<story><title>StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacoblyles</author><text>No nesting. Is this 2004?&lt;p&gt;How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomdale</author><text>Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It&apos;s especially hard to come back later and see what&apos;s new.&lt;p&gt;Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically.&lt;p&gt;If, however, you&apos;d like to &lt;i&gt;change&lt;/i&gt; the topic, there&apos;s a &quot;Reply as New Topic&quot; button to the right of every post. This allows you to create a new thread, with a new topic. Metadata about this forked topic is saved, so that future readers can easily bounce between related threads, while still having every message in sequence about the same &quot;topic.&quot;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, this approach maintains the simplicity of flat discussion with the ability to fork topics of nested threads, without the complexity.</text></comment>
<story><title>StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacoblyles</author><text>No nesting. Is this 2004?&lt;p&gt;How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>I&apos;ve built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly.&lt;p&gt;My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of argument is valuable, but generally it&apos;s just a strain on the social fabric without a lot of upside.</text></comment>