Being able to (usually) personalize your comments I think also played a huge role in fostering community: avatars, taglines, signatures, etc.
I wrote my own tagging system for HN and it's hard to describe how much it changed the experience for me. only usernames feels a bit like being in a community where everyone wears the same clothes, uses a vocoder, and covers up their faces. if you squint you might be able to make out the nametag.
I love to think back on the early social web and consider how much we got right, particularly with forums. Presence and personality via avatars went a long way to feeling like a community in an era when the masses were still figuring out how to do that via technology.
I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered discussions.
> I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered discussions
Yes, and not in the least because one can answer/reference multiple messages in one post, thus bringing different conversation 'branches' back together. It also provides a nice chronological order to follow the whole discussions, which is hard in nested discussions.
However, flat discussions have limits: once you have hundreds of participants, it becomes nearly impossible to follow. I estimate that the limit to more or less comfortably follow flat discussion is ~50 posts/day, or 15-30 more or less active posters.
By default HN almost hides usernames. The byline on this comment will be a smaller font than HN's already small body font size. It'll also be a light gray almost fading into the background. You'll need to spend extra effort to notice my username and try to remember it. I'm not likely to remember yours later.
I wrote my own tagging system for HN and it's hard to describe how much it changed the experience for me. only usernames feels a bit like being in a community where everyone wears the same clothes, uses a vocoder, and covers up their faces. if you squint you might be able to make out the nametag.