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

@Sailsman63, you’re making a very good point that I actually tend to make over and over again, when (yes, I’ll use this analogy a lot) discussing filesystems with people - direct hierarchy is rarely enough to demonstrate complex relationships.

I think you’ve provided ample evidence for Discourse to have both a more robust common relationship mechanism and separate extensible view models. Specifically:

  1. When writing a new response, allow a person to choose multiple comments to mark as responded to. This means that a user doesn’t have to tag multiple people in their comment if they’re responding to multiple comments, and ensures that it is objectively communicated what they’re responding to.

  2. This can then be consumed by the user’s choice of view model (flat, threaded, MermaidJS-like relationship diagram for that kind of person who spends his days looking at relational databases).

    1. Flat would merely display multiple avatars in the response indication header.

    2. Threaded would base the hierarchy upon either a comment which the responder designated as “primary” (not an ideal solution, but intuitive).

    3. The Mermaid-like view (Star?) would provide an overview of what topics appear to be of most importance, then allowing the user to select a comment and switch to one of the aforementioned standard views.

Agree?


It depends upon the conversation. In topics like these, all of the context must be considered. However, in a thread about a technical issue which has divulged into discussions between multiple people like this has, requesting a summary or commenting upon a specific part distinct to the rest means that the rest need not be considered.

Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. I don’t have infinite time.

It was certainly influenced, indeed.

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