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(a)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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