Man, this is one of the great imageboard unsolved mysteries. How do you get people to remember that specific threads exist if they haven't been posted in for a few days? Many have tried, but none have succeeded. Or rather, they seemingly all rely on the user themselves searching instead of doing something that comes natural.
I do use the catalog sometimes, but it's not my default. Who can find a solution to this dilemma...

I use the catalog by default, and sometimes when I arrive home without having browsed the site much that day I order /all/ by last reply and begin reading. I like seeing all the threads at once and it wouldn't be as simple with the index view, although I just realized I can sort the same way that here too so that's a hmmmm. In any case for me personally it wouldn't make much of a difference since I read every post made here, even the ones you deleted.

>is it really that bad of a thing for some people to have it as their default view?
>some people
If only a small part of the community uses the catalog, whatever effects the catalog has on browsing habits, will be marginal to the overall site.
Now, there are multiple things that need to be considered.
1) discovering an old thread that you had previously missed
2) discovering a new thread
3) discovering that in there is new activity in an old thread
4) discovering a specific thread
5) being pulled into a discussion because of a response
666) the effect that this has on your browsing habits, and the effect that your (and others) changed habits will then have on the board
Let's go through them one by one. (for this comparison, I will assume order-by-creation-date)

1) If you use the catalog, the only reason why you would miss a thread is because you were too lazy to go through the whole list. You technically have them all spread out for you. But because most catalogs are actually pretty large, most people do not maintain their interest all the way to the bottom. On fast boards, this means that if an "old" thread is not intrinsically interesting to them, they will probably never really see it. On slow boards, you can come back a week later to check out the rest. That means that you have probably given a fair chance to every OP.
Therefore, for old threads on fast boards, the catalog probably obscures more than it reveals. On slow boards, the opposite is true but you can easily achieve the same with indexed view (because the board is slow)
2) discovering a new thread
The catalog wins, obviously. On slow boards, the difference is as not pronounced, but it still exists.
3) Because of my chosen setting, the catalog can't do that. You can switch to sort-by-activity or bump (which doubles the number of actions required for a check up of the board), but even then, the catalog obfuscates the actual activity.
4) The catalog wins, and it's not a contest.
5) The catalog loses, and hard.
666) So, what does all that mean?
It means that you usually make just one judgement on a thread, which is on the OP. If the OP fails to interest you, the thread falls off your radar. If you grow disinterested in a thread that you are participating in, and then close the tab and remove it from your watcher, you will probably not rediscover it later, no matter what happens with it.
This means that discussions will be more sterile, with less cross-fertilization happening.
If you do not care about a particular TV series, you are not likely to see that somebody has made sense of the story using a flawed understanding of physics, and will thus be unable to jump in and correct the lass. You will not derail the discussion into something that you ARE interested in, physics.
The thread becomes a bit of a sub-community.
That can take perverted dimensions, as it has on 4/a/, but it does not have to.

I also use the /all/ catalog by default. Kissu is so slow that it's easy to look over every thread as it's made and the full thread hover previews let you quickly look up the new responses even if there are more than three of them and even reply to them from the catalog. I use index on other slow boards so I can quickly see the new replies without needing to jump into each one, but kissu's catalog provides that functionality and more so there's no need to do it here.

>>121449
>for old threads on fast boards, the catalog probably obscures more than it reveals
It should be the opposite. I almost never clicked through every page in the index on 4chan, but I regularly went through the whole catalog. It lets you skim over the OPs faster, which makes it viable to go over each one at the expense of only seeing responses if the OP image/initial text grabs you enough to make you hover over it. I don't think this is a good thing there since it promotes lust-provoking image/irrelevant time-wasting question threads and generals over good discussion threads, but at the same time the front pages of many boards at this point will just be those generals all the time so sorting by time created lets you jump into newer, more novel threads from the catalog.

Also, the big thing with the catalog is that it enables you to follow certain thread topics because you can always see whether something is up about it, which makes people less understanding of duplicate threads and, ironically, makes the fear of missing out or falling behind much worse than with a view where only the most dedicated of browsers can realistically be in every thread. Again, not really an issue with kissu since it's slow enough that you never miss a thread if you come here regularly, but I always feel like that's part of the mindset of people who think finding old threads to resuscitate is better than just making a new one.

> Kissu is so slow
sadface

>>121483
>at the expense of only seeing responses if the OP image/initial text grabs you enough to make you hover over it.
That is precisely what I was referring to, implicitly.
That's why there was a "therefore" at the start of the sentence.
I omitted a comparison to indexed view because I was not sure if there was a decent generalization to make.

I've found that how much I feel inclined to use the catalog is an accurate indicator of a board's overall quality. On good sites I enjoy scrolling through the index, but on shitboards I'll almost always use the catalog to single out the couple of threads I'm actually interested in.

I read over GNUS

The catalog is good and I use /all/ a lot. What I really like is the thread viewer thing above the reply box where you can tab through older threads. It's how I found this one, just wish it would show latest replies when you hover over them.

>>133466
That might be a neat feature to insert as well, and would probably give people more ideas for things to reply to.