@AcerPlatanoides wrote:
And they will fall quickly off the list of discussions if nobody is taking part. Or they will deserve a spot on the list when people do.
Also, the list of discussions can be filtered by topic. Boing will always bring you to front page article discussions. 'meta', 'games', 'wrath', these are all categories for user generated content, which is encouraged.
They may not be the -original- topic, but they might a topic being discussed... in parallel to the original.
@codinghorror encourages use of the (Reply as new topic) button when someone catches themselves being about to be more than 20% off topic. How about when they don't catch themself? I'm not sure most of us here in the peanut gallery are entirely sure when someone else is going to see us that way, and rather than 'clutter up the list of discussions' we might chime in slightly off topic in a way that ends up disrupting the original conversation. But if the community had members empowered to say that a subdiscussion is derailing the original, and can press that button after the fact, it could well aid discussion.