Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

This is then the worst possible outcome for the very devices you mentioned: mobile phones or tablets. The page becomes a scrollfest, and the blockquotes squash the text into ever diminishing horizontal width... itself causing the page to lengthen even more and amplifying the effect of that scrollfest.

People wouldn't care so much about the quotes in anything that offered threaded conversations, so that it was easy to see who was being responded to and to see the original message. Web forums suck.

I can remember when many ISPs used NNTP for their user discussion forums (kept separate from USENET because trolls). Your average Windows user could read them using Outlook Express, UNIX geeks like me could use our newsreader of choice and it all worked well. Or you could use the crappy web interface that they offered as an alternative, where there was no threading, searching was shit etc. Gradually, they ditched supporting the NNTP solution and went entirely to the crappy web interface, which became the crappy standard.

Not that this helps anybody. Just my 5 minutes of remembering another example of the market making the shittiest of technological decisions What's the opposite of nostalgia?