I encounter situations like this rather often where I am responding to a comment that contains many individual points/statements. I typically will respond with a single comment that contains a quote of each point that is being responded to with my response under neath the respective quote — and, sometimes, for added clarity, a horizontal line separating each response. For example:
Statement 1
My response to Statement 1
Statement 2
My response to Statement 2
etc.
I wonder if it would be better practice to have atomic responses to comments — create a single comment for each individual statement, i.e. spawn a new thread for each new atomic topic. This would allow scores to be representative of each specific response rather than an average of the total, and it may also help with clarity when reading through the comment section, as well as easing the creation of responses (not needing to rely on formatting so much). For example
Comment 1 in reply to comment with multiple points:
Statement 1.
My response to Statement 1.
Comment 2 in reply to the comment with multiple points:
Statement 2.
My response to Statement 2.
etc.
I don’t like the multiple comment idea.
If the conversation is at the point where you are replying to replies, and you’ve sent me three rebuttals with each of them asking for clarification or verification from me, I’m now sending 3-6 replies back, which may require you to send 12 or more.
Also, I’d lose track of who said what and would end up referencing something from a conversation with someone else.
You are right that the amount of comments would grow rather quickly (exponentially, I think), but the threads, themselves, should be easier to follow — there wouldn’t be multiple conversations happening within each comment.
How come? The comments are all visually tied together in the thread hierarchy (well, assuming that one isn’t reading Lemmy content from Mastodon, or with the Chat mode in the Lemmy UI)
I never look at the threads. I get a notification on my phone that somebody responded. I read the response, I reply to it if necessary. I’m not opening up the entire thread and reading through a conversation from the beginning again.