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’m just wondering if it’s a practice/belief that should be continued. Perhaps multiple replies is actually a better way to do it, regardless of how it is currently interpreted.
I don’t think so. It just clutters things up and makes referencing the points and counter-points later more difficult if they’re all spread out in multiple replies instead of just 1.
How so? Are you just referring to the sheer number of comments as being clutter? I would argue that it’s cleaner as there is less of a need of large comments and extensive utilization of quotes. Ideally, one comment would receive one direct reply without any extra formatting.
How so? Everything is still contained in a threaded hierarchy (assuming that one isn’t using something like Mastodon, or Lemmy-UI’s Chat feature in the comment section). If the comments are contained within scope/context, relevant information to the thread shouldn’t be spread out. The relevant information should be contained within the path of the n-ary tree.