Thread:Feedback/Replies/reply (2)

I've been thinking a lot about this feature, and I think you have to make a big choice here. You're trying to have things both ways in having an "Add an reply" link to encourage linear conversation and also "Reply" for threaded conversations. (Google Wave does something similar.)

There are a few problems with this. The first is confusion, such as Aude's stated above.

The second is that the semantic meaning of Replies is now ambiguous. When I read a discussion linearly, the assumption is that a post is responding to the message directly before it. When I read a discussion hierarchically, I assume the post is a response when it's indented. So if you're encouraging both, which is it?

The third is practical. You have a very nice feature for splitting and moving threads. This could be used as a way to refactor and "bump" threads. If you're encouraging linear responses, that essentially breaks splitting and moving threads. Here's an example.

Message 1: LiquidThreads is great! Message 2: I agree! Message 3: I don't, and here's why. Message 4: Wow, that makes total sense. Message 5: I want LiquidThreads on my project!

Logically, Messages 3 is a response to Message 2, and Message 4 is a response to Message 3. I might want to break that subthread out into a separate thread for refactoring sake. But if this thread is captured linearly as expressed above, there's no way of doing that.