Intellectual Loneliness
&gt;the &#x27;uncompleted reply&#x27; problem<p>&gt;As I see it, this is a bigger problem than missing an initial post to a story because it can leave existing arguments in a specific thread to remain open and or be incomplete.<p>I can see your point of view, however I&#x27;d expect the problem to naturally resolve itself if people where provided with the incentive to do so. As you&#x27;ve pointed out, these limitations are here almost always because of website policies. I am more interested in starting with the reason these policies exist in the first place, than starting with their removal. While I dislike these policies and the reason they exist, I would be cautious and not simply assume they&#x27;re entirely inane.<p>What we have is a proverbial Chesterton&#x27;s fence that had to be explicitly added to the software, and that has become widespread among forum&#x2F;discussion platforms.<p>The more interesting problem to me here is finding a way of structuring online conversation so that people will find it natural to enrich an existing discussion without suffering from noise. The reason it is more important is that threads are mostly not abandoned because of cut-off time or hardcoded limits, mostly people leave when a thread falls out of view and becomes hard to find again.<p>The problem we really have is a problem of noise, organization, and visibility of information.<p>--<p>Let&#x27;s look at another adjacent domain for a minute. There exist websites serving structured, user-contributed, long-lived information that people continue building upon for years, and not hours.<p>When people use software like Mediawiki, contributors have no trouble finding the right page to lookup information in or to add content to. This shows that a website can scale to very large amounts of information without a big duplication problem, and without needing to limit the lifetime of user-generated content to a few days.<p>If we contrast this to forums, the same topics are discussed again and again, month after month, but each individual contribution to a thread is lost after a few days because of the structure of discussion forums.<p>Unfortunately, while traditional wikis are great for building articles, they do not make for appreciably better forum software.<p>I believe there must be a way to solve the problems of long-lived discussions in forum software, by taking inspiration from how other sort of platforms manage to scale to vast amounts of information without excessive noise, duplication, or time limits.<p>But this has to be a more fundamental change than just adjusting the limits.<p>--<p>&gt;The Correcting of Errors and Typos Problem<p>I&#x27;m unsure how important this is. I see typos as an annoyance, that almost always a sufficiently interested reader will be able to correct on the fly. Language is very much redundant, so that people can omit a &quot;not&quot; in a sentence and a reader still guess that the writer meant for a negation to be in there.<p>A post so compact that a typo confuses the meaning entirely occurs occasionally, but it is rare, and empirically I&#x27;ve rarely seen a conversations being materially impacted by a typo. Except perhaps for people who insist on reacting to the noise more than they react to the information.<p>--<p>I&#x27;ll also note that even when talking about more substantial errors than typos, this isn&#x27;t a fundamental or universal problem.<p>The problem of people editing old posts to change their meaning is well-known, I think, but also rarely matters very much. The only times I&#x27;ve seen that done, it was being played for laughs. A deceptive person would be caught very quickly (be it by archives, screenshots, or other witnesses), and the problem solves itself.<p>Popular forum Reddit, for instance, happily allows me to edit a month old post. Hacker News has more stringent limits. There is a tradeoff there, and it is sometimes annoying to see a limit being more conservative than it needs to be, but I don&#x27;t see a fundamentally hard problem being held back by a lack of innovation there.<p>&gt;Nor do they care or worry that their rotten workmanship is further contributing to increased web information entropy<p>I agree that ability to edit a post feels very nice, but I think the emphasis you put on this is excessive compared to the harm it does.<p>To be convinced that this problem is as important as you make it out to be, I&#x27;d want to be shown that it substantially affects the quality of discussions, first.<p>--<p>&gt;I could not agree more with the fact that extended &#x27;run-on&#x27; results in terrible signal&#x2F;noise ratios. But again, little or nothing has been done to ameliorate this problem over the same 30-plus years.<p>Right, and this is really <i>THE</i> problem I think is most important. I think we&#x27;ve had some slow improvements, in the form of going from flat discussions (traditional forums) to increasingly threaded discussions, and sorting of comments by votes.<p>A Hacker News or Reddit thread can accommodate a thousand comments without becoming impossible to navigate, where a 30 year old forum may have a hundred page, resulting in no visibility for anything but the first and last posts, no ability to have multiple discussions in parallel, and all the other obvious problems that directly result from the structure of the software.<p>I do think we&#x27;ve done a small amount of progress, but it has been excruciatingly slow, and there is room for a much better system that scales to higher amounts of information, and allows people to naturally build upon previous work, without artificial limitations becoming <i>necessary</i>.<p>&gt; This problem could be fixed in an instant if the typical tree structure that&#x27;s used in most posts were modified to both better reflect the actual subject matter of the post as well reflect a more accurate relative temporal position in the posting list (both metadata from posts along with temporal data should be used to ensure that posts appear within the hierarchy in the correct and most relevant order).<p>Right, I agree with this sentiment completely. I think more metadata is a way of addressing this, or at least some more interesting sorting method than letting people arbitrarily gain visibility by responding in the right place. Metadata may be a solution, but the best sort of metadata doesn&#x27;t require adding many annotations to each post (or people will simply not bother). It should be there structurally.<p>Visibility (and sorting) are very important to the quality of a discussion, because that directly determines whether relevant or low quality posts will be seen and replied to. That seems obvious, but when software is a chronology (like a traditional forum) or even a tree of threads sorted only by votes and time (like HN), I think there is room for improvement.<p>&gt;I know that&#x27;s a badly worded explanation but it&#x27;ll have to for the moment.<p>It would certainly be appreciated if you have something more detailed in mind, and if you find the time to elaborate. I&#x27;m interested.<p>&gt;none of them do a sufficiently satisfactory job that would ensure that &#x27;discussions and debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two&#x27;.<p>I agree with that, despite what I&#x27;ve said above about <i>some</i> relative level of progress having been achieved. Discussion software should be able to scale in terms of amount of information, and in terms of time. These two properties are only somewhat correlated.<p>&gt;The fact that none of these forum programs has either the means or wherewithal in this regard simply means that those who have programmed them have failed dismally in achieving a workable solution.<p>This suggests that crafting a better solution would not be challenging to you. I&#x27;m not sure I know exactly what the better solution is, but I agree that we can do better, I&#x27;d like to see more people thinking about this, and I think this goes far beyond determining the optimal value for forum timeout limits. It&#x27;s the structure that needs to evolve faster than it has.<p>The impact of all of this is not a trivial thing. There are a few billions of eyeballs on the internet, and the quality of discourse directly affects public opinion. If we organized information better, we would create tremendous value.<p>In some sense, Google understood the importance of this. Wikipedia succeeded in its particular niche. Much of the rest of the world does not seems to care very much about organizing information.