do you prefer nntp's hierarchical tree-style format for groups, e.g. alt.binaries.warez.ibm.pc.old, or reddit's flat organization of /r/mysubreddit? how about fidonet-style?
what's a reasonable character limit on group names? e.g. reddit enforces a 21 character limit on subreddit titles.
@vga256 The biggest advantage of a hierarchy is that someone can BROWSE it instead of searching, which allows for discovery of things you wouldn't have thought to search for. In a flat system with a large number of items, browsing becomes impossible.
Reddit's flat system suffers from this, leading to things like sidebar lists of related subreddits and even the whole r/findareddit sub, where you tell a person what you want to do and they tell you if they know of a sub that will do it for you.
by asking this question i've just realized that i've made a generational error:
those born < 1990, and who grew up with hierarchies like card catalogues, the dewey decimal system, MS-DOS, Usenet, and use nested folders for their data.
those born > 1990, who grew up with Google, and have a ~/My Documents/ folder with 19000 files.
@vga256 You forget that there are those of us who were <1990 and understood the concept of organization, but also used floppy disks where you'd list the entire directory to find something. Convention was to name an empty file at the beginning with a space or ~ or something to show up first, then a name or description in the title for the disk contents.
Myself I prefer the flat version with the ability to quote/link replies as complex discussion can get out of control with a tree. I grew up with BBSes, never liked Usenet's raw structure, and thrived on the traditional forum looks such as phpBB. I got used to Reddit's style of trees and ranking movement, but very long threads got annoying to follow.
