I made an off-the-cuff suggestion on Hunter's Daily Kos 4.0 Suggestions Thread regarding changing the Diaries-and-Comments site structure of Daily Kos. The idea's been growing on me ever since; and I think it bears fleshing out in a separate diary.
See, the current structure of Daily Kos is like this: Each story or diary acts as a "seed"; and the comment threads for each diary conceptually form a "tree". Each diary+comments tree grows for a while, until the diary scrolls off the list. Then the discussions end; the branches die out; new diary seeds are planted, and the old, abandoned diaries and their comment trees are filed away into the near-oblivion of the archives.
But with just a few changes (detailed below), that underlying structure could be radically transformed: Instead of a series of discrete trees with limited lifespans, we could have a continuous, evolving "grapevine" of interconnected discussions. This would solve a number of persistent site complaints as a side effect; and it could be done without radically changing the site's interface or giving up any of the advantages of the current diary+comments system.
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