In your experience, what is the maximum effective length of a topic?

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@codinghorror

Now this button won’t appear until the topic has > 50 replies, and it is a “best 10 percent” so you are still looking at minimum 5 posts in a 50 reply topic, 10 posts in a 100 reply topic, 100 posts in a 1000 reply topic, and so on. But they are objectively the best posts.

I’m not sure of “objectively the best” is tongue-in-cheek here or not. In those threads, it didn’t feel like I was getting anything like an intelligent summary, even if those were the highest scoring.

@codinghorror

Always a good time to remind people they can click or tap the reply icon in the editor to convert to a new linked topic:

OMG WAT???!?! I’ve been digging for the icon and hitting “+ New Topic”. This is great — but is it just me not finding it? Does this need a boost in discoverability?

In general, yeah, I’m with you on the futility of gigantic threaded posts — that’s definitely not a solution. Closing the thread at an arbitrary limit seems so… 1990s forum, though. I wonder if we could, instead, as the thread approaches the “real big” point, increasingly-less-gently steer people towards:

• considering if they really have something to add
• using or other reactions as an alternative to adding one’s own words.
• if they really do have something to say but it’s tangential, making a linked topic — maybe even make that the default as you get close to the topic limit.