There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler

There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler listened. Every time you rehash a conversation that someone else had, GPT-12 butler interrupts and says "excuuuuse me sir, some permutation of this conversation has happened 2000 times on the internet. I will replay the top 3 of those. Please listen carefully, then proceed to tread new ground." I think that GPT-12 butler would be very annoying. You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining. Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement. All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.