Thread:Talk:Flow/Auto-archiving/reply (68)

WhatamIdoing, what Patrick complaints is not that people will be able to answer to the tangent; of course people can do that now too. It's that the design will encourage answering to the tangent, because it will be the one that stands out as more visible. This doesn't happen now, because the most visible comments are those physically at the beginning and end of the page, not the ones with the latest date; a tangent comment gets buried in the current system, as it's usually posted mid-page in the whole thread, so it doesn't have high visibility. With Flow, it would stand out, which is a Bad Thing - the original thread's subject is what should define the topic of conversation, so that off-topic detours are kept to a minimum.

It's not about the possibilities of the tool being the same; it's about the defaults, which as described will encourage the wrong behavior from users.