> I'm not sure why transclusion isn't popular. [...] Perhaps the tool-and-community bootstrap challenge is sufficient explanation? It was clear for years that

> I'm not sure why transclusion isn't popular. [...] Perhaps the tool-and-community bootstrap challenge is sufficient explanation? It was clear for years that USENET news needed comment voting, but its community never really made the attempt. Progress came from moving elsewhere, eg HN. Consider selective comment display as a limited form of transclusion. Why doesn't HN have more highly personalized views? Sometimes you want quality, but it's obscured by chatter. Sometimes you would like to chat, but that would obscure quality from others. So we're at very not 90% of benefit; not a security issue; and far more effort for both readers and mods. But the better code doesn't exist yet. And community expectations don't demand it -- users might abandon a "no comment voting? - so broken" site, but "I can't even do basic reputation filtering?" isn't an expectation yet. Or consider the largely unsuccessful effort of the late-80's hypertext community to shape the development of the "that's not right" WWW. Including "this has become funny" multiple Xanadu attempts. Path-dependent local incentives seemed to dominate instead. But if one bottleneck is ease of exploring non-linear information, perhaps help may come from VR's relaxing of screen real estate constraints, providing more elbow room for low-overhead speculative UI content and associated assistive agents?