3 ms·

It's interesting what you say about flat replies. Although a "technical" person, I can't believe that users are not wanting to reply to individual posts. Perhap

• _delirium 16y ago
  There are certain social dynamics that have grown up around this variety of single-thread-per-post forum: discussion is channeled into essentially one discussion per post (you start a new post if you want to fork it); threads are "bumped" when someone replies and the expectation is that it's a reply to the main thread of conversation; the pagination encourages discussion to move on (in a 50-page thread, you don't normally belatedly reply to something on page 8, unless you have a good reason for it); etc. Threaded discussions are very different in style imo, and have less of a "conversation" feel. I tend to prefer threaded overall, but there are some non-threaded forums I'm on where I don't think the community would work as well with threaded. For example, I don't think the SomethingAwful forums would work well at all as a Slashdot-style (K5-style, HN-style, reddit-style) threaded forum. Actually, I think some parts of reddit would work better with unthreaded; there's often a sort of urban-sprawl feel to the thread branching there.