Originally Posted by R Soul
I think the Discord chat would benefit from a system where the user has to type some sort of (very short) summary of what they want to discuss, maybe even just the general subject, along with another input field where the question or comment is written in more detail. Once the user is happy with what they have, they can submit these things to be listed. In order to help other poeple see things that interest them, or what they think they could contribute to, only the summaries would be listed, expanding to show the rest of the content when clicked on. Users wanting to add their own comments will be free to do so, but it would all be kept within this secondary window/page. This would allow the discussion to remain focussed. When the user has finished viewing this list of related comments, they can go back to the main list of discussion summaries and see if there's anything else they'd like to read (or start their own).
Furthermore, if someone adds a comment to one of these topics, it would be best to then move the whole thing to the top of the page so that people can see that it's been updated. This would be especially useful after a long time has passed: Another person may need assistance related to this subject, or may have had some insight that's worth drawing attention to. Having the chat comments sorted into subjects would also make it easier to use a search function which could give the user the option of viewing just the subjects that match the search terms, or snippes of the general comments within (like a preview).
With the main screen only showing the summaries, the more popular topics will remain prominent without crowding out other discussions which were started around the same time.
What do you think? Could it work or would it be impractical to hide all the comments?