I’ve long felt that recursive/threaded replies were the death of intelligent online discourse. It’s just endless debate club: everyone proselytizing stodgy talking points from their individual soapboxes without any genuine back-and-forth happening. If someone loses an argument, they usually just disappear instead of facing the music. No accountability, no reflection, no real sense of community.

Quite good at being addictive, though.

On the other hand, threading makes it possible for one group of people to spin off into a subtopic like discussing the relative merits of threaded vs linear boards, in the same general post about what Zuck said, without annoyingly hijacking the main topic. On HN I often find it useful to collapase the child responses and just read the top level, until something like this pulls me into a rabbit hole.

It goes all the way back to Usenet, if not earlier.

When did Usenet really fail? I left by 2007 but it was in bad shape before that.

I agree. It also means you likely need some way of sorting replies. And that means upvoting, which is a horrid system.