The key thing about Usenet and email is that the first-class entity was the individual message - on web forums, the first-class entity is the thread. On Usenet or email, a "thread" is something strung together on the fly from the surviving References: headers of whatever messages have made it as far as you. (This is why Gmane is a bit weird to use as a forum, even on a mailing list with no messages getting lost.)
Trees work in places like Reddit or LessWrong, and to some degree on Slashdot - though the latter lacks the ability to collapse a fruitless tree in the interface.
Some ramblings on Usenet vs web forums: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html
On 9 June 2014 07:42, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
I see traditional email and newsgroup clients missing a bit from Krinkle's list. Subthreading works perfectly fine in Thunderbird (but even in Outlook Express!). Indenting is the one characteristic found in all wiki conversations: subthreading can't be discarded based on gut feelings. In my experience shepherding thousands of it.wiki conversations (mostly on their own subpages), the biggest issue are offtopic and personal tangents, hence the most important technical feature in wikitext is that I'm able to easily tell apart, link and move subthreads.
Nemo
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