Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class

Re:Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a c... by tptacek on Friday March 27, 2020 @08:05PM (#22708006)

I used to think HN would benefit from more state-keeping, to make it easier to follow threads over longer time periods. I'm now convinced the opposite is true: that HN pushes threads towards being more ephemeral is something that makes it better as a community, not worse. I spent a lot of time on Usenet, and I don't think month-long threads (and their attendant personality factions) would make this place better.

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Re:Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a c... by kick on Friday March 27, 2020 @09:01PM (#22708303)

Months-long? Let's not kid ourselves: years-long.

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a c... by JohnL4 on Saturday March 28, 2020 @12:13PM (#22712035)

Long-lived thread as emergent community? :-)

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Re:Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a c... by lifeisstillgood on Friday March 27, 2020 @08:22PM (#22708108)

One thing that might make a difference is to have a count of comments below mine - I often check my own 'thread' and it would be useful to have something like "you made 6 comments made in past day, and people have left 14 sub comments, 3 in last 2 hours".

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

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