Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost.
All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.
Say a newcomer joins the conversation (at the bar) halfway through. He is missing a lot of context. His kind friends would then fill him in, unlike the internet.
A threading like structure however, allows you to quickly scan the parent, and if need be the parent's parent. It's within the user's perogative to choose how much information he needs to be caught up.
That being said, I'm very open minded about seeing the new approach develop. Heavily nested threads are a far from perfect solution.
But that's hardware accelerated. There's a lot of brain given over to doing just that. When you stop that working by presenting the conversation in an incompatible codec (threaded), you switch over to the equivalent of software decoding.
And that is as bad an idea for conversation as it is for h.264.
All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.