Always surprises me that out of all the different kinds of internet communities, it's only the oft-maligned imageboards that consistently provide that feature.
I was kind of expecting Discourse to play with the idea, since they seem to be the modern-reboot-of-forums with the most traction + willingness to experiment, but they haven't so far, afaik.
How would you represent that? On HN and similar every response is its own thread. This is true with email as well, but I don't have experience with any significant threads or mailing lists.
The naïve solution would be to just limit nesting and order nested comments chronologically. Another solution may be to CC @postid in your messages and have posts display "responding to: id1, id4" at the top and "responses: id91" at the bottom with appropriate links. There's a question here about which post to write or display your response under. Finally, an extravagant solution would be to really represent discussion as a graph and I think a lot of time would need to be spent creating an interface with minimal frustration as I feel it can get really involved (i.e., a lot of clicking).
Always surprises me that out of all the different kinds of internet communities, it's only the oft-maligned imageboards that consistently provide that feature.
I was kind of expecting Discourse to play with the idea, since they seem to be the modern-reboot-of-forums with the most traction + willingness to experiment, but they haven't so far, afaik.