[mcgwiz]

I don't want to be misconstrued a "bad HN commenter", so I'll say first of all, technically amazing. Also, UX is consistent and aesthetically pleasing (though admittedly incomplete; lots of actions are unexplained... e.g. what's the difference between Focus and Shift).

Technical and design accolades aside, IMHO I would not call this an improvement on existing discussion forums. In Part 4 of his post "Building a Better Online Community", he implies that a major problem is the signal to noise ratio. This web app has not solved that problem.

The extremely low barrier to participation, while inline with privacy ethics and democratic ethics, unfortunately removes important incentives to creating quality content. It is however, successful at enhancing anonymity and removing the (burdensome?) requirement of identifying oneself.

Let's take a step back and re-assess what we're looking at. It's not an improved discussion forum, it's an improved chatroom app, plain and simple. And for that, I credit it with certain innovation.

[javajosh]

I agree that it is more chat than forum, especially because of the limited (that is, non-existent) support for threaded conversations. (The only thing I could find was a hash-number style referral shortcut).

Personally, I also disagree with removing timestamps. Although HK (presumably the author) is correct in that people can tend to ignore 2-year-old posts, this is an entirely n00b tendency, as old-hands know that there is gold in older content. That said, old-hands can very quickly filter for relevance when hunting for timely news. Removing timestamps removes that facility.

[sgdesign]

Quick note: "HK" stands for "Hong Kong", it's not the author's name.