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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I can't speak for everyone but I really like the reddit style branching comment/post structure.

Reddit's style of branching comments is the worst, because discussions get buried and harder to find. 4chan style where replies have direct links to the post they're replying to (and the ability to preview the previous/next post in the chain by hovering) is the best forum style I've ever experienced.

I strongly disagree, Reddit lets you follow specific conversation threads much more easily and collapse/skip threads you aren't interested in. That being said what you ask for is available at https://www.themotte.org/comments albeit not segregated into topic threads.

edit: I will say I do find the /comments version useful as the thread matures and I'm just looking for updates on certain discussions. Early on I like the reddit style structure because it keeps everything in context but it does become harder to keep up with where the new posts are towards the end of the week.

Yeah, I also prefer the free-form style of the chans where you can reference whichever post you like without tumbling ever further down some tree structure. But then again, would that stand up to the thousands of posts a megathread often gets?

I think reddit style discussion works much better when discussions are very large, with many participants. Forums are much better when it's smaller in scale, and you're not constantly producing these monstrous chained quotes. If you get rid of the megathread approach, small scale discussions would dominate I believe

At that point you might as well be on discord then.

Small forum threads are nice because they're easy to keep track of. Discord is just about the opposite of that.