“But this indentation game doesn’t ever end.”
See, that’s a computer scientist response to a social problem. Though you are correct in a xeno’s paradox mathematical sense, you are actually wrong in that the limit eventually approaches zero. Discussions don’t go on forever. Particularly if the topic auto-locks in 5 days.
You get a much better sense of who said what, and when, with indentation. It’s naturally more legible (unless you’re using a right-to-left language, maybe) and it would be trivial to come up with some logical visual shorthand to show that a thread had been indented too far to be legible - the carriage return symbol, representing the roll of a typewriter being pushed back to the start of the line springs to mind.
Also, I am interested to hear what type of data structure you propose instead of a tree… there’s a lot of inherently intuitive stuff in tree based systems… do you propose some sort of amorphouse node based social networking graph? That could be interesting, if a bit mind bendingly insane.
Ultimately it’s a question of legibility, and as of right now, there is NO sense of linear progression. It is TOTALLY UNLIKE a discussion or conversation, and more like a random selection of tweets by strangers.
As for “most things you say should be more or less standalone” that’s like… dude, an unbelievably insulting and ignorant generalisation of human discourse. Good advice, maybe, but we’re not all just chatting in radio friendly soundbytes.
And what’s with having not time on the comments? That makes it even worse! What said what, when? Who knows?
