@awesomerobot, whether something is an “unrelated topic” can be quite difficult to agree upon. Flat discussions force moderators to make this judgement call, which they wouldn’t otherwise need to.
Similarly:
@nathank, that’s the easier call to make, because users have flagged it. This is more problematic when nobody has, but a moderator believes that an irrelevant discussion is occurring within a thread, because they’ve perused it.
This is even worse when unrelated topics are merged, which would barely be problematic, if at all, if they were threaded.
…when something needs to be moderated, perhaps. We’ve not been discussing that.
I’ve no desire for any of what I do to be private, much less ephemeral. Regardless, one level of nesting is barely better, if at all; I’d rather have pure flatness, or infinite threading, than a single level of nested discussion. Try utilising the feature at a Matrix instance (whether via Element or the Reddit Chat), for an example.
In my opinion, the difference lies in the character of human communication in general. Threaded discussions may be the perfect tool for “chatting” in the true sense of the word, while flat discussions reflect a communication culture where scope and structure are more deliberately considered.
Hence, it’s more than a UI option – it’s a decision about how ideas are exchanged and, more broadly, how people work together.
It might be worth noting that in Jeff’s post about threaded discussions, an argument against threaded discussions is that a tree structure represents a rigid hierarchy:
Rigid hierarchy is generally not how the human mind works, and the strict parent-child relationship it enforces is particularly terrible for fluid human group discussion.
But the point seems to being made here that flat discussions are good because they force a structure onto conversations.
My sense is that Jeff’s second point related to trees is more valid:
Browsing a tree is complicated, because you have to constantly think about what level you’re at, what’s expanded, what’s collapsed… there’s always this looming existential crisis of where the heck am I? Discussion trees force me to spend too much time mentally managing that two-dimensional tree more than the underlying discussion.
Expanding on Naomi Alderman’s idea of the internet as a tool that lets us think together (Naiomi Alderman - The Third Information Crisis) forum software should be doing what it can to work with how humans think. It should help us think together, generate new ideas, riff off each other, etc. It shouldn’t generate a lot of cognitive load when we come across an interesting idea in a post that’s tangential to the OP.
So there are two issues: a tree-like structure actually represents how humans think together, and a tree-like structure makes for terrible/confusing UI. Something related to the existing linked topic functionality might be able to deal with both points, and also deal with the issue of there being some maximum number of people who can usefully be engaged in a conversation.
I specifically registered to write this.
Reply chains are the most painful part of forums. To read all the related replies, you have to constantly click to display/jump to parent/reply replies, making it impossible to see everything at once, and sometimes figuring out who’s replying to which message.
Summary
For example, this post iOS 26 bugs with fixed position elements in Discourse - #7 by awesomerobot When you open it, you can’t immediately see which message it’s replying to (you have to click “Load parent post”), the content of the replies (you have to click “1 Reply v”), or if there are more replies to this post and how many (you have to click “Jump to post”).
I’m a master of compromise and I came up with this compromise. The main display is a flat forum, but a post with parent/reply has a BUTTON that opens the ENTIRE chain of related posts in a new window, in a thread/tree view, in which this message will be in focus (for example Testing Nested Replies on Meta - #101 by Ed_S (thanks for the implementation, this is what we need!), but make it so that 10 nested / threaded are displayed without clicks (to do this, make the Topic width wider, now 50% of the screen is empty. As an example, 10 nested fit normally in width forum.opennet.ru - "У меня отжали 2 квартиры в Москве с помощью ЭЦП" (81) ; Полная доказательная база аудита мессенджера MAX / Хабр ), if there are more than 10 nested, then “show more” Opens a new window from this point, but displays the two threads before this message and the eight threads after, etc., to avoid reducing the width. For mobile devices, make the 5 nested.)
This is especially useful in a thread with 1,000 posts when you search for a word, find a post, go to it, and it’s not clear which post the answer was to, and you have to click 10 more times to display the parent/reply link.
You can combine this BUTTON with the number of replies and the thread depth display, so it’s clear that the message is within a larger discussion even before opening it in a new tab.
This combines the advantages of a flat forum (easy reading of the entire thread) and a tree-based forum (the context of a specific reply is visible), without forcing the user to constantly click “go to message” and “show reply” links.
Let’s make forums more convenient than instant messengers and social networks to offer better usability and functionality!
and I came up with this compromise. The main display is a flat forum, but a post with parent/reply has a BUTTON that opens the ENTIRE chain of related posts in a new window, in a thread/tree view, in which this message will be in focus (for example