The medium is the message — if the majority of people are interacting with a system via one of those mechanisms (say, threaded), then the conversations will look/feel thread-y.

You can see this on Reddit already if you look at live threads, which some subreddits create for live events, episode releases, etc. Typically, the mods will set these to sort by new by default, which leads to something that behaves more like a classic flat forum post, albeit sorted in the "wrong" order. These discussions tend to feel and behave quite differently from discussions in other Reddit posts, simply because the default UI is different.

And much like "default new" forums have a thread workaround to keep threads of discussion alive, it's quotes.

Forums are a bit like dropping into an IRC chat. You generally just go to the first and last pages and everything in between is lost (if they aren't in a quote chain).

Tbh, that's exactly what I always liked about forums. They weren't as good as a searchable source of information, but in terms of discussion it really hit the sweet spot for me. A single conversation could meander in different directions, but you still had the first page of the thread as an anchor point, and because there was only so much quoting you could do before it became obnoxious, the conversation remained more cohesive. You had at most 2-3 separate trains of thought happening at once, as opposed to in a threaded forum like HN or Reddit, where the fringes of a conversation feel much more spread out.

The other nice part about this is they inherently work better on mobile phones.

In theory yes, in practice, I remember reading forums on my phone in the days before responsive design was a thing, and there was nothing inherent about those sites that worked better on phones...

I actually strongly prefer to read such forums WITHOUT "responsive design," even on my phone. Strongly.

And notable Hacker News eschews all of these affordances and others because they're considered unnecessary complexity. The only way to sort a thread is by karma, the only way to read it is top to bottom, even if it's 10,000 comments. You don't get a signifier of new comments. They even removed pagination, which objectively made reading long threads easier, and something as simple as thread collapsing was wildly controversial when it came out here, after years of pleading.

Hacker News' entire cultural zeitgeist is "being better than Reddit" but honestly in terms of readability Reddit is a better experience.

Yeah - what happens when a forum post quotes 8 different conversations?

It’d need to be a whole new thing, not just a new view on top of phpBB

That new thing could be possible, though

That's literally just how imageboards work.

You’re describing one view. We want two.

I've thought for a decade or more that "discussion" should be an HTML element, with the view format user-selectable. Threaded, flat, time-ordered, collapsed, and/or ranked by votes would all be handy. An interactive filter-by-keyword would also be useful, in which a thread would expand only comments matching the current search, with other context expandable. This is more useful than search-in-page (all the irrelevant content remains visible), and permits expanding a subthread as needed to see where a discussion goes.

The ability to apply one's own weighting / ranking preferences might also be useful, downweighting tired terms, phrases, or posters, upweighting others, including the option of killing these entirely.

Usenet, effectively ;-)

Though as noted, how most people see a discussion will tend to dominate its overall dynamic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760193>.

Some html tags for things people actually do online would be a game changer.

Content editable is as old as Rome but obvious things are still missing like a rich text input area with the obvious options like italic and bold. But why not a <quote> with some sensible attributes. And <code type="text/php"> with highlighting.

It would also be sensible to have standardized forms that the webmaster can't modify in any way.

You could also have an <index> that points at a json. Blogspot use to have tags like that. Something like:

   <index src="index.json" max="100"> 
     <h3><title/></h3>
   </index>

Then the title tag is replaced by the "title": from the json. Could have a pagination tag too. Need to flesh out things like requesting the next json when one gets to the end. Not impossible.

Perhaps there is even room for commercial post ranking solutions.

What kinds of forms do you have in mind?

Another ask of mine would be standard page formats, such that there could be standard styles which could be consistently applied to them. Article, index, search, gallery, discussion/thread, off the top of my head.

Stop everyone from reinventing the registration form so that it can be filled out without all the fuzzy business. You specify the fields you need and where it should post. Then have no further control over it.

Have the browser bar show it is a standard form for site: example.com which means no [3rd party] js listening in on personal information. Validate and format all countries adresses correctly. Get email addresses and names right

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

If you let me (or random Joe) design it it will no doubt be wrong in multiple ways. It will probably zoom annoyingly on iphones, I will ask for the state name outside the us and I should really ask for your mum's birthday and maiden name. I will disable right click, mess up tab index and ruin accessibility with a gray on gray font. Should I wrap table rows in labels?

Why should everyone have to implement this if 100 million people already tried and mostly got it wrong?

Now the hard part:

Which fields are allowed?

Which aren't?

It's not so hard but does require some debate and research. Only the sensitive info needs to be contained. For [say] a webshop you have at least the name, address info, email and phone number. Perhaps payment info or coupon codes could be included.

Gradually make it more sophisticated.

It's just an example. The point is for stuff used often enough to find its way into html and improve.

The time date picker was a fun idea but needs work.

Search suggestions was a good idea but the implementation is still horrific.

Basic table sort doesn't seem very exotic but you could add many data types.

Everyone is using toggles rather than checkboxes. I know how to doctor this with css and labels but its an ugly hack.

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_switch.asp

Thanks.

Coming up with a standard form is of course the hard part, but the basics you suggest are probably in there. There is of course all the bit about falsehoods programmers believe about names, addresses, emails, and the rest:

<https://ctemm.me/falsehoods/>

<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=falsehoods%20programmers%20believe...>

Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.

If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior.

To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.

You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier.

* It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861

If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context.

> You can have a chronologically sorted tree view

Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well.

I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript.

Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time. Only a very fringe subset of nerds (myself included, I still weep for my HN clone in Hack that will never be finished, and my Godot client that will never be released) considers forum UI design to be interesting.

> no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time

Not sure about that. To me it looks as if Facebook is self sabotaging, for example their local events page is broken and has been for years. FB-the-company seems defunct internally, and if they start fading away (slowly over many 10s of years), maybe forums will make a comeback (slowly). Also, if AIs destroy Reddit, this might be an opportunity for smaller forums that have ways to block boring AIs.

> Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point

Definitely not :- )

> With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to […]

He says as he replies to a commented that did quoting. :)

> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable

I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing).

Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar.

See: (incl demo video)

https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve...

(Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))