The old style forums were great, but popular threads were pretty horrible to try and navigate. I’m sure we’ve all fallen victim to searching for important information in a forum thread with 750 pages. The Reddit-style collapsing comment tree is so much more manageable and allows for natural subtopics and conversion tangents to take place without derailing everyone else’s discussion.
On the other hand, reply chains drifting further and further off topic make comments much more difficult to navigate as active branches become busier and more popular. Being able to collapse them is good, and necessary really in those circumstances, but being able to split a discussion into a new post as a moderator is a super valuable feature that we don’t really have anymore.
In top of that, comment order being dynamic and based on popular vote byvdrfaukt can rob comments of context that is needed to fully understand them.
I don’t actually think the content aggregator way is better. It just might not be worse.
The old style forums were great, but popular threads were pretty horrible to try and navigate. I’m sure we’ve all fallen victim to searching for important information in a forum thread with 750 pages. The Reddit-style collapsing comment tree is so much more manageable and allows for natural subtopics and conversion tangents to take place without derailing everyone else’s discussion.
On the other hand, reply chains drifting further and further off topic make comments much more difficult to navigate as active branches become busier and more popular. Being able to collapse them is good, and necessary really in those circumstances, but being able to split a discussion into a new post as a moderator is a super valuable feature that we don’t really have anymore.
In top of that, comment order being dynamic and based on popular vote byvdrfaukt can rob comments of context that is needed to fully understand them.
I don’t actually think the content aggregator way is better. It just might not be worse.