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One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum.

The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles.

Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news".

StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets.

So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this.

As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.




The thread on HN the other day about wanting to revive old threads made me realize how transient posts are.

The difference is basically that comments in threads are not linear by time and threads are not sorted by most recent comment.

Free app idea.


Call me crazy but aren’t you describing a forum?


bump


It’s not about what’s written, it’s about engagement and advertising. The more ephemeral the better! Then that fomo kicks in and engagement is through the roof. That is, until some rich guy buys it and runs it into the ground.




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