Create ‘megathreads’ by redwizard

Create ‘megathreads’ (by redwizard at 25 Feb 25 17:09 UTC)

Hyphae affected: megathreads

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+# What are Mega-Threads?
+
+Mega-Threads (MT) are an idea or concept that stretches back to the days of simple Web Forms like phpBB, where the primary governing agent for post order was "Most Recent Comment". In those days, there was no "score" attached to a given thread and inside a thread, the comments were sequential and not hierarchical. In many ways, it was like an asynchronous chat room. If a topic was general enough in a given thread, or the topic of the thread was topical enough, it would persist on the main page of threads for days or even weeks until conversation eventually died out. People would bookmark a given thread and return to that topic regardless of its position in the list to continue it. Some forms would develop a practice of locking a thread if it became too stale to prevent people from "necroing" a thread, where a topic suddenly reappears on the front page after months or years of inactivity because someone found and replied to it. So in this context a MT was simply an incredibly active, asynchronous chat room dedicated to a topic, either highly open-ended, or highly topical and popular. Even though forum systems like phpBB allow you to create several sub-forums, even within those sub-forums large generalized topics would form out of the list of threads. You might have created a section for "Gaming" on your forum, but inside it is a "World of Warcraft" thread that sits somewhere on the front page almost daily, where people would gather to discuss that specific game. If World of Warcraft was dominating the "Gaming" section, you might create a sub-sub forum specifically for World of Warcraft nested inside "Gaming" or as its own top-level forum, which had its own feed. Even here you would find these MTs forming.
+
+
+# Reddit, a history of development
+
+Reddit, when it launched, had a single feed. It was not a "forum" but instead a "link aggregator", and the stated goal of the platform was to become "The front page of the internet". Links had a score, and that was about it. They didn't even have comments. It was clear from the design initially that Reddit's aims were not to replace the traditional form, but instead provide a way to aggregate news using large crowds based on a simple Positive and Negative vote resulting in a score and a Time metric in hours. The hours would be subtracted from the score, creating an overall Rank, and all links were ordered on the main page of Reddit using this rank ([see blog: hottest page, 2005](https://web.archive.org/web/20070327160115/http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/hottest-page.html)). As time passed, eventually new "sections" were added to Reddit, the first being the "Not Safe For Work" section, as announced in their 1/19/06 blog post entitled "[for those of you with a private office...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070327183801/http://blog.reddit.com/2006/01/for-those-of-you-with-private-office.html)". As an aside, it's interesting to see they also announced opt-in public votes at the same time. It's no shock that a startup, which has no women among their team, would expand their link aggregator to curate or isolate (depending on how you wish to spin it) Not Safe For Work (AKA Pornographic) content. This marks the second major step towards the "forumification" of Reddit, the first being the [implementation of comments on 12/12/2005](https://web.archive.org/web/20070324043800/http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/comments.html).
+
+The next major milestone for this fourmification of Reddit came in February of 2006 with a blog post entitled "[it's about time we added something new](https://web.archive.org/web/20070324043719/http://blog.reddit.com/2006/02/its-about-time-we-added-something-new.html)":
+
+> We've uploaded a couple new things today:
+>
+> A reddit for the olympics [olympics.reddit.com]
+> A reddit for suggesting features [features.reddit.com]
+> A reddit for requesting reddits [request.reddit.com]
+>
+> Last but not least...
+>
+> A reddit of reddits [sub.reddit.com]
+>
+> Each of these subreddits is a fully-functional reddit just like the main site. We want to make a home for things that wouldn't normally get submitted to reddit itself, but could still benefit from a community of voters choosing the best.
+>
+> Also, it is now possible to submit a link to reddit that refers to itself. This has been done by hand a couple of times to pose a question to the reddit community, and see the answer in the comments. It is now possible to do this automatically by submitting with the url of "self".
+> *posted by steve [spez]*
+
+Here, the forumification of Reddit is effectively complete. As Reddit started to grow, they encountered a problem. That problem was, conflicting desires, tastes, and demands from the larger collective community. While the collective decided what was on the "front page of the internet", it became apparent that communities of people were forming within the site,