Ask HN: What's the ideal platform for online discussion?

1 points by capnrefsmmat 15y ago ↗ HN

There's a lot of online communities made for sharing links: MetaFilter, Reddit, HN, Slashdot, and many others. There aren't so many that exist solely for discussing topics -- discussing an issue, rather than commenting on a link about the issue. (Link-based sites often don't have the same depth of back-and-forth discussion, but rather many comments on the article's contents with unrelated points.)

I think this is partly because most discussion forum software is cumbersome and poorly designed, and partly because nobody has built the right community.

If you could build a discussion system from scratch, how would you do it? What would the software look like? The rules? The community?

My current thoughts involve a threaded system that's either invitation-only or has a high bar for membership, although I find current threaded discussion systems unsatisfactory.

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angryasian 15y ago ↗

from the beginning of the bbs, to forums, nested forums, to twitter.. they have all been trying to manage conversations better. I though Google Wave had it right when you could press a Play like button of history and could see how the conversation played out as to when each new conversation piece was added, but this would only work in smaller groups.