I've got to disagree with the recommendation against threading. The problem is that too many sites do it badly. The HN approach, where I can collapse an entire thread easily but see them all by default, is optimal for me.
The threaded model simply scales better. A Reddit thread (on the old interface, before they ruined it with the redesign) with 5,000 comments is a huge pain to navigate, but it's possible. A flat forum thread with 5,000 comments is utterly and completely hopeless; <i>lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate</i>. And yes, I was cutting my teeth on flat forums for years before Reddit even existed (all thankfully deleted now, to the relief of my teenage self). The ability to isolate and instantly collapse irrelevant subthreads and understand the full context of a specific reply is what makes it easier to scale threaded discussions.<p>If you have a small, boutique forum with less than ten active chatters at any given time, then go flat, sure. You don't need to scale when N is small.
I think 4chan’s model is actually really underrated. Replies can be indicated by referencing the number of a previous post, and a post can link arbitrarily to as many posts as needed. Posts include a header with links to all posts that reference it. This allows posts to form arbitrary graphs and allows following a single thread of discussion while still maintaining a linear structure without disjointed branches.
Phpbb is almost unreadable for me. What he's missing is persistently collapsible comments.<p>Say for example in this discussion someone mentioned internationalization which I don't care about with 50 replies. I collapse this comment and it's 50 children and this discussion is for me still very readable. It must be persistent because if I return in 30 minutes I don't want to collapse same posts over and over. I also collapse posts that I have read and I'm not interested in replies. This effectively makes me a moderator.<p>Subreddits protects website from off-topic posts. Nested collapsible comments protects posts from off-topic comments and tangents.
Back in 1998 a German webtech forum installed its first forum software, if I remember correctly it was WWWBoard out of Matt's Script Archive. They soon got better software over time [1].<p>But something the community was and is sure about was a preference for threaded discussions. WWWBoard must have been inspired by the Usenet – and for meandering discussions with many sub discussions it still is perfect, I think. We then looked down on those flat bulletin boards – but then the Usenet people were looking down on us Web people.<p>But to be sincere: In a way threaded and flat are just different views on the same date. From a modern web forum I’d expect a switch button for different views or even maybe a combination of those two: A visualization of the thread structure on the left, a flat list of posts on the right.<p>What speaks against threaded, sadly, is the rise of mobile: You can’t very good display an even more indented structure on a small portrait screen. Another cultural technique lost.<p>[1] WWWW Board was replaced soon by as custom Perl Software which then because of resource constraints was replaced by a server in C which then later was replaced by a Rails application and now it is written in Elixir. But there is a clear lineage and the archive was always converted and goes back a quarter century. I feel old.
A follow up from the same author<p><a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design...</a>
> Branching is very logical to a programmer's mind but it doesn't correspond to the way conversations take place in the real world.<p>But online conversations are their own type of discussion. They may have been born from wanting to mimic traditional discussions, but we're down the road from there now.
Flat discussions tend to be alive for waaaay longer<p>Ive spent years using both approaches and threaded is better for fast moving, news oriented content like hn or reddit<p>Meanwhile old style forums are better for deep, weeks long discussions.
An interesting model is the one found on 4chan (maybe other places too?).
All the posts are sorted by timestamp, but you can add a link to one or more previous posts, meaning your are "replying" to it/them, and those posts get a footer with with all the replies as links. You can then scroll to check a discussion or click to see/jump between references.<p>I find threads useful under specific circumstances, but cites are way more useful (I'm looking at you, slack...)