I have to agree with this. I believe threaded reply systems (in combination with upvote systems) work reasonably well to produce digestible and shallow conversations (in terms of the number of participants, not necessarily quality) for news articles, but are absolutely terrible for conversations that happen in real time, grow to a certain length, or are expected to be read in full by participants.
The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes:
I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract.
I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read.
I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning.
I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.
The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes:
I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract.
I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read.
I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning.
I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.