Back in the early 2000's I much preferred a flat forum. As I remember VBulletin had flat/ nested or a hybrid of both. When I was designing my own forum software

Back in the early 2000's I much preferred a flat forum. As I remember VBulletin had flat/ nested or a hybrid of both. When I was designing my own forum software I went with flat. I think it really depends on the topics and the audience though. For something like Hacker News, flat would be a nightmare as it is such a large loosely connected community and each submission usually generates comments that are only loosely connected. A smaller online community, maybe a few thousand where all the regular contributors know each other can have flat work fine depending on the topics discussed. What is the answer? Probably the ability to configure. One thing I can say I do hate is nesting to one level, this confuses people more as the first reply will be nested then subsequent replies to the first nested level will be awkwardly placed at that first level also. (Guess I am mainly thinking of Disqus here)