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Indeed, the value of threading on usenet was that it provided data for the user-agent to decide in what order to present unread posts to the user - if the original topic A had drifted to subjects B C and D which were being discussed in parallel, when reading it three hours later I would get all the posts about B before the posts about C and then the posts about D. And if I grew tired of B I could hit 'k' and move immediately onto C. As long as I wanted to carry on reading, though, all I needed to do was hit SPACE (or in today's language, scroll down)

This is all a completely separate issue from the one of whether replies should be indented under their parent. For my money, this only makes sense if the reply is approximately as long as 'ME TOO!!!11!!!1!' and in the more interesting case that the reply is actually a reply and not just a comment, indenting is the wrong decision. But there is no need to conflate the two: ordering and indenting are independent decisions




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