If someone’s writing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its structure clear, perhaps with headings and tables of contents and introductory paragraphs and bullet points and whatnot.
I don’t think that’s usually appropriate for comments, which are usually rather short.
So, e.g., I don’t think your comment to which I’m replying right now would have been improved by adding such signposts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from knowing that it begins “I want to argue that this is a huge problem”.
There might be benefit in providing some sort of guidance for readers of a whole comment thread. But it’s hard to see how, especially as comment threads are dynamic: new material could appear anywhere at any time, and if order of presentation is partly determined by scores then that too can be rearranged pretty much arbitrarily. (And who’d do it?)
You might hope that a collapsed pile of comments is itself a sort of roadmap to the comments themselves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a useful summary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief History of Time by just taking the first half-sentence of each paragraph.
If someone’s writing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its structure clear, perhaps with headings and tables of contents and introductory paragraphs and bullet points and whatnot.
I don’t think that’s usually appropriate for comments, which are usually rather short.
So, e.g., I don’t think your comment to which I’m replying right now would have been improved by adding such signposts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from knowing that it begins “I want to argue that this is a huge problem”.
There might be benefit in providing some sort of guidance for readers of a whole comment thread. But it’s hard to see how, especially as comment threads are dynamic: new material could appear anywhere at any time, and if order of presentation is partly determined by scores then that too can be rearranged pretty much arbitrarily. (And who’d do it?)
You might hope that a collapsed pile of comments is itself a sort of roadmap to the comments themselves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a useful summary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief History of Time by just taking the first half-sentence of each paragraph.
I did think, as I wrote, that the beginning of the comment would be a good summary, but you’re right, not enough would be visible in the preview.
Perhaps if the comment previews were a bit longer.