> It does make discussions more "robust", though. Citation needed. > especially women Citation needed. But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good f

> It does make discussions more "robust", though. Citation needed. > especially women Citation needed. But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good for debate in the sense that you can dissect arguments point-by-point and argue them individually. It does however also mean you can derail the conversation more easily by attacking multiple irrelevant fragments of the post without addressing the actual point. Replying in-line to multiple points is useful to you, the reply guy, when writing the first reply. It's completely useless to anyone else two replies in as you're basically forced to either maintain multiple different conversations in the same post or need to decide which ones to abandon. It's trivial to overload any conversation using "reply in-line" with the shotgun approach of throwing a bunch of low-effort nitpick replies into one post and seeing which one sticks. This is the opposite of robustness. Instead of being forced to steelman the other person's argument because you need to reply to the post as a whole or risk being called out for nitpicking, "reply in-line" allows you to unravel the argument, pick out the weakest parts, ignore the rest and then derail the conversation by replying to an army of strawmen all at once. This is the conversational equivalent of bikeshedding.