FWIW, many email clients -- before Gmail dumbed down email forever and no one seems to understand that email replies form a tree anymore -- also had (and maybe some still do?) that way of viewing the world.
I like mutt, but aerc [0] is imho much better. But no matter which solution you prefer, editing emails in the terminal is so much more efficient. If the majority would switch to pure text emails instead of HTML...
aerc sometimes breaks on non-compliant email because the author of the header parser refuses to introduce kludges to handle broken email. When it happens, the mail in question simply doesn't show up in the list. I fully understand that position, but it's not really ideal as a user who can't simply refuse to deal with broken crap. So after using it for a couple of months I reverted to neomutt.
No, HN doesn’t have read/unread state, and also cuts off discussions after a day. This makes checking for new comments tedious, and prevents any longer discussions.
The HN comment system discourages depth as there is a relatively shallow limit to threads. There also is no in-built concept of an inbox to monitor replies.
Hacker News prefers quality over quantity and signal over noise. Deeper threads tend to result in uninteresting, low quality comments as the subject matter diverges from the topic at hand, or flamewars, so long-term engagement is discouraged.
All these decisions add up to people just not replying to interesting questions.
More often than not, nobody will reply, so all threads are just one or two levels deep. Or in the rare case someone actually replies to an interesting point, it's usually not the original poster. Probably because they had no idea that anyone had even followed up on their post.
Requests for elaboration mostly go unanswered, and comments are made expecting no replies. So people just shoot ideas into the void, with interesting interactions only happening when someone famous comments.
