I think a "related to", "reply to" or "topic threading" mechanism would be neat, but possibly difficult to work out.
People generally want to submit their own threads for various reasons (adsense, unique-impressions, karma, etc...).
The tagging would probably still have to be community driven, but an "is child of topic", or "related to topic" tag would allow users to see a different sort of front page. (GROUP BY TOPIC, ORDER BY DATE DESC)
You'd only see the most recent post on a topic until you clicked on a "show related" follow up link.
Google news seems to do this grouping reasonably well. One headline and see all 872 articles on this topic. Obviously PG isn't going to write that but a poor man's version could be implemented with a 3 column relationships table.
It would also leave the current new and frontpage untouched for those who loathe & fear change (or unintended consequences).
I'm sure there's some other actual considerations to worry about in this - that's only an off-the-cuff response. But generally I think a "related to" list and a front page filter showing only the most recent article in a "thread", with the ability to expand out into the others under "more reading"
We managed to post nearly identical ideas simultaneously - a Google-News-like approach to related posts. In all my experimentation with community news sites, I find I prefer Google News if all I want to do is read the breaking news (without discussion) entirely due its well done grouping of related stories.
Yeah - wouldn't it be interesting if the Google news style grouping of all articles on a topic also had a single threaded discussion about the topic as well? (complete with upvotes or +1's of exceptional comments and analysis from the user base).
I think one of the issues we'd have to contend with is the tremendous drive that the publishers have to generate new column inches. They really want to squeeze out just one more pageview (or competing web pages who each want their first pageview).
There will be a lot of incentive to figure out how to not be tagged in the "new grouping" sort of system.
If you head on over to reddit, they've got a great visual description of the "duplicate news" issue http://i.imgur.com/WANc1.jpg I think it's kindof relevant to this discussion.
People generally want to submit their own threads for various reasons (adsense, unique-impressions, karma, etc...).
The tagging would probably still have to be community driven, but an "is child of topic", or "related to topic" tag would allow users to see a different sort of front page. (GROUP BY TOPIC, ORDER BY DATE DESC)
You'd only see the most recent post on a topic until you clicked on a "show related" follow up link.
Google news seems to do this grouping reasonably well. One headline and see all 872 articles on this topic. Obviously PG isn't going to write that but a poor man's version could be implemented with a 3 column relationships table.
It would also leave the current new and frontpage untouched for those who loathe & fear change (or unintended consequences).
I'm sure there's some other actual considerations to worry about in this - that's only an off-the-cuff response. But generally I think a "related to" list and a front page filter showing only the most recent article in a "thread", with the ability to expand out into the others under "more reading"
Maybe only the highest voted in a thread?