Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads.
Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads.
Interesting. I wouldn’t expect ordering by the latest reply to have such a strong effect.
In addition to ordering by latest reply, those forums also had a linear thread structure which made it easy to scroll to the last post.
In reddit style forum that are a tree it’s harder to go to the last post.
Yeah, good point. gjm made that point too and I agree. It’s a practical thing that I think would actually be a big barrier.