Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.

The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.

With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.

What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.

In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.

Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.

While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.

Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.

Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.

An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.

The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.

I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.

Defining superfluous as off-topic, the format does not inherently invite superfluous content. In both the traditional forum and engagement ranking schemes, the off-topic post will be ignored and the poster has the same experience in both settings. I argue that the culture of some forums may invite noise, but the forum has several mechanisms to make this invitation a net-positive attribute.

If a post has negative value, then the moderators will probate or ban a poster and the offending content becomes an example for everyone to learn from. If the community deems an off-topic comment to have neutral value, then it is ignored and the individual poster gains information about what the community does not value. There is also the subforum structure which tends to create dedicated threads oriented towards off-topic noise. In turn, these subforums spawn subcultures, each with different relationships towards content and posting styles.

The result is that forums become more representative of their members than upvote ranking communities. The forum benefits come at the cost of higher friction to assimilate as a new poster. The forum structure is also fragile; moderators must operate with high judgement and pulse with the beat of their communities.

Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.

Personally: forums are mostly about one subject, have a community and you have to invest some time learning the lay of the land to get the most out of it, get some reputation. Reddit? It's just drive-by commenting. I get points? Cool. I get banned? Next account. No avatar, pseudonyms almost hidden it is not a social media, it's unsocial.

> The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion

On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack.

E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll.

Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches.

After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree...

Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?

Eh, I think both formats have their pros and cons. For example, a standard forum discussion tends to prioritise the last post, while a Reddit one tends to prioritise the first few posts.

This means that unless you can get into a discussion in the first 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the subreddit size), your comment is basically getting buried. The earliest posts will probably have racked up dozens or hundreds of upvotes by that point, and it's hard to dislodge them, no matter how poor they may be compared to later replies.

The standard forum setup at least means you have a chance to get your opinions out there if you don't live in the same time zone as the topic creator, or don't have hours to spare for online discussions.

The Reddit format also seems to heavily minimise user identities too, which can make it harder to have a community rather than a bunch of random names commenting into the void. I literally don't recognise anyone I see on Reddit, since the only thing I have to go off are names and maybe post flairs, and the site is so vast that the chances of bumping into the same people over and over again is pretty low.

A standard forum can feel like a group of friends hanging out, while a subreddit just feels like a blog's comments section.

And the upvote/downvote setup feels like a mixed bag in of itself too. On the one hand, prioritising posts the community considers good can be seen as a positive thing, and help them get noticed. But it can also make communities even more of an echo chamber, because a post that might say "hold on, are we sure this is correct?" is almost certainly getting buried rather than taken into consideration.

But I'd say that subreddits, forums and social media are really just different discussion formats with their own pros and cons, and which one you prefer is probably going to depend a lot on the individual. The former is the most content focused, the latter is the most user focused, and the forum is sorta in the middle.

I do think people are gradually starting to see why reddit comment tree is bad.

> is a clear improvement

I remember going from usenet, with it's tree comments (when the worked) to flat forums and being annoyed at the change.

25+ years later flat threads are correct threads, and tree comments are just a bad idea.

I frequented a forum with a two-pane UI with a tree in one page and the text in another. It encouraged long posts; was used for political and historical discussions. And what was amazing was that it had a seamless NNTP backend, you could easily participate using an news client, which was nearly every email client those days.

Don’t forget moderators getting tired of seeing new threads on a popular topic and inevitably creating the “megathread”: a thread that (by the time you arrive) has 900+ pages and the first post that is edited to include highlights and important new info hasn’t been updated in 2 years because the OP has moved on or become inactive

Even better when it contains potential fixes for problems. The solution you need is on page 672 but you’ll never know because the poster phrased the problem weird and even if they didn’t search is absolutely garbage (and outside search tools won’t work because most subforums are locked behind needing an account so they aren’t indexed). Have fun reading page after 40 post page where the overwhelming majority of the comment amounts to “I upvote/downvote this”

Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces interleaved replies.

Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.

Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.

> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions

I think it makes a distinction between "thing that we are discussing with multiple conversations", and oldschool forums where each thread is "thing that we are having a conversation about".

Are there any self-hostable forums that work like digg/reddit/HN?

>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

The original battle.net forums featured a threaded view much like HN/reddit. Actually, in retrospect it was like mailing list archives.

IIRC they switched to a more orthodox phpbb-like layout because users preferred it.

> the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions.

But very difficult to have those conversations.

>I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices.

That's exactly the problem.

Colocating everything in one place basically invites the internet riff-raff to shit all over everything. You have some asshole who spends most of his time lying about solar panels by cherry picking links wandering into some area where people talk about potato chips doing his thing there to everyone's detriment.

And then you start keeping score and it incentivizes all sorts of bad drive-by contribution behavior, circle jerking, etc, etc which very clearly has an un-diversifying effect.

All that shit combines to create a community where 99.999% of the content and the same amount of the discussion is about the same quality, accuracy and honesty of a grocery store tabloid.

Your take would have been defensible in 2016 but with a decade of hindsight I don't see how any honest person can think all that.

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