What I mean regarding Reddit is that you couldn’t have a thread running for 13 years like that, which you could easily follow (track up to which comment you’ve already read) and conveniently browse like on a forum. Pagination is important for that.
On web forums, a new comment on a thread automatically bumps that thread up to the top of the thread list, which means that even after a pause, existing threads gain traction like if they were new threads. (Possibly even more than new threads, due to the existing contents.) That way it’s easy to have a focused discussion for weeks/months/years on a particular subtopic.
But the problem with that approach is that people tend to revive zombie threads. I would estimate that <1% of threads actually have any useful discussion after 10 years, the rest is bumping zombie threads.
I’m not sure what qualifies as a zombie thread. If the new comments are meaningful contributions to the topic, it’s perfectly fine to revive an old thread. It’s certainly better than to have new threads about the same topic every few days or weeks, ignoring the previous discussions.
In any case, I’ve never experienced reviving old threads to be a significant issue, or to happen inappropriately to any significant degree.
I would just like to estimate that >99% of threads older than 10 years have useful information and the potential for useful discussion.
I realize that where i am enthusiastic about older things, cars/bikes/tech/languages, you probably like new stuff. I hope you realize that most of the zombie revivalists agree with me. Most of the time we are looking for a new solution to an old problem, which is the definition of progress. Locking threads after 6 months (thanks Reddit) or berating someone who want to revive an old topic, cripples progress.
One approach is to post an old, valuable thread (from Reddit or elsewhere) to HN, where annotated/appended conversation can continue indefinitely, especially if it reaches the HN front page for a one-time infusion of new readers and commenters.
What we need are search engines to offer an opt-in view or keyword which prioritizes this genre of valuable older evergrowing content. Perhaps Brave Goggles can be adapted to this purpose, using HN reposts and other signals of longevity.
Not my experience at all. I spent a whole lot of time on the endless sphere forum (forum for building PEVs) when I was in my teens and early 20s, and in my 30s now some of the technical threads from back then are still relevant and going strong. The discussion on there is light-years better than Reddit and HN for anything related to power electronics or EVs in general.
A simple visual indicator of the age of a post such as a zombie emoji (or something less tacky) is all that is needed to quickly disregard zombie posts you aren't interested in. Forums are great but we definitely need a UX overhaul incorporating the last 15 years of web UX research.
About UX, I agree insofar as web forums have worse usability than Usenet clients had before. However, I don’t see how web UX has improved in the last 15 years, in particular on the desktop, and in particular regarding forum and messaging apps.
I wish more people would do that. Reddit used to have that stupid 6 month limit on threads making it difficult to reply to someone saying something 4 years ago. They also need better tools to keep track of replies to older comments.
High-quality, long-lived threads could be renamed "Immortal", since they are periodically renewed with fresh content/life, while some older comments are still relevant.
A Reddit thread is automatically archived due to inactivity, forgot the exact duration. So in theory as long as somebody is posting a comment on a thread every few weeks (months?) it never archives unless the mods manually do it.
The problem with this is that adding comments to a thread does nothing to make it more visible. Traditional forms bump up all threads as long as they have recent activity, which Reddit doesn’t do.
The closest solution you could probably find would be for the mods to pin the post to the top, but in my experience most people just ignore pinned posts except in very specific cases.
That's not correct. On Reddit, thread archiving (on subreddits that haven't opted to keep threads open forever) is based on time elapsed since the thread was posted, regardless of how much activity there's been. IIRC the interval is 6 months.
Reddit Threads are locked after a while aren’t they?
Even if all of this would be in a Reddit thread I’d argue the usability of their site has declined to a point where using it for longer reading is unpleasant. (Login-Wall, collapsed threads, slow JavaScript frontend)
So yeah discoverable yes, but nobody would use it like that.
What? I've seen more recent threads getting "archived" (no one can comment or vote) earlier and earlier than ever. It used to be that every thread was guaranteed to stay communicable for at least a year, maybe 2. That was enough for most things but still represented a discontinuity in the transfer of knowledge as a new thread would need to be made and gain traction and votes and rarely (very rarely) the previous thread would be linked to avoid just recycling the same points and never making progress. That exceedingly rare linking now basically never happens and threads get archived as early as 6 months! I assume there's some variation as I believe I may have seen threads that don't get locked so early but it's a significant disruptor on the transfer of knowledge. And with how bad reddit's searching is, unless the previous thread is linked there's a tiny chance you'll ever find it let alone even know it existed.
That format just promotes reposting and restating the exact points that were popular 6 months ago. There have been many times I have had something to contribute to a discussion and have been rebuffed by the "This thread has been archived" popup. Truly any thread more than a year could not survive most current social conglomerates, I understand the scaling issues but it does not make it untrue.
sometimes whole subreddits get deleted because of $reasons. sometimes I get to a link and a message greets me: this subreddit has been deleted because of no moderation.
IMHO a bit of the problem with Reddit is that it's so extremely threaded. I can understand replying to an individual message within a discussion topic, but the tree growing to the right just makes it hard to find out what's the "latest".
The great thing about old style forums is that you'll check it once in a while and just go looking for the "latest" message, almost like joining IRC after a few days. You can go look at earlier messages but it's not always necessary.
Or am I wrong - can you make some sub-reddits work that way ?
It’s barely usable, for starters. Desperately trying to coerce me into downloading some mobile app. Riddled with ads and UI/UX anti-patterns. It looks more like a spyware site or a scam site than the modern “front page of the internet” they liken themselves as.
For the rare times I want to navigate to that cesspool I have to manually change the URL to “old” but it’s just a matter of time before they get rid of it.
Not to mention all the other issues that plague the site. Archived posts, dead links, deleted posts, deleted comments, deleted entire subreddits, and more. It’s not a place to effectively find older content much less truly old content. And worst of all the search function is comically useless so much so that there is practically zero self discovering within Reddit itself. You must exit Reddit and search on a search engine with “reddit” at the end of your query.
On a ten year old reddit thread you'll find the top voted answers and top voted replies to those answers but not a sequential discussion for page after page.
