Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet?

[rokejulianlockhart (Roke Julian Lockhart Beedell)]

@piffy,

@piffy

My point was more about revisiting the same discussion. Assume there are 12 new replies. For a flat discussion, there’s a single point you need to return to, and you can read all 12 of them. For threaded discussions, there could be 12 unique conversational threads with replies, and you have to re-establish the context of each before reading the new reply.

I find that easier. I don’t understand how mere indentation would make it more difficult to read rather than less. I indent every heading of my documents, for instance, like Revision - Stack Overflow demonstrates.

@piffy

After all, the most cognitively easy option is to not read the discussion at all.

That’s a Logical extreme - Wikipedia. It’s irrelevant. Cognitive difficulty, like any other attribute discussed here, has a non-negligible Benefit–cost ratio - Wikipedia, so it should be considered in earnest like any other attribute. I don’t understand why you would mention that.