On: Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

[JoshTriplett]

> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.

I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.

[layer8 → JoshTriplett]

It’s how old-style forums work, and I’m still on a couple of them. It functions quite well with the right moderation.

[JoshTriplett → layer8]

It can work, but I think it's harder to scale to something the size of HN without losing some of the important properties HN has.

For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.