Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

[pnt12]

I follow posts from Hacker News using RSS, specifically https://hnrss.github.io/. It's great to consume posts at my own pace, but often a discussion is already dead when I participate.

It's an acceptable trade-off to me. But I wonder if others would also be interested in longer term discussions, and if there could be a way to have them. I thought about old forums, where old threads get bumped even if they were created years ago, and wondered if an hybrid model could be of interest to HN users.

Just a thought, I'm glad to have this site as is. Enjoy your Sunday everyone!

[thadt]

I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN discussion from years ago and wish I could ask a question, or make a comment in that conversation today.

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.

[akiselev]

> 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.

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

[Agraillo]

Your comment inspired... HN is a pool of ideas of "above average" quality fighting for the attention of readers in evolutionary sense. As in the life they born and die, the lifespan is very short, but the "DNA" of the best fitted lives somehow through the users passing them to other users.

[qbasic_forever]

Something that seems kinda unique to this community and the moderation is allowing and encouraging things to be posted again.

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.

[college_physics]

This points to a more general problem with all online discussion forums: The signal to noise varies (and may on occasionally be zero) but in the end all the signal is lost / buried deep into some archive (like tears in rain if you want to be melodramatic about it).

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.

[gus_massa]

I used to post a link to the previous thread and sometimes copy a short version of the best[1] comment if I remember it debunk or enhance the article.

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...

[prox]

The thing is, the curator of any topic X, also needs to be at an expert level of topic X. On HN I often gain more insights, so I add to the signal, not noise (I hope)

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.

[1123581321]

Google (and now Open AI, I suppose) are excellent at surfacing those old discussions.

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.

[beckingz]

People use technology to manually curate the better bits into things called books, and sometimes implement them on physical biodegradable materials to serve as offline backup and as a low bandwidth distribution method.

[mancerayder]

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit.

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.

[PragmaticPulp]

> There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex)

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.

[1983054105]

Rant: I was banned from Reddit once again yesterday (for the 100th time) because of my harassing behavior. The comment that caused this was about "daily Scrum meetings that were way too long in most companies." I'm dumbfounded about who would have reported this, and who confirmed that this was harassment.

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.

[MikeTheRocker]

This perfectly captures my frustration with Reddit. I can't stand it these days. It's been eye opening to read about technical subjects on Reddit that I personally know a lot about only to see heaps of confidently spewed misinformation in the comments. Makes me question the validity of everything I read where I'm not very knowledgeable. I'm very grateful HN is a lot more thoughtful and open to questioning.

[TheAceOfHearts]

There's a videogame subreddit that frequently downvotes comments from top tier players. It has gotten to the point where most good players will no longer engage with reddit because of the extreme hostility and incompetence.

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

[buildbot]

It’s not really different here… Just recently, with the ballon stuff, sooooo many commenters were super confident how hard it would be to get up there and shoot down a ballon, how a missile would not work, etc. Like, unless you are all in the air force, you have no clue. I did not, and that’s okay, and I just didn’t say anything.

[edgyquant]

I stopped using Reddit over a year ago and found a couple of traditional forums to replace it with. Sure I don’t have enough discussion to soak up hours of my day but in turn I’ve just started reading more books. My mental health has greatly improved.

[Tycho]

I use the word Reddit as a pejorative.

“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.”

[CSMastermind]

This year one of my resolutions was to finally give up Reddit because I kept recognizing the site frustrating, annoying, or disappointing me. Whether intentional or not that seems to be the type of content generated there.

[chrismarlow9]

This wasn't always the case. I've used Reddit since the Digg days and in the earlier days it was long form comments with sources and the vote system was actually used as a "this is true" signal instead of an "I don't agree with this". The thing that killed it in my opinion was the layout change to embed media directly in Facebook style. Sure there's always old.reddit.com , but the problem is that because of the default interface change it drives a certain type of ecosystem for submissions and discussions that's not as enjoyable.

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

[akomtu]

Reddit caters to the young audience, it's mostly them who go on emotional crusades as they have little experience to back up their words. In real life, you wouldn't engage in a serious argument about real estate market with 10 year olds, but on Reddit you can and do.

[ergonaught]

As a general rule, for me, the barrier-to-entry for online commentary is too low for genuinely worthwhile "longer term" discussions to occur. The vast majority of responses are "automatic" rather than reasoned and thoughtful, even in the limited cases where the commenter is otherwise "sufficiently competent" to contribute meaningfully.

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.

[lizknope]

I miss Usenet in the 1990's where threads would go on for months or even years.

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.

[tgv]

The group was so much smaller, and also more more homogeneous, and there we so few alternatives, it's incomparable.

[wwarner]

i’m finding mastodon very reminiscent of the early usenet, in tone and quality, tho haven’t yet seen a years long thread.

[gus_massa]

For me the main problem would be thread drift. In most short discussions (10 comments) usually the comments are on topic. In long discussions (100 comments) usually the topic has drifted to one of the usual attractors.

(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.)

[gtirloni]

I usually collapse those comments that drift too much because everything below it doesn't matter much. Sometimes I have to collapse all top-level comments, which is sad.

[cristoperb]

If hn had reply notifications it would go a long way toward keeping discussions relevant for later readers.

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

[holler]

Creator of Sqwok here, you can have long-lived real-time conversations that will get bumped even if they're older, while also having notifications, @mentions, embeds, following, search, themes (including "hacker" https://imgur.com/a/qHkopKO), etc. The ranking algo is based off live conversation activity.

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

[LunarAurora]

IMO The best way to encourage this is through better (default) notifications. Or, this solution, for a platform with (tens) of thousands of users like HN, seems to automatically bring the specter of flame war (and intrusion and what else ?)

Is there a middle ground? I don't know. Edit : Daily/Weeky email (=slower) updates ?

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.

[staindk]

Took me a while to realise there are no "your comment has been replied to!" type notifications on HN. Seemed weird to me.

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.

[BlueTemplar]

More chat than forum, with the exception that the comments stay on the Web instead of being hidden in the logs.

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.

[ufmace]

I always thought it'd be nice to have a "slow" discussion forum. Something a lot like current forums, but where it's normal to take a day or two to respond to somebody. I think I make calmer and higher-quality responses if I wait a little longer than usual, especially for topics that tend to generate a lot of heat.

[ravagat]

I get the sentiment. And I think you should feel encouraged to repost the thing that interested you. That's one of the things I've found good about HN. Some really old, obscure posts/topics get reposted and I get to discover/re-discover them. Another way to tackle this is possibly write a blog post around your topic of interest then link it here. In one way you invite longer discussion while allowing rediscovery for any previous commenters. You should try it

[bovermyer]

I would adore an old-school forum (phpBB, anyone?) that had the HN crowd on it.

[ISL]

For ages that was Slashdot.

[johnchristopher]

The medium is the message though, so even if you got the crowd...

[O__________O]

To me, feels like more pressing issue would be to increase the ease of tagging, grouping, filtering, ranking, etc. Specifically, if you see existing coverage of a topic, it’s easy enough to revive it if you’re aware of how HN handles duplicate detection, but there’s no way to enforce users having to vote on comments with fresh eyes, hide comments that don’t have significant new sub-comments, discover significant new sub-comments, etc. Not to mention need for comment notifications and user responsiveness indicators. (Insert yet feature to support various user sub-use cases.)

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.

[lolinder]

YC and dang's approach to HN seems to be more or less this: "Somehow we stumbled upon a system that really works. We don't know why it does, but it does, and so we don't want to change things too much too fast lest we break it."

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.

[stevekemp]

Two years ago was the last thread I remember talking about night-mode:

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

[cientifico]

For me hn.algolia.com solved some of the needs you mention.

[ww520]

The thread discussion ends often because of two things - new popular posts pushing old ones off the front page and the lack of constant notification. Both are by design and what make HN great.

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.

I remember Usenet newsgroups were sync’ed daily via uucp, which forced a delayed notification of new responses.

[zzo38computer]

If you have NNTP, then that will help. You can read/write any message. There is not voting, but to me that is an advantage to not have voting; I think chronological will be better. Also if you have NNTP, you can more easily to compose and read already downloaded messages even if you are not connected to the internet (or if the server is down), only needing internet to send/receive. Scoring files can be used if you want to customize which messages should be displayed, and possibly other things if you use a client program that can use scoring files for other purposes. Another idea is global scoring files that can be optionally installed if the user intends to do, maybe. A protocol extension for search could be used if it is desirable to be able to search, maybe.

[eastbound]

One part of HN’s success is the addictivity. Having to be-here-now-or-don’t-participate is certainly part of it, it makes people open HN many times a day. The drawback is that participants are often dopamine-high people, not the wise CEOs with developed opinions that we had 10 years ago.

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

[karaterobot]

I think the posts on HN are often good, and it's typical to find at least a couple insightful or informed top-level comments about them. But after that, replies to those comments, and then the replies to those replies, typically don't add much value. I have my theories about why that happens, but in any case I doubt the site would benefit from leaning in to one of its weaker aspects.

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.

[californiadreem]

What is the age of a Hacker News post before discussion dies on average? It seems like having a feed for any new comments on posts posts older than that age would allow anyone interested in longer-term discussion to opt-in without requiring any additional features.

[binarymax]

From my anecdotal observations after using this site for over a decade, it’s about a day, sometimes two, and very rarely longer than that.

[yakubin]

There is a timeout after which you can't respond to a comment. So old threads don't die only because people lose interest, but also because HN doesn't allow them to continue the discussions anymore.

[dpcan]

I agree that even old conversations need updates, but I think it should come in the form of a repost. Ask or post about the same thing again and let it get to the front page.

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

You can always reference the old post.