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[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 00:12:33 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> bcs Wrote:
> > You must have miss-spoke. I assume your intended to say organised and
> > grouped instead of an insane interleaved view where the conversation's
> > natural structure is mashed flat and destroyed.
> 
> I've *never* had a conversation in real life where time branched out.
> 
> The closest you can come in real life is if a group splinters, and instead
> of a public forum, you have a bunch of private conversations that just
> happen to take place in the same room.

Knowing the parent post of a particular post can be critical to understanding 
that post - especially when the parent post isn't quoted in  the reply. 
Particularly with longer threads, I don't know how you could ever hope to 
follow them without having a properly threaded tree structure to the posts. 
That's one of the reasons that I always read posts in my local mail client 
rather than in my e-mail's web client. Even gmail - which has threading of a 
sort - is completely inadequate to dealing with complex threads.

I don't really care all that much about what you do with your reader, since 
I'm not likely ever to use it, but I don' understand how anyone could 
reasonably track any of the longer threads without a properly hierarchical 
view of them.

- Jonathan M Davis