In the excellent discussion concerning comments, a number of folks brought up the idea of threading comments. That’s certainly one of the possibilities we’re thinking about, and we’d like to focus some thinking on the pros and cons of implementing it.

On the pro side, threaded comments — which presumes the concept of a reply function, perhaps in an @username manner — would, it seems, help organize the overarching comments thread. If a group of users wants to pursue a particular topic (a back and forth on whatever element of the discussion they like), that sub-discussion would take place in a grouped manner, instead of in a distributed manner up and down the entire comment thread.

Also, we’re thinking that if a particular thread is longer than, say, 4 comments, we’d show those first 4 comments in the thread, and then offer a “See more” kind of link that would dynamically expose the entire thread.

We’re thinking that indentation wouldn’t be necessary; and in fact that it would be a bad interface decision; if you’re 5 or 6 levels into a nested thread, the column width of those nested comments would be uselessly narrow. Rather, we can differentiate particular threads in other ways (say, background color; a line which delineates comments and threads from each other, etc.)

On the con side (personally, I don’t see much of a con side, but that could just be me), it could be that some users like having replies and responses distributed up and down the entire thread. If the number of users who like unthreaded comments is great enough, we’d consider offering a threaded/non-threaded option, so users can organize the comments as they like.

What are your thoughts? Would it be best to thread, or not to thread? That is the question.

(And to reiterate: we’re very much still in the let’s-think-about-this-and-gather-information phase. No changes are officially planned or set in stone.)