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 think multiple comments would reduce clarity. It is rare for any signle point in an opinion to stand on its own as an atomic unit. A reader would need to jump through a thread to follow your line of reasoning in its entirety.
Single points of an argument may be valid or true on their own, but it is the mutual reinforcement of several points in agreement with each other that will educate or convince someone.
But if it does, wouldn’t it be better for it to be its own comment?
But isn’t that what already happens? The only specific relevant difference is that, currently each comment in the thread could contain any number of individual arguments happening simultaneously.
This is a fair point — I hadn’t considered this.