> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.

Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:

* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...

Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?

But replies in forum topics weren't a single chronological conversation either. Especially in those huge threads with many posters. It was people replying to posts who knows how far back in the stream, maintaining a bunch of smaller conversations, or just interjecting a top-level comment based on the 1st post or title.

The upside is that ideally these subconversations can split and merge into a larger conversation. But then you also have the problem of 99% of a topic's history being fluff nobody is ever going to read again, especially not in that 20 year long topic. It only created the illusion of a convo people would follow because it was a stream of posts with a reply box at the end.

Of course, I haven't seen a solution that addresses both sets of issues between tree vs. forum linear pipe, though I think the tree maps better to human interaction and attention.

You bring up an upside of the forum style topic though: the chronological view gives it more lifespan since new posts are given maximal visibility.

On the other hand, long threads pick up too much baggage nobody is going to read, so I think creating new Reddit submissions with fresh participants is better for conversation. The limited lifespan is a feature.

The idea of "dupe threads" never made sense when the "dupe" is a 30 page topic from 6 months ago. We're here to talk and exchange our views, not scan for our views in a conversation others already had. That there could be some sort of canonical discussion or master thread on a topic was probably the worst superstition had in the forum era.

USENET with a threaded newsreader like "trn" provided the optimal experience here.

You saw things in their threaded context, but it remembered what you've read and there is a direct action to "go to next unread" that will jump around and follow the fringe. You don't have to open individual root posts.

It wouldn't work so well if you expect to read sparsely though. People used moderation and killfiles to prune out garbage. The death of USENET was in many ways the flood of posts that made this no longer feasible.

The other missing thing here is topics, i.e. newsgroups. HN is not as broad as USENET as a whole, but also not as narrow as one newsgroup. These groups are what you would open, then skim through all the messages in that forest, catching up on what is new since last visit. HN topics are too narrow to want to bother reopening each one to catch up, but there is no collective layer above them to help find your own sparse subset of worthwhile HN conversations.

Yes, and this is especially true of enthusiast communities, which usually have evergreen topics. A user who is new to the Leica M system can head to rangefinderforum.com and get value out of lens reviews or camera comparisons that might be literally 20 years old.

I wonder if LLMs could be useful here for automatic node-graph generation of which replies addresses which train of discussion within a thread, and the user can click through said generate index to follow how a specific topic evolved.