This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound bites that sound interesting but are actually shallow so they’re easy to write and easy to consume and also uncontroversial so your comment(and the following discussion) isn’t hidden after one or two downvotes.

Reddit, at least, has an active reply notification system, so while this is rare, at least it's possible to have a conversation, even if it's probably only visible to its participants.

HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.

How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.

Yes, though it operates at the post level only. There's absolutely no indication that a post in which you've already indicated strong interest by participating in it has ongoing discussion. If you've received a reply notification to your comment, my own, immediately adjacent, receives no such notice: the tpost is effectively dead. Visiting a subreddit gives no clues as to recently-active posts.

Mind, inbox replies for any activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would get old fast. But some indication of 'this thread is still live* would be tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently "lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it was large and functional enough to do that.

Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later abandoned.

HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications suffer similarly.

A lot of people use http://www.hnreplies.com/ for that, it works really well.

I enjoy https://www.hnreplies.com. Perhaps you might too.

You're fortunate to even get to. this stage. In my experience, on both large and small subs, even this very rarely happens.

Part of this is the fault of threaded presentation -- very useful for following a specific subthread, but horrible for seeing where a discussion remains live. HN suffers from this as well. Unless you can alternate flexibly between various threaded vs. flat time-ordered presentations, or even randomly-selected contributions, you're not going to break out of this.

A real challenge is that as conversation, functional scale is low. At least one person, more usually at least 2. I've noticed that panels with more than three participants (live, radio, TV), and usually as host/moderator + two guests, do poorly, often due to the timeslicing problem -- an "airtime hour" is effectively ony 50 minutes, with a Q&A and after introductions, speaking time is often only 20-40 minutes. Divide that among participants, and by the time you're at 4-8 minutes per participant with 5 panelists, fewer still with more. Usually the form devolves to a loosely coupled set of short serial speeches or lectures rather than actual engagement.

With more time -- hours at a symposium, Socratic lectures, a long dinner discussion, an academic seminar -- it might be possible to bump the size up slightly -- there's more time to discuss, or (academic) more focus. But even here the ideal size is 5-15 participants (see for example: https://sites.google.com/site/entelequiafilosofiapratica/aco...).

Text gives the potential for expanding this ... slightly. Maybe about 50 people, possibly double that with an excellent moderator. Yonatan Zunger at Google+ is among the best I've personally witnessed. Sadly the archived conversations at the Internet Archive preserve only a small number of comments.

Group size, intragroup relations (do participants know and respect one another, even where they disagree?), avoiding perils of groupthink (self-selection, unconscious group bias, self-censorship, privilege, cultual mythologies, etc.), and a fair-but-firm moderation, are all critical. And you're still lucky to apprach, let alone exceed, Dunbar's number (about 150).

Last I checked, there were slightly more than 150 people online. This means that there'd have to be on the order of 10^7 individual conversations, minimum, more likely 10^8. FOMO much? Group concesus and information sharing are ... profoundly limited.

HN has, as I understand, has on the order of 10,000 registered users. (A very rough guesstimate.) As of 2013, daily uniques was about 200,000 (see, with interesting discussion of some site-design parameters: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...). Looking over the list of just the top 100 users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), I recognise many, a few personally, and shave one, but ... really can't say I've got a relationship with the vast majority. And that's ~0.01% of registered users, 0.0005% of daily visitors.

And just to note: I'm agreeing with your comments. I just see them as the tip of the iceberg and part of a problem that goes far deeper than mere technical aspects.