Comment by jancsika

Reading this interchange, I think I'd really enjoy a forum where all the responses a poster thinks they'd want to make in a thread are pre-committed-- but not yet viewable-- when the initial comment is posted. Any consequent responses in that thread are then limited to those that are pre-committed-- e.g., that user can select them from a dropdown-- and the full list of pre-commitments is (eventually?) publicly viewable.

Maybe that doesn't apply to what you're replying to here. But my gut is that anything nested deeper than level 2 on HN is one or more respondents doing low-effort, pedantic heel-digging. (Single exception for any and all of Alan Kay's posts where the references cited are always worth whatever level the nesting is at.)