I encounter situations like this rather often where I am responding to a comment that contains many individual points/statements. I typically will respond with a single comment that contains a quote of each point that is being responded to with my response under neath the respective quote — and, sometimes, for added clarity, a horizontal line separating each response. For example:
Statement 1
My response to Statement 1
Statement 2
My response to Statement 2
etc.
I wonder if it would be better practice to have atomic responses to comments — create a single comment for each individual statement, i.e. spawn a new thread for each new atomic topic. This would allow scores to be representative of each specific response rather than an average of the total, and it may also help with clarity when reading through the comment section, as well as easing the creation of responses (not needing to rely on formatting so much). For example
Comment 1 in reply to comment with multiple points:
Statement 1.
My response to Statement 1.
Comment 2 in reply to the comment with multiple points:
Statement 2.
My response to Statement 2.
etc.
Support for what? I’m not entirely sure what you are referring to with this section.
That’s a fair point. Replies do sometimes rely on fragments of information from the entire post, but, even still, one could still just contain that within an atomic reply, but yeah, it would need to be repeated for each part. Personally I’m not bothered by the increase in actions. Generally, one isn’t commenting in a large enough volume for that sort of efficiency concern to really matter, imo.
I meant that if someone made multiple replies within some time threshold, similar to how ‘this post has been edited’ works, the board could automatically join them into one post, maybe with a little indication that it’s concatenated. You could even make it config option for users.
That’s an interesting idea, but I feel that it overcomplicates things without much benefit.