You just did exactly what I was talking about. Only by taking that post out of context could you have thought I was asking for help in trying to see the whole post.
My post, in context, was about how the conversation suffers because people will take single lines out of context, as you just did. That’s why selective quoting must be used judiciously to make sure you don’t corrupt the original meaning. And thus it serves as a poor default choice.
We’re kinda big on that here: we consider it a misquote if you take something out of context. It’is forbidden to alter quotes here, because you cannot misquote.
It also seems odd to declare that your preference is better, when most of the special features of Discourse are things we’ve had to disable.
In particular, like-based sorting is a horrible idea unless you want echo chambers. That’s why we have likes removed. So is allowing flags to actually close threads–we’re constantly having to un-close them. Both make popularity more important than quality.
Furthermore, Trust levels as implemented are not good. Being good or prolific at posting has no bearing on whether people can be trusted to have new powers. That’s why we tried to neuter them.
Like it or not, quoting posts is not just a waste of space. Even the poster you are responding to says that it’s bad that we can’t tell if they replied to the poster above them or to the general topic. It’s confusing and is why most of us will continue to keep undoing the “helpful edit.”
It’s our community. We want to be able to do what works for us. There is no 1 size fits all. Please help us make the forum we want, rather than telling us why we’re wrong. We have over 20 years experience with what works for us and what doesn’t.