* Dominik Mierzejewski:
You don't have threaded replies, either. And quoting the post you're replying to is entirely non-intuitive. It took me a while to discover that you have to click on the "speech bubble" icon inside the editor that opens after you click reply.
In some instances at least, you can select the text in the fragment you are replying to, and a quote button will appear. I at least found that quite discoverable.
Renaming topics works in a much saner way. You can deal with 'cross-posting' in a much saner and more flexible way. Quoting is always a problem everywhere, but that's only *one* thing, at least. :D
Quoting and threading are the fundamental features in text-based non-realtime conversations, so switching to a medium that offers inferior quoting and no threading is questionable at best.
I tend to agree, but most clients only offer rudimentary support to show the metadata that's there. Nowadays, a lot of people pick a random message in a thread and reply to that, disregarding what that particular message contributed to the conversation. I can't really blame them because in the interfaces they are used do, it does not make a difference for presentation purposes. I'm not sure if nested threading in email ever went mainstream, to be honest. Discourse and similar tools may merely reflect that lack of familiarity.
I couldn't consume the volume of mail I process without it because nested threading still works on most of the technical lists I frequent, but I suppose it's a dying art.
Thanks, Florian