[cogman10]

And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.

Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).

[krapp]

And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading.

Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.

[MrJohz]

Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more cohesive. You had at most 2-3 separate trains of thought happening at once, as opposed to in a threaded forum like HN or Reddit, where the fringes of a conversation feel much more spread out.

[cogman10]

The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.

[MrJohz]

In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

[Robotbeat]

I actually strongly prefer to read such forums WITHOUT "responsive design," even on my phone. Strongly.