Threaded vs Flat Discussions

Comment threads are a useful way of organizing the discussion, why did you choose to not use it?

I think you're confusing the implementation of threads with the feature itself. Emails (and mailing lists), forums, reddit, HN, etc has shown us that threads are great. IMO they make discussions less ephemeral which is a good thing for slower communication methods. So hopefully the use of this tool is less "chatty" and less stream-of-consciousness.

It's pretty difficult to have a conversation of any kind, let alone a productive one, without threaded comments. I feel like the site is stuck in the 90s along with Fark.

You'd have to stop people editing their comments, too. Or people end up responding to subsequent comments by editing previous comments and doing the whole:"On subject foo:.... (insert four paragraphs of blather here)On subject bar: .... (more blather)In response to your point .... (yada yada)"thing, and it gets even more unreadable.I find any serious, meaningful creative discussion almost impossible without proper threads. I have this same problem in Slack, where in

With modern forums the flow of discussion is different. If you have something for a dated discussion, you just open a new thread. Here on HN you often see those indirect responses happening.Reddit on the other side used to have a better response-interface. You get a message for new responses and can discuss things over weeks and months if it just happen so. New redfit-interface killed yhis a bit.

Cool idea. HN can get a little annoying / slightly unwieldy when threads get large. A forum is a much better format IMO.

I'm not a fan of threading outside chats to be honest.I'd rather have a moderated linear discussion with quotes/references.

This lacks part of what makes Twitter and Reddit usable - the context of a conversation is clear. Here, you just see the latest comments on a thread, but you have to scroll way up to see the conversation up to that point.In Reddit everything is threaded. In Twitter you respond to specific Tweets. Here, you just have an unorganized list of every comment. So as a casual, I don't feel compelled to participate in conversations that have already started, which is most of them, so I lose inter

I far prefer threaded discussions to flat discussions. The ability to hide child comments on a top-level comment is a godsend for wading through lengthy threads (so much so that I made a small Chrome extension to automatically hide child comments on HN by default) and threaded discussions force each reply to be a reply to a specific comment which I generally find makes replies more relevant to the topic at hand.

HN is closer to chat than forums. Topics after the first page are effectively closed forever and it’s near impossible to continue a conversation without constantly checking it or relying on some external tools/extensions.The point based default sorting also makes it difficult for any late entrant to participate in the conversation. The community has already decided what consensus is and that topic will quickly disappear anyway.HN has a great community but a shit format.