The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.
"This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums.
To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on:
- kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc)
- scoring
- user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content)
- tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them
- other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above
Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-old technology."
When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying. Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current monstrosities by a wide margin.
One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.
Plus, the clients had things like killfiles, so that one could ignore a troll or a subject (or even fancier stuff, like scoring: maybe a user tends to have worthless comments, but what he says about one subject is really worthwhile).
Long story short, a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want in order to keep them engaged and sell more ads. We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance.
Yes, the tight coupling of progress to profits is becoming very counter-productive. Too many good ideas and products that get killed because they can’t make enough money (and the criteria for “enough” keeps rising unnecessarily and exponentially, i.e. something has to sell in tens of millions to be considered a “success” even if half a million would be profitable.)
We will need to rethink the role of money in human civilization if we don’t want it to become a corporate hell where every action is dictated by how much money it makes.
For example, Google only lets you get a few results at the top of their search. What if you want to get the whole 100,000 of them? Sometimes it's important, for science.
