Apart from GraphQL itself, two things are pretty impressive about this thread. 1) Impressive community to have such an informed set of comments in a matter of a few days. Congrats. 2) People have to talk like that in a very hard to follow way since we used to have better ways (NNTP, mailing lists) but now they are gone in favor of worse systems.
The commenters are great, so they provide a discussion that makes sense, but is a wall of comments one after the other. It is possibly the most primitive way to interact, compared to something like Reddit comments with collassable threads, votes, and so forth.
I might be the exception, but I find Github comments much easier to digest and manage as an archive than mailing lists. In all the years working in the industry, I could never get used to mail lists.
Agreed. It's a trade-off – threading leads to repetition and/or references to already-mentioned ideas. The more truly linear a conversation is, the better Github's style is, and the more a discussion splits into multiple independent conversations, the better the threading style is. Unfortunately, you can't know a priori which kind of discussion it will be, and most discussions are a hybrid.
Personally, I find a linear style with mentions, quotes, and backlinks (a la Discourse) strikes the best balance for most conversations. But of course we'll never all agree.
Here's the wonderful thing about email and nntp: It provides a list of backlinks, and it's up to clients to decide to render it in the form of either backlinks and mentions, or in the form of threads, instead of forcing the choice on you.
That sounds very nice in theory, but in practice I've never seen an implementation that is as easy (for me!) to follow as Github's or Discourse's linear flow. Links to the great implementations that I've missed are very welcome!
Do you mean you have no idea what I find easy to follow, or that you can't understand how I find it easy to follow? I don't have any trouble at all with the typical Github or Discourse thread, and I don't think there's anything confusing about Gmail. On the other hand, when I go to Gmane or someplace, things seem all over the place. But I recognize that my experience isn't universal. Like I said, we'll never all agree. I really like the idea of leaving it up to a client to organize things however works best for an individual, but I'm not aware of a good implementation of such a thing.
I mean that my idea of 'easy to follow' is far enough off yours that I haven't looked for what you're looking for, and I have no good way to really evaluate any examples I could google up.
