== Why I organize comments on WanderingThoughts the way I do

DWiki has a pretty simple way of displaying comments; all comments on
a single page, which also has the main entry. There's a lot of more
sophisticated comment handling systems, like LiveJournal and Slashdot,
and I won't deny that part of why DWiki is simple is that simple is
[[less code ../python/CodingParalysis]]. But part of it is deliberate,
because it's all about the context.

Specifically, I want people who read comments to have as much context
as possible, which means that I want them to at least have the chance
to see all of the comments along with the original entry. I prefer flat
comments over threaded comments for the same reason; flat comments force
a theoretical reader to at least skim the whole thing, instead of
narrowing in on just one aspect of a discussion.

(This is true of threaded comments even if everything is displayed on
the same page; people are good at quickly skimming visual structures.)

The other advantage of flat comments is that they push things towards
staying as a single conversation, instead of multiple conversations
diverging down each different thread. Well, assuming that one squelches
heated side exchanges somehow, before they take over the entire
conversation.

(I believe I got this cluster of ideas from [[Joel Spolsky
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html]],
although he wasn't writing about blog comments.)