Other sites refer to those sorts of threads -- threads for general discussion of a topic or question rather than of a specific article or detail -- as "generals

Other sites refer to those sorts of threads -- threads for general discussion of a topic or question rather than of a specific article or detail -- as "generals", e.g. "FLOSS Dev Compensation General", "Log4j Vuln General", etc. Long-running threads are better suited to discussion formats with strict time ordering. I'm not sure how a vote-ordered hierarchical comments section could keep up a clean presentation of new developments in the discussion. Linking between threads doesn't look like a practical solution to me; I expect we'd still see the same exchanges rehashed in each thread.