But that's an UI/UX problem. I had extremly long running usenet discussions back then. My usenet reader was giving me a tree view of all topics were I could:

* See all news messages since the last time. I could see all the threads, news messages were marked in bold. * Cycle through them, i.e. show me next unread. * Make whole threads as read (when the topic is not interesting to me) * Ignore a thread or subthread (when it's going offtopic or completely uninteresting to me)

And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

> And it was also super easy to filter out idiots, without anyone moderating the stuff.

That's one thing I've found lacking in practically any single forum out there. IMO, client side moderation is the best kind of moderation. That said, it can be daunting to a newcomer if the signal-to-noise ratio of a group is rather low due to numerous trolls, cross-posters, etc and they don't have their killfile set up yet.

Not sure I understand - in your example, isn’t it the archiving that’s to blame, rather than the tree/threaded format?

In more traditional forums (e.g. VBB) one effectively replicates the tree format through quoting - just without the tree being so clearly displayed.

In tree-format discussion, new replies disappear into the depths of subtrees, whereas in a linear thread they're always at the bottom and easily marked as new. There should be a way to somehow switch between the formats.

Some forums do both at the same time, which can be nice.

E.g. showing every comment linearly with time, but each comment that has replies also has a "show replies" link which expands when clicked to show the replies as children. Those replies are the same comments shown later in the linear list; it's just a convenient alternate way of showing them on request in context.

Fair point - thanks.

There are two problems here, one is reddit preventing new comments on old posts, which is not inherehent to tree-style threads.

The other is that trees make it harder to keep up with ongoing discussions as you can no logner just continue reading from where the thread was at when you last visited. Reddit actually has an OK solution for that which highlights new comments since your last visit(s) but it is only available to moderators or paid users.

Another possible solution would be a better notification system - with forums you can typically watch a thread to get notifications for any posts but with Reddit you only get notfications for direct comments to your post/comment.

Long while ago I noticed that on slashdot all the top rated comments by people with high karma were universally trash. And the best comments were made by some anonymous coward a few days after everyone else had moved on.

I guess it depends on the forum. On usenet, many threads would last for weeks, if not months. The reader I used (Thunderbird and its ancestors) would sort threads based on which one had the most recent reply. Given the indexed view of the thread, it was pretty easy to find the new replies and continue existing discussions.