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Well, forums of course.
Can you explain why? In my opinion, forums only work for threads with single-digit active participants. Otherwise the discussion keeps derailing constantly, and people keep having conversations past each other, with new participants bringing up points made two pages previously.
I was part of a particularly active forum 20 years ago, and on active threads, moderators regularity had to remove comments by posting "No derailing! Open your own thread on that topic!" Which is trying to force the tree-style comment format onto a system that doesn't support it.
Tree-style comment threads pretty much solved that issue 15 years ago, and I never looked back. Introducing voting on comment quality might have been a mistake in general, but I maintain its a good idea for technical question threads - because it can get the objectively correct answer to the top quickly.
Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.
Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.
Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.
Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior
I think I pretty much agree with you. But unless you're in a thread with only a few other people, forums also never had the "group discussion" feeling, either. "Shouting at a riot" is more accurate.
This is exactly what happens in an active linear thread, too, but now the separate convos become a lot less readable because they aren't organized by topic.
True, but again, that's just group size. Can you imagine a linear forum with a weekly discussion thread with 1500 replies? It would be unreadable. So each top level comment would need to be its own post with linear comments. This is how Elements and Slack handle replies to messages - you can start a thread from every message, but only once. No nested comment trees. I find it useful, but the way they do it can be just as confusing as tree-style, since the newest messages can suddenly appear far upstream.
Still, probably better group discourse than tree-style comments. 50 replies per week would still work nicely for linear comments. Maybe worth a try.
Forums definitely wouldn't work if you carried on with motte-style megathreads, you'd have to create a new topic for each culture war item.
Which is basically what DSL does, and I find it perfectly readable. You do lose the accessibility that megathreads have, hence why so many people stay here and don't go to DSL, a lot of more niche topics would never get any attention with individual posts.
It's interesting you bring up Slack and Elements, as they are basically the next stage in internet discussion - which is Discord. As reddit cannibalized forums, so discord is cannibalizing reddit. And yet, I think if you polled older internet users who had experienced all three, you would get majority agreement that forums > reddits > discord. Nonetheless, the internet inexorably moves towards the latter.
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I'd be interested to see what an imageboard style cw thread would look like. >># links preserve structure without all the excess quoting needed to distinguish individual conversations within forum topics.
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