14 thoughts on “Comment Threading”

  1. It’s much easier to follow without threading. You can achieve the same thing as threading with a brief quote which you have to do anyway with threads if you want to reply to part of a comment. Plus you don’t have to look in multiple places to find comments you might miss.

    If somebody already makes my point, I don’t have to comment at all.

  2. In a comment section with low volume, there isn’t much benefit from threading and pure chronological order helps to find new comments. Threaded commenting would work better if you could easily find new comments, as Usenet news readers could do ~30 years ago.

    (what if… blogs ran nntp servers alongside their web server and usenet clients were tightly integrated into web browsers, we could have much more useful web commenting decades ago…)

  3. Seems like this is just the way in which we like our database to be presented. Is there a way to make it switch modes? Making everyone happy. I’ve no idea about how your web software works.

  4. 3. About 50% of the time, I mistakenly add to the end of the comments instead of directly replying to another comment. I notice that this happens to others as well.

    I like to put a comment at the end of the comments if the threaded segment has become de-threaded and crowded. But that situation also serves as an indicator that maybe that point has been talked about enough.

    I like the threaded version but finding new comments easier is a good point. But how many people know that Rand’s blog already does this?

    The mobile version has chronological order and the desktop has threaded. Easy enough for anyone to go try it out. The mobile version of the site isn’t as visually appealing.

  5. You can achieve the same thing as threading with a brief quote which you have to do anyway with threads if you want to reply to part of a comment.

    Or if there are a schist-load of comments in a thread so that what you’re replying to wouldn’t be obvious anyway. Might as well schist-can the threading altogether.

  6. I like comment threading. I find some topics more interesting than others and I like the convenience of just going to the threads dealing with the ones I’m interested in.

  7. I prefer nested comments, but being able to find new posts is a real problem. It wouldn’t be the end of the world for me, if we went back to single list comments. But it is a bit painful trying to figure out who is commenting to who on a big list. Not everyone does the quote thing and even when you do, that still might be hard to trace the flow of the discussion in the bigger threads.

  8. I like threading, but it seems that this WordPress theme doesn’t make the threading stand out visually. Would be nice if replies had the name of the poster replied to.

      1. Better would be a hyperlink to the post being replied to, if such were somehow implemented. With that a straight sequence would have both.

Comments are closed.