]https://hnreplies.com/

[ngrilly]

Agreed, Reddit's solution works quite well. And yes, hnreplies.com is very useful (I already use it).