Human nature is to learn from mistakes, and that's not significantly less likely under either system - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 11/05/2011 08:59:03 AM
Most people aren't going to click on the post they are replying to if they don't think they need to - it is more effort for no obvious benefit... except to avoid the argument out of it.
You've just stated why most people prefer paged threads rather than nested ones. Why RAFO would want to deliberately deter most people from joining remains unclear to me.
Now people will perhaps learn after a few arguments about it... or they will get angry and leave having accidently stirred up bad feeling.
Which will remain the case whether we make the display optional or not. The difference is that the "most people" you referred to above are more likely to repeat the mistake and/or get angry and leave if they don't have a way to display threads as a page rather than with nested replies. If that's RAFOs goal, fine, but it seems a counterproductive one.
To be honest, I just can't see how setting it up do both styles are an option is a good idea - you're going to end up with an ugly mix of the two which will piss people off who prefer either style from the posting habits of people in the other style. Nested people are going to have threaded people just replying to the original post and get annoyed by that while threaded people are likely to have nested users threadjacking straight through the middle of their conversations.
If threaded people just replied to the main post it would be displayed in a nested format as separate response to the main post, yes? Why would nested people be any more annoyed by that they are now? Threaded people will have nested people replying through the middle of their conversations via quotes of the response to which they're replying, which is something to which threaded people are already accustomed at sites with threaded formats. Why would they find it more annoying here than they do elsewhere? As someone who much prefers that option I'm telling you (and think everyone else arguing for it would agree) that would be FAR less annoying than having to click every single response individually to read an entire thread. Regardless, having an option is a good idea because no one with a strong preference for either format is forced to either use the other one or leave.