The sentence "Agoras display threaded conversations, a successful design pioneered by Reddit and Hacker News" seems to be a couple of decades off - as far as I can tell, threaded discussions where introduced by the nn newsreader, first released in 1984.
It is not clear if it is in fact the combination of threaded discussions and collaborative rating/moderation which these sites are credited with pioneering. In that case, I would point instead instead to sites like SlashDot and Kuro5hin.
I think that adding that reference could definitely work. Although it's true threaded convos go way back, it was reddit & hackernews who popularized this paradigm to great extent (at least on internet years).
The sentence "Agoras display threaded conversations, a successful design pioneered by Reddit and Hacker News" seems to be a couple of decades off - as far as I can tell, threaded discussions where introduced by the nn newsreader, first released in 1984.
It is not clear if it is in fact the combination of threaded discussions and collaborative rating/moderation which these sites are credited with pioneering. In that case, I would point instead instead to sites like SlashDot and Kuro5hin.