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.

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I generally try and pick few of the strongest points and reply to those. It’s impossible to debate someone who replies back as you demonstrated above. The discussion gets out of hand in no time.

    • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      5 months ago

      I generally try and pick few of the strongest points and reply to those.

      This is one possibility, but it’s quite flawed, as you end up losing portions of the conversation.


      It’s impossible to debate someone who replies back as you demonstrated above.

      It may require more effort, but it’s far from impossible. And that’s precisely the reason why I outlined the second alternative that has atomic comments.