However, I think better commenting systems are the real problem here, instead of hacking current ones. The "threaded" conversations in this post are very cool, but disqus threaded comments are much more intuitive.
And instead of making just a blockquote, and referring back, github-type line commenting would be awesome.
The model of post then comments is kind of counter intuitive in terms of real discussion.
Inline comments organize comments around the subjects of a post.
That's neat for code. Not so for discussions I think.
Inline comments make it hard to read all the comments at once. And I often care more about that than being able to select which comment I'll read according to it's subject.
The problem with threaded threads is that there's less of a feel of permanence. When everything is linear, then you've got a very real spatial sense of where, say, the second comment is on a page. Depending on how important the blog community is to the blog, linear comments may hurt more than they help.
Actually, the better model comes from forums, where conversations were threaded early on and then switched to linear as forums evolved. Linear threads let you follow the progress of a conversation. Threaded ones lose that same sense of time.
Threaded ones let you follow a main conversation, ignoring digressions and side arguments; you can see the shape of the overall discussion, tracked by evolving subtopic. I have found that I approve of it; "derails" are rarer.
The idea of a linear conversation, though, is that once the topic is set that's what people talk about. If the conversation branches, somebody starts a new thread. That's one of the neat things about forum development: you get to watch what conversations begin, and sometimes your forum becomes something entirely different from what you thought it would be.
You lose some of that with threaded conversations. I've seen a few threaded forums, and on the whole you lose a lot of the people. In a linear thread you're forced to read everybody, which means the community evolves around its specific members. In a threaded one things are less focused. Conversations become more private, in a way, as small little conversations form from the big one, and while that works well on a site like this, there's something lost in the process.
Look at Reddit versus Hacker News as an example of what's lost. On Reddit, the most-known people are mainly the trolls. You get 911was_an_inside_job and Captain_Obvious. Other people don't stay memorable within the community, unless it's within a particular subreddit. When you look at conversations, very often a very bad thread (conspiracy theory or pun thread) will be voted up to the top, which makes community seem either immature or difficult or worthless. It's got some good communities, but they're the close-to-inactive ones, almost always. More people means the community breaks apart.
Hacker News does work, but that's because it's got a built-in audience of people who want to apply to YCombinator - from there it's attracted a like-minded audience. Here, there's no personality among people, or there's very little. I remember whether or not I respect a name, and I often disagree with the same people, but there's still very little personality here. Partly that's because here, as Reddit, discussion revolves mainly around news stories, but partly it's because when you're not linear there's no reason to get to know other people, because you can just skip over their strand of conversation.
So threaded conversations help with some things a lot, not so much with others. Cirqueti is being designed with a linear user forum in mind, because we want a very personal forum to go alongside the polished mainpage. I'm guessing we'll get users on the forum that aren't big on the main site and vice-versa, and I think that's extremely healthy for a site's community. (As the SomethingAwful forum credo goes, "There's a main site?")
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Okay, too much reply there. I'll end by saying that I've never seen a blog that needs threaded conversation: not enough useful talk goes on in blogs for it to be worth it. A blog is a single-user-centric community: it's not healthy for it to have a cloud of responses like threaded offers. It fractures what minimal community ought to be there. The only blog I've seen with above-decent comments is Ebert's, and it keeps a linear thread, and commenters (and Ebert) get to know each other. That's what's missing out with methods like Disqus's.
However, I think better commenting systems are the real problem here, instead of hacking current ones. The "threaded" conversations in this post are very cool, but disqus threaded comments are much more intuitive.
And instead of making just a blockquote, and referring back, github-type line commenting would be awesome.
The model of post then comments is kind of counter intuitive in terms of real discussion.