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.
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:
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.
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 can confidently state that I am unaffected by text which I see whilst scrolling but do not read. To purport otherwise is nonsensical - if the brain does not deliberately comprehend and then commit observed text to memory, it is not stored and consequently unable to affect the reader. Billboards which you pass on the highway but do not read do not affect you.
For me, as long as a discussion about a topic is logically segmented, whether it is arbitrarily designated as a “topic” or “response” has no effect upon me. Think of a filesystem - it is a simple hierarchy of objects, and yet entirely comprehensible and traversable:
A hierarchical conversation should not differ (except that each comment is more frequently multi-line).
Regardless, that’s a rather unsubstantiated opinion, even considering what supposed evidence that you’ve provided:
The example (if I’m correctly identifying the example as the <details>-encompassed section) which you’ve provided doesn’t appear to demonstrate that. However, I understand what you mean, because it’s quite simple to consider a situation in which a threaded response contextually depends upon what it responds to.
However, why do you state this? I ask because all that it appears to demonstrate is that some threads should not be separated into new topics, irrespective of their relevance to the original topic.
I’ve no idea of what you mean by this. It’s too vague.