Thread (online communication)

Conversation threading is a feature used by many email clients, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Internet forums in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages with their replies.

Conversation threading as a form of interactive journalism became popular on Twitter from around 2016 onward, when authors such as Eric Garland and Seth Abramson began to post essays in real time, constructing them as a series of numbered tweets, each limited to 140 or 280 characters.

Given this advantage, threaded discussion is most useful for facilitating extended conversations or debates [3] involving complex multi-step tasks (e.g., identify major premises → challenge veracity → share evidence → question accuracy, validity, or relevance of presented evidence) – as often found in newsgroups and complicated email chains – as opposed to simple single-step tasks (e.g., posting or share answers to a simple question).

It can be difficult to process, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and integrate important information when viewing large lists of messages.

Grouping messages by thread makes the process of reviewing large numbers of messages in context to a given discussion topic more time efficient and with less mental effort, thus making more time and mental resources available to further extend and advance discussions within each individual topic/thread.

In group forums, allowing users to reply to threads will reduce the number of new posts shown in the list.

Thread fragmentation can be particularly problematic for systems that allow users to choose different display modes (hierarchical vs. linear).

The following email clients, forums, bbs, newsgroups, image/text boards, and social networks can group and display messages by thread.

Example of a topic thread on an internet forum
Thread view in a discussion group. At the top level, a discussion with several posts. Next to the subject, number of lines, sender and date is shown for each post.