The best part of forums was that they didn't have much temporal dependency. People posted things there, and it was expected that other would reply days or months later. It made for a much more calm and lively discussion.

When Reddit puts something on the hot tab, there's one hour or two for anybody to say what they want to say, no time for anybody to reply, and it's gone. HN is slower, but not very different. It's a completely different kind of site.

Also my lamenting the loss of newsgroups for just that effect.

Used to be in alt.callahans and I can't imagine how many threads I just collapsed and moved on because I knew that conversation wasn't a topic of mine. And still managed to ping in at least a few dozen messages of varying size/quality a week.

Eternal september is more powerful than any form of site design or BBS format.

i think this may be strongly correlated with the end of dialup and the rise of always-on internet, and then again in the rise of always-on-hand smartphone internet usage (and its pervasive push notification capacity), each stage raising the ground state of expected response times. speed then proceeded to kill everything in its way.

This is also what I fucking hate about Facebook's desire to make you spend all your time there. They do the same sort of thing.

I believe this is the dividend and curse of Web2.0. Things can be so easily mixed, matched, shared and are federated. Boundaries have been eroding in the digital as in the real world. We've lost the sense of closed group, community and with it some natural short feedback loops.

There are huge benefits to this like minorities gaining scale to be heard. But I feel a lot of benefits are of the type of taking something very good and scaling it up to a global level. What is less seen is the destruction of a lot of other good solutions elsewhere which might have had a chance to develop into something even better with a little more time. We are loosing diversity in products and ideas.

Finding ways to restore smaller scale in some areas may be beneficial but it is not clear how to make it work. Arbitrage across boundaries levels differences. The benefits of tearing down the boundaries accrue with the rule breakers who gain scale. Google+ was an attempt to stem the tide. It may have been flawed but it also tried something fundamentally hard.