@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.