[kijin]

> the audience loses context and don't know what you are talking about

In most forums, you just jump quote the post you want to talk about. Doesn't matter if you're on page 144 and the original post was on page 36. Click "Quote" and phpBB/vBulletin automatically adds a link to the other post.

And it's an unholy mess to wade through a 144-page forum topic. A lot of people just quote the whole post to add a one-liner. It's a nightmare. Any long thread is probably 90% quotes and 10% new content. Just the other day I was trying to find some information in an XDA Developers forum. I gave up after a dozen pages or so. Too much garbage thrown in between useful content.

On HN and Reddit, on the other hand, people quote one another much less frequently. For example, I only quote other comments if I want to say something specific about a particular passage. Here, we get along just fine without excessive quoting, because the context is already there. HNers understand the cost of context switching.

I wouldn't want to read a HN thread where 90% of the content was made up of quotes a.k.a. context-switching crutches.