I'm becoming convinced that vote-oriented threaded commenting is harmful to discussion, except of a more limited, conversational kind. I haven't had time to pro

I'm becoming convinced that vote-oriented threaded commenting is harmful to discussion, except of a more limited, conversational kind. I haven't had time to properly think it through, so forgive the sketchiness of the rest of this comment, but my instinct is that this approach favors narrow, isolating, unnatural and oppositional discussion. Dynamically-ordered threading divorces comments from the context they were written in (i.e. the rest of the thread, and of the natural linearity of conversation), and forces an awkward, artificial pattern of replying. This is a marked contrast to the sort of all-in-this-together, synthesizing discussions that can be found on sites like MetaFilter, and indeed of the natural conversations people enjoy in groups in real life. Voting and non-linear threading encourages and rewards simplistic, emotional, bias-confirming comments, while discouraging and often punishing any other kind of comment, leading to fragmented individualistic comments, which seems to me like the opposite of discussion. I'm sure there are big problems with traditional linear comment threads, but if you want interesting, intelligent discussion, dynamic threading+voting seems to me the worst solution. (I might add that the generally high quality of comments here reflects the community, rather than the commenting system)