Thread:Talk:Flow/Auto-archiving/reply (52)

The difference is one of context. If I filter out all the information that I don't want to see right now, I will not be aware that it exists in order to maybe see it later. Wikideletion Today puts all discussions in a single page, and then provides a table of contents for all discussions in the page, so that I can do two things:
 * 1) See how many conversations are active in the page (with a list of their section and subsection titles, which also provides hints about their relative size), and
 * 2) Select which conversations I want to read, skipping the rest.

This is the overview-plus-detail pattern, which is lost if you treat all content as an infinite stream of posts without an overarching structure. It wouldn't matter if a Talk page was simply a collection of totally unrelated conversations, but that is not true of Article Talk discussions, with are related by the article's topic; or Wikiproject's log reviews, which are related by the project's goals and activity.

There's no evidence at the Flow prototype or current design documents that Flow will have a way to provide 1 (seeing everything that exists) without forcing you to read everything (i.e. having all conversations loaded and expanded). The one feature that would approximate that, folding all threads, you said will be removed; and the tag system will only show conversations to which I have previously subscribed, which won't allow me to have an overview of a group of all-new conversations.

I don't object to having available the flow you describe, loading just one conversation and filtering out the rest, as long as the other flow is still possible in the same convenient way as it exists now.