There's little in what you say that I can disagree with. In fact, most of the difficulties were obvious to me before my post but I concentrated my comments on the higher issues rather than being concerned with the more mundane practical problems that you've rightly mentioned. It seems to me that we need to have solid objectives about what we actually what to achieve before we can clear away the unacceptable dross that plagues the web.

As I see it, there are several levels to dealing with the 'messy' posts issue (topics where there are large numbers of replies). In essence, these 'levels' represent different classes of problem and thus they require different (more specific) solutions.

1. First, there's the 'uncompleted reply' problem. This is where one intends to reply to an existing post and for various reasons one is unable to do so. Reasons may include the website's cut-off time for posts being exceeded or that the poster hasn't had time to reply to a post for various reasons. As I see it, this is a bigger problem than missing an initial post to a story because it can leave existing arguments in a specific thread to remain open and or be incomplete.

On more than one occasion on HN I've said I'd get back to someone on a matter and missed the timeout deadline for various reasons. This unfinished action leaves that thread incomplete in that there is no logical outcome or conclusion in respect of the earlier commentary. The problem is exacerbated if the person to whom I'm replying has made new comment that requires a definite reply. Also, the absence of any reply from me is liable to make me look like an unreliable correspondent in the eyes of that person for seemingly ignoring him when in fact matters were outside my control. This may not seem important but I believe such etiquette is actually important, especially so if the previous poster has gone to the trouble of posting information that actually needs a reply.

There are some simple solutions to this: a website can have a definite cut-off time, say 14 days, for new post to a story, but it could have a longer time for those who've already posted a comment and who later want to reply to someone who has already posted to his or her comment/post.

2. The Correcting of Errors and Typos Problem. For me, there's little worse than to revisit and reread one my posts several days after I've posted it only to find some glaringly stupid mistake that makes a nonsense of what I've written and that I can no longer correct it due to an inane website policy that stops latter editing. Mistakes such as the inclusion of wrong or inappropriate words easily happen when one misses, say, a wrong auto-correction entry. Similarly, with other minor errors such as the wrong use of 'its' and 'it's', the same goes for possessives (the correct use of which I actually do understand but it doesn't stop me from mistyping them on occasions).

As everyone in book publishing knows you cannot publish a book without an editor by virtue of the fact that we're all blind to many of our own mistakes, thus we simply cannot pick up certain errors no matter how many times we may proofread them. These days, through necessity, it's not possible to have someone sitting at our side correcting our errors whilst we type. That said, the problem of blindly missing our own mistakes hasn't gone away. In effect, even after 30-plus years, NO website has found satisfactory ways of accommodating/correcting typos after posting.

What web designers are effectively saying to us is that they are 30 years or more behind the times and they could give a damn if they never caught up. Right, there's no incentive from web designers or makers of web standards to bring web publishing standards in line and level with normal book publishing—well that's the view from their perceptive and of course we poor hapless users have never have counted for much anyway. Frankly, it's an unmitigated disgrace, it's yet another instance of the unprofessional nature of the software industry - if you want actual proof then read this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247573088_Software'... (despite this article being nearly 28 years old, almost nothing has changed to change its findings).

There are many ways around this problem and they don't involve rocket science. There's the limited editing approach as well as the ability to edit certain words on an ongoing basis, especially so those involving the apostrophe as well as words such as 'them', 'then', 'whose', 'who's' and so on.

I fully acknowledge that changing the wording or meaning of text no matter how small and insignificant the change after someone has already posted to or commented on said text is completely unacceptable and should never happen. Here too there are some easy solutions: if text is altered after a post has been made then it's dead easy to flag that post with say a dagger '†' whereupon clicking on said dagger would reveal the original text that the poster actually replied to. Moreover, many variations along these lines come to mind.

Again, the real problem is that both those who run websites and who write the code for website comments don't actually give a damn about such niceties. Nor do they actually care about the fact that their laziness and ineptitude is contributing to the ever-increasing number of errors that we see appearing across the web not to mention the increasing general sloppiness of the web per se.

Nor do they care or worry that their rotten workmanship is further contributing to increased web information entropy—or, as is more likely, they don't actually understand what increasing information entropy actually means. There are many things wrong with the web and we would be well served if those who actually ran the web set higher standards through example. Applying higher standards to accuracy and presentation is an easy point from which to begin.

3. I could not agree more with the fact that extended 'run-on' results in terrible signal/noise ratios. But again, little or nothing has been done to ameliorate this problem over the same 30-plus years. Moreover, the matter is made worse by websites allowing posters to reply to the first poster in order that their response appear high up in the posting hierarchy. This problem could be fixed in an instant if the typical tree structure that's used in most posts were modified to both better reflect the actual subject matter of the post as well reflect a more accurate relative temporal position in the posting list (both metadata from posts along with temporal data should be used to ensure that posts appear within the hierarchy in the correct and most relevant order). For this to happen it's likely that each thread in reply to any given post may have to split to accurately reflect both its metadata status as well as its temporal position relative to all other posts.

I know that's a badly worded explanation but it'll have to for the moment. Again, I also need to point out that there has been precious little development in the way forums have been displayed over the last 30-plus years. Whether it's phpBB,WordPress, MyBB or whatever, none of them do a sufficiently satisfactory job that would ensure that 'discussions and debate can meaningfully continue beyond a day or two'. The fact that none of these forum programs has either the means or wherewithal in this regard simply means that those who have programmed them have failed dismally in achieving a workable solution.

I repeat that the web is in an unholy mess: if we follow exiting example then we see that it inevitably leads upwards from the lowest common denominator and not as it ought from the highest of standards and from the moist excellent of ergonomic design downwards. I am strongly of the belief that for the web to improve significantly from its current ratbag existence then excellence should always begin at the top. Standards of excellence could start by websites actually agreeing on something as seemingly trivial as reaching an agreement on unified forum timeout procedures.