A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if folks are curious to dig deeper into the history.

IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great.

This is where I am at. The notion that HN posts die off relatively quickly (i.e. within ~48h) is potentially a very important part of what gives them the quality they have today.

If every post was eternal and duplicates were always closed, you'd wind up with effectively perma-stickied comments in these god threads that become the law for that topic until the end of time.

You could have an AI to summarize the last N comments, giving an overview on the most recent opinion.

I do this informally: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., but that's all just prep for one day fitting it nicely into the software.

For example, are all the various ChatGPT threads related? What about coverage of an event (e.g. there are six or seven threads regarding the recent earthquake in Turkiye—all empty apart from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672314 —however I've seen it where basically the same story is being carried across several outlets and discussions are on the same topics, just one post gets more traction than the other).

It's easy enough to link articles which refer to the same exact source and mark duplicates, but harder to link posts which rely on different sources to cover the exact same topic.

All and all, reliving prior content and/or having a complex multifunctional interface would take away from the centrality and freshness of the home page experience.

I have wondered if dang would be open to allowing community to contribute to various approved feature additions; for example, better search, night mode, duplicate detection, etc.

For clarity, this is how you search HN using Google:

https://google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472535

And honestly, I love that approach. In my time on HN features have rolled out slowly, and you can tell that they were selected very carefully as being important quality of life improvements that don't fundamentally change the interactions.

Most features that people propose that HN needs are likely to substantially or subtly alter the dynamics, with potentially catastrophic results over the long haul.

I use HN replies (and RSS)... but very few others do, so the the change of getting a reply to this comment is low, even though I got here within a day.

When I say a system, I'm including everything, including the community. It's not any one part of HN, it's the way all the parts interact. Seemingly small changes can have a dramatic impact on the way the system operates, which includes the community. Suddenly different voices become amplified while others feel marginalized, and it's hard to predict if that will be a good outcome.

I'm not saying that it would for sure be a problem, but I sympathize with dang wanting to be very careful before introducing something like that.

Not that I am complaining but this place often elevates pretentious, "high brow" shit posting as opposed to the vanilla thing practiced the us commoners. As if rich tech bro's trolling is better. Gotta say, this place really like smelling its own farts.

However, there's a lot of good stuff, too, and the moderation is better than /. where the majority of visible posts are made by the same 10 guys. Been like that for past 20 years.

Sorry. Got carried away. That beer had 7% alcohol in it. How is this place anything like the phpbb (now, xenforo) style forums?

Is there a middle ground? I don't know.

As for old threads getting bumped, I think this is here equivalent to reposting the link (or re-asking). The old thread is almost "dead", but this is how it works "in real life discussions". So maybe that is not so bad. This is (as a call it) a (fast) stream model, where there is no (direct) accumulation : it is more twitter than Stack Overflow, more blogs than Wikis.

Forums and chats do have a solution to too big size : they can just split into others (or subforums) once the linear discussion becomes unmanageable.

I don't get your solution. It seems to me that HN threads are already tree-like.

I sometimes read the new ones by first reading all of them, and later manually scanning every comment newer than X hours, but it's tedious.

I guess a system that would automatically hid old comments (except their immediate parent) might work ?

I know there are a couple third-party services that you can sign up on to monitor that for you (they email you when someone replies to you, AFAIK), but I opted to just go with the flow and hit my "threads" link every now and then to see if someone has replied to something.

Agreed - built-in, opt-in HN notifs (or easy-to-opt-out) would be good to help with what OP is asking about, IMO.

It would be similar to a forum.

I used "slrn" to read news and it was great. It would only show me new posts. I could kill a thread to filter it so I didn't have to see it. I could just hit one button to go to the next post on the thread or to the next thread.

In many ways it was superior to modern web based forums.

I’d say, pick any server that’s close enough and just play with it for a while. That way you can get a feel for what it’s like, and you can also see if you end up repeatedly following people from a specific server. If you do, you can move over to that server if you want.

I started on hachyderm.io and it seems vaguely like what you describe, though I also follow a few people from infosec.exchange

The server you join effects who are the people who can ban you. Lately, mstdn.science has been banning scientists who have discussed the coronavirus lab leak theory.

(For example in a new proposed rocket technology, after 100 or 200 comments there will be a huge discussion about how to use it to get FTL travel like in a popular sci-fi movie.)

I did a Show HN back in April and have been quietly continuing to develop the site. Open to ideas/suggestions as well.

https://sqwok.im

Shallow, reflexive engagement (especially from a "large" number of participants) has no actual value except to platforms needing eyeballs for ad revenue, which isn't the HN model. So.

Brought to you by the letters I, M, and O.

However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time.

Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.

Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of her descendants here on HN? She had 11 and it's been more than half a century now…”. Minutes later…

> Hi! I’m her great-great granddaughter. I actually met the thru-hiker mentioned in the comment above, Dixie, in October 21 and we still keep in touch!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321521

That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool comments - we used to publish them periodically* but it was too much work. In the meantime anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful of drops from the ocean and there are tons more out there, so if anyone finds a post that belongs on it, please let me know at [email protected]. I figure this'll be useful for something someday!

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thank you for all you do, dang.

In lieu of a built-in solution I've been using https://www.hnreplies.com/ which seems to work well.

To encourage longer term discussion without changing the existing design, one idea is to add longer term notification to keep the engagement on a thread discussion, e.g. a daily summary of the responses to my comments coming as a notification. One is not constantly bombarded with instant notifications but still have a chance to catch up on the responses.

Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification).

There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overall it has a culture of people who write well but their reasoning stinks. They have strong opinions and make assertions speculatively. I can't read any real estate investment, market or nerdy thread on Reddit without encountering armchair bullshitisms from people who happen to write well but don't research anything, and respond with hostility when questioned.

So maybe this is my way of saying, don't change HN too much.

Reddit may be fine for very specific subs, but overall it's a real mess where power hungry mods have fun without any kind of accountability.

HN does not have this kind of behavior and I don't really miss the lengthy conversations that can be found in other forums.

I've been on reddit since before subreddits existed and I've never been banned. Now I'm sure you've had your run-ins with some unhinged mods now and then but to be banned 100 times, you should probably take an honest look at your own behavior.

Do they really think they are a force for positive change?

Isn’t every other fictional story some parable about how the means don’t justify the ends? It feels weird to me that people don’t absorb that idea at some point.

Again, that's just what I think makes sense and personally believe. It's certainly possible I'm incorrect.

Has this person never been around a group of assholes for more than a few hours at a time? Some places are toxic and attract toxic personalities. Reddit is one of those places(the internet as a whole, really)

I've said far more hostile things out loud about Agile at my workplace to senior management.

Three months later, somebody didn’t like a political comment I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post, and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned people about a criminal’s behavior. Heh.

Did a moderator ban you from a subreddit?

Or did Reddit ban your account?

Some subreddits have trigger-happy mods that will ban people for everything from the wrong tone to simply holding the wrong opinion. Subreddits like the Lex Fridman sub are famous for banning anyone who posts comments that aren't in total glowing agreement with Lex Fridman, for example.

But getting banned from Reddit, the platform, is a rare occurrence. If you're getting repeatedly banned from Reddit (not just individual subreddits) then you really should step back and take a look at how you're writing your comments.

There are so many possible reasons for being banned in a subreddit.

Mods on Reddit are pretty free to do what they want. There are guidelines by Reddit but they are nothing more than suggestions and unless the mods of a subreddit are racists, they won't do anything. Sometimes not even then look how long it took for /r/TheDonald to being banned.

Ok, but what was your comment?

And next question, would you have phrased that comment around here in the same way?

Top tier players aren't always going to be right about everything, but the things for which they often get downvotes are absurd.

I deleted the account immediately and never regretted it once. I recreated a new ne to engage in purely technical discussions.

I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so there may be something to that (though I'd chalk it up to becoming more popular/mainstream).

I would mention /r/credibledefense as a counter example. It was a niche subreddit before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the aftermath got popular, but still managed to keep its quality.

But I agree with your general point, it's not a huge problem for me, though. Some subreddits get popular and thus bad, some new subreddits get created. Reddit's relative anarchy is its saving grace, communities can split/fork, but still stay within reddit platform.

Format certainly influences the quality of interactions, but there are some other strong factors as well.

Tl,Dr when it was primarily a text based website the discussions were better. The gifs, video, meme layout is like junk food.

So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20, you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good comment. Because your brain will process "100" before reading a paragraph of words.

“I stopped watching after the second season. The writing had become so reddit.”

“The steak itself was good but this sauce is a bit reddit.”

“Rose Street is a good night out but Raeburn Place is completely reddit.”

"Redditsplain"

v. "To make confident, even angry assertions about facts without a strong backing, but in a literary and well-reasoned style. To make bold statements about a subject where one is still a dilettante."

I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes are default good, and "rationalists" are the only ones who see the world for how it really is. The contrarian superiority is becoming vaguely reminiscent of conspiracy theorist circles. Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains.

I finally unsubscribed after a series of posts where posters wrote at length about their frustrations with dating, blaming their failures on women and women's behaviors as if women were a foreign species. The straw that broke the camel's back was when someone complained about taking women out on dates and not receiving sex in return for their effort, which I assumed would have been readily downvoted and dismissed. Instead, it was upvoted (100+ votes) and most of the upvoted comments agreed with the OP's take. When weird incel ideology becomes front and center accepted in a community, I'm out.

I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations.

To your point here - that's one of the points I was making above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit of looking in the mirror here) that good writing can cover up shoddy thinking. I've made a concerted effort to sometimes pause when I'm replying to something, and look things up to make sure what what I just said is true is actually true. Probably because I ran into smart people who questioned things here on HN.

One time I was replying to some sort of big article/thread in a real estate sub which touched upon housing affordability, the number of unregulated versus unregulated units in my city. I replied with a pretty neutral tone and linked the city's yearly datasheet in a PDF format which backed up what I said in terms of the breakdown of housing types in the city. There was a pie graph in the PDF document.

Well, I got downvoted to grey/invisible and there were a ton of replies in the style of "How arrogant that you think you're going to make us read THAT." I thought it was incredible how the people reacted.

Could it be that instead of stating in the comment both the relevant, precise figures and a conclusion derived from them, you merely linked out to the PDF in a way that only by reading the PDF could your point be fully seen?

By and large, on forums and social media it is heavily frowned upon to rely on outlinks and open ended reasoning. As in the line of thought: "if you will not state your point clearly for everyone to see at a glance and then back it up with sources, why should I bother?".

It may seem unreasonable or even anti-intellectual at first until you draw parallels with in-person discussion: imagine someone describing their point in detail for 10 minutes only for the other person to hand over a whole book and say "you're ignorant, go read this and learn why you're so wrong".

I will repeat again: I do not know what you actually said in that comment, but I've seen this play out a few times and my gut tells me that unless the point was extremely controversial, a deluge of downvotes is likely explained by this scenario.

This has been my experience of the "rationalist sphere" (specifically downstream of reddit and Substack) that pride themselves on supposedly charitable longform discussion.

They, as a community, identify as utilitarian Bayesian rationalists, but really optimize only for metacontrarian sophistry--"reactive logorrhea" in one member's own words.

It's like watching Sports Center for the Extremely Online--great for keeping abreast of what the heated controversies are, but absolutely terrible for actually shedding light on them.

I've read reddits /r/cscareerquestions for a number of years. I've observed it mostly tends to be new grads or unemployed doing the upvoting and questions, I think most successful people get what they need then leave.

As an example, in cscareerquestions someone asked a question about a coworker joking with him about NSFW drawings he found the person drew when younger, getting on his nerves. The most upvoted response? Tell HR. The update posted later? The person got fired. He did the most upvoted thing. Only one person told him not to, and was downvoted.

Perhaps occasionally go to reddit for trends of some form, but I don't like to go to reddit for things that aren't common knowledge. It might be good for observing trends, but I don't think reddit is likely to contain insider business knowledge upvoted for example.

A long-form HN would involve another audience than the dopamine-high people.

IIRC the BBS software surfaced threads based on recent replies rather than novelty so interesting threads stayed current for longer.

It would be hard to replicate and I am not sure how one would start but I miss it :)

I think you might respond that improving the site's discussion features would improve the quality of the discussion. But I am skeptical that would happen: it feels like an engineering approach rather than a community approach. The best discussion sites on the internet have worked consistently because of the crowd they attract, and the pressure moderators apply, not because they had a certain feature set.

Think about those millions of people, interacting for billions of hours online over almost two decades now. What is there to show for it at the end of the day? If even 1% of that exchange its somehow "valuable", it means there is a lost opportunity. And it will be kept thrown away in the future.

Wouldn't it be useful if we somehow could use technology to persist the "better" bits across this ever growing digital ocean? Something like wikipedia but autogenerated from diverse sources, with no claim to "truth", but rather a concise, searchable repository of whatever people are interested and are discussing online.

But it’s sometimes hard to gauge who is an expert if it’s a topic you are unfamiliar with. It helps if someone mentions (“I have been doing this for the last 5 years”) or wrote a literal book on the subject.

Lately [2] I had no enough time to look up, and usually dang post a link before I see the repost.

[1] Best in my opinion. Usually the top one, but sometimes the second one, or a mix of a comment and a reply.

[2] In the last few years...

Forum software like Discourse also reliably brings them up in an effort to avoid deduplication of discussion.

The best discussions are also springboards for articles, books, and sometimes whole companies.

It is closer to a book index than a table of contents (to use older information technology tools) but one where the whole index is not accessible.

Bots already pretty much dominate platforms like Twitter and Reddit, although I would point out the structured nature of Reddit makes it an ideal public resource AI training dataset. Saying that, I like your idea because these new LLM's like ChatGPT v3 need to be able to debate which is something that has largely been shutdown online including here, under a variety of guises. A debatable AI some would argue is the next logical step in some area's of AI evolution.

I can't imagine running HN. If I had to run HN and also had to deal with 1-n week long flame wars I would delete the database, backups, and repo.

The worst part of the modern internet is how often we have to come into contact with commenters and moderators. No, I don't want to click on a monkey emoji to declare your Discord's constitution legally binding.

Plus, it has far fewer people posting one line non-comments than other places...

Every year or two the same thing needs opened for conversation - in some cases.

You can always reference the old post.

Many people here have contact info in their profiles. If you find a good (dead) comment thread, you can contact the people involved directly. I suspect many of the people here would be willing to continue the conversation.

The other way to restart discussion is to repost (if the topic is more than a year old). That's a pretty common theme on HN. You can link the past discussion in the comment section for context.

HN has something kind of like this with /newcomments.

Past HN threads on evergreen topics do have a very long tail. I'm still getting inquiries in my area of expertise* about items I posted on HN 5 years ago. I really appreciate this and my inquirers do too.

H/T to dang for curating all this. Thank you.

*US extraordinary-ability visas for engineers / tech industry.

I've tried to put my finger on what made certain G+ discussions just tick, and it's complex and subtle.

Much of it came down to having a good host for the discussion, and among the best was the site's chief architect, Yonatan Zunger. He was well-connected within G+ and at Google (obviously), but also had a diverse set of interests, tolerated a wide range of opinion and interactions, but not without limits. (Similar in many regards to HN's moderation philosophy.)

Threads were anchored by the initial post or link, and Yonatan often wrote a fairly substantial piece himself, rather than just throwing up links or a brief tweet-length bit.

Discussions were limited in how many comments could be appended, I believe the limit was 500. Presentation was unthreaded flat, with most recent comments at the end of the thread ... but that was also what was presented by default (the full thread could be expanded if desired).

And "recent" participants (I believe this was the most recent 100 comments, could have been more) would get a notification if there were new comments. This could (and did) occur even years after the initial post, and occasionally old posts would come back to life.

Participants would receive a notification, and could view and respond to recent comments within the Notifications pane itself, rather than having to separately go to the post itself. This is unlike many other systems I've seen, including Diaspora*, which is otherwise quite similar but has a very cumbersome (and slow) notifications -> posts interaction.

Key to keeping this from becoming a magnet for spam or tedious arguments was the fact that the host could moderate (and remove) low-value, distracting, or inappropriate replies. Doing so would effectively remove notifications generated by such comments. Again, Yonatan was diligent in this --- over several years I saw a very small handful of low-value responses, and usually they had been removed in the few seconds between my own seeing them and writing Yonatan to alert him of something untoward.

The other element driving this was an effective search tool. G+ went through numerous iterations, some lacking search entirely and some with a very half-assed search, but for its final few years, there was actually an effective and useful search which could turn up interesting prior discussions. (Search is another feature Diaspora* is entirely lacking.)

As regards HN, several elements that made G+ so vibrant in this regard are lacking. There are no notifications, individual members don't host threads in the same way as G+ did, S/N is worse than G+ at its best (and that was by no means the typical experience).

For HN, the best way to resurrect an old thread is probably to either link it (or a comment) directly, or to re-share the original article/URL and reference earlier discussion. That would have to be more than just the "previous discussion" comments which are typically made.

I'll often reference my own earlier comments (or occasionally posts elsewhere) in responses, and have a few bugbears I'll raise again. (Those ... risk becoming tedious, I try to be mindful of that.)

There are a few themes I've raised multiple times and developed somewhat in the course of multiple discussions, two examples that come to mind are the prospect of trans-oceanic trains (using submerged floating tunnels), and the possibility of a tax- or ISP-brokered scheme of universal content syndication as an alternative to subscriptions and ad-supported media, both of which I've developed over several years.