Encouraging selective quoting with interspersed comments, but having seen the triumph of top quoting in e-mail discussions, this might be a lost art anyway.
Also, personal kill files. Bring back the PLONK! Thanks to the thread organization of HN, subject kill files are no longer really necessary, but being able to mute people for 30 days or permanently may still be useful (And it might contribute to downvotes being used less for subjective differences of opinion).
I also used to like the ability to easily take discussions to email, but Usenet was a smaller place back then and this may no longer scale.
A modern example of this is lambda-the-ultimate.org, which has so many threads that have been running for years without any clear purpose that it's almost impossible to find a thread that hasn't.
Of course, that could be a matter of scale; with less posts to keep track of, I guess it would be easier to continue things eternally.
If I cared I could dive down and see where conversations were happening. as it is I really only spot a top couple.
I guess it's halfway between real state and ephemeral
Looking at HN discussions today it has very few of these, in fact you hardly every see the parent counter-replying to someone opposing his argument. Instead often others reply with a different perspective or the discussion dies because why argue with a troll. Maybe even the lack of quoting is a big contributor to the healthy discussions here.
Branch pruning, a la trn (threaded read news). Allows one to tune out unproductive flamewars. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with facilitating long-running threads.
Some version of killfiles, but somehow magically adjusted for a world in which trolls can make new accounts easily.
Or expanded ones, if I came into the topic w/all nodes collapsed.
I would agree that the site is pretty strongly pro-Musk and anti-copyright though.
I understand this as an intentional feature of HN.
And good newsreaders were also able to selectively skip a comment and everybody replying to it (e.g. if a discussion devolved into a tangent that was less interesting), instead of a whole subject.
I have noticed this as well.
Furthermore, the moderators definitely have a personal libertarian bent that regularly seeps into selective moderation. I routinely see someone declare an interesting political assertion and then any replies to it that disagree with the principle are shut down as being political, but the parent post is ignored.
Personally I inherently disagree that a forum can really be kept apolitical. Politics is the art of things that matter, the only things that are entirely apolitical are irrelevant and uncontroversial. As soon as you bring money, power, or status into the picture in any respect, someone will turn it into a political issue. I am not saying turn this into a campaign rally but many issues have underlying causes or worldviews that inch into the political domain, it is unavoidable.
> The technology backing HN is still massively inferior in every respect to what Usenet was 30 years ago. I tend to read each thread only once, and then only follow up discussions of my own comments. Following a thread over several days is a near hopeless endeavor. Why doesn't anybody combine the light touch moderation of HN, combined with the tools that a decent newsreader like nn or GNUS could provide?
You've just described a traditional threaded forum. Want to discuss some different aspect of a topic? Start a new thread. And in fact this significantly minimizes the amount of "redundant" conversation where four people are arguing similar things in different comment trees of a topic and you make a similar post multiple times.
Furthermore, a threaded model contributes to a more collaborative discussion. It's not upvoting my viewpoint and downvoting yours, as Reddit-style models inevitably turns into, it's just people discussing something because they want to discuss them. Not that arguments and flamewars don't exist, but when you turn it into a points-scoring game, you get sports-team mentality.
But people like the dopamine rush, so everything has to have upvotes and downvotes and scoring nowadays. It is what people congregate to. Traditional forums still exist and yet here we are, all of us.
(I do kind of agree to your point that having an "inbox" model like newsgroups could allow better discussion than a purely comment-tree based model like reddit or HN, but I'm not entirely sure that allowing the discussion to "branch" arbitrarily much is actually a benefit. You can still follow multiple discussions within a single thread on a regular forum too. However, I am very much of the opinion that "voting" systems inherently turn into "sports teams" and eventually a hivemind. The fact that Usenet and traditional forums aren't "gamified" is a huge plus IMO. The fact that "winning" means the dissenting viewpoint is suppressed is extremely problematic - I browse HN with 'showdead' on for exactly that reason.)
This is very much in the eye of the beholder. People's assumptions condition which posts they notice and how strongly they weight them. People with opposite assumptions end up with the opposite picture. (Edit: here's a nice exchange in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706035). There are endless examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588105
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325122
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BetterThanSlave
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912334
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742578
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21803541
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907232
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...
I would like an ecological model to be used instead of this constant spectrum-y adherence.
In an ecological model you might for instance find yourself cutting back on the majority opinion expressed in reasonable ways - just because it is too popular. Here the moderator is not the butcher but the gardener promoting a variety of interesting flora.
This is the alternative to the 'balance hypothesis' I believe to be the primary culprit and a failed model.
The moderation is reasonably effective against the most extremely toxic content, but IMHO has a tendency to privilege toxic opinions stated in measured tones against the pushback they create.
As for member downvotes, I can often predict which comments of mine will attract downvotes: humor will tend to get downvoted as irrelevant, while the relevancy of replies complaining about said humor is rarely questioned.
Certain subjects are downvote magnets: Criticism of Elon Musk, scepticism about nuclear power, support for intellectual property rights (especially in the case of music), support for ethnic and gender inclusiveness. It's possible, though, that these are just hot button issues, and the opposite opinions also attract downvotes.
The technology backing HN is still massively inferior in every respect to what Usenet was 30 years ago. I tend to read each thread only once, and then only follow up discussions of my own comments. Following a thread over several days is a near hopeless endeavor. Why doesn't anybody combine the light touch moderation of HN, combined with the tools that a decent newsreader like nn or GNUS could provide?