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

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-discussion-is-ultimately-too-complex-to-survive-on-the-public-internet/63172
**Category:** UX
**Created:** [23 במאי,‏ 2017,‏ 2:43am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-discussion-is-ultimately-too-complex-to-survive-on-the-public-internet/63172 "2017-05-23T02:43:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 63

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### Author: ![roke\_julian\_lockhart](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/roke_julian_lockhart/32/540179_2.png) [@roke\_julian\_lockhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/roke_julian_lockhart)
#### Post date: [15 באפריל,‏ 2024,‏ 9:38pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-discussion-is-ultimately-too-complex-to-survive-on-the-public-internet/63172/63 "2024-04-15T21:38:56Z")

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@Sailsman63,

> [@Sailsman63](#):
>
> How am I supposed to _find_ that new post if I have to scroll up from the bottom of a 60 comment discussion?

You shouldn’t need to, because a new post notification should direct the user to it, like [Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet? - #62 by Sailsman63](https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-discussion-is-ultimately-too-complex-to-survive-on-the-public-internet/63172/62) does to your comment.

As an example, every time I receive a message via e-mail about a new notification on Reddit, I merely click the button to take me to the comment, rather than trawl through thousands of comments manually.

> [@Sailsman63](#):
>
> Indentation is a necessary affordance to make a threaded ordering somewhat functional. The issue, at least for me, is the _ordering_ in the first place.

Would you elaborate on this?

Do you mean that because the sorting is necessarily applied to each hierarchy individually, it produces problems like a file manager can cause:

1. You’ve a list of files, and want to sort them by modification date to find some old logs. However, because these logs are in a directory of multiple file types (some irrelevant) they’re grouped by type (which is alphabetical) meaning that although they’re generally chronological, the chance for something new to be at the bottom is non-0.

2. You’ve a list of music. You want to remove some songs you don’t like, but you can’t order them by rating, because too many have identical ratings. You’ve _grouped_ them by rating consequently, and have ordered them by access date, so that you use when you last accessed them as a determiner, too. However, this means that some seriously old songs are missed even if you rated them highly when you were young.

I understand that, but I can’t think of a solution. Discourse implements the sole alternative that I’ve considered, but (of course) I consider it inferior due [Threaded discussion is ultimately too complex to survive on the public Internet? - #61 by vel](https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-discussion-is-ultimately-too-complex-to-survive-on-the-public-internet/63172/61).

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