Is there a way to view posts in a thread in chronological order?
While the voting system is advantageous for taking "better" answers to the top for purposes of searches, etc., it makes reading a thread very confusing for, say, those signing on after being away for a few hours, and wanting to read all the new threads.
Is there/could there be a button to rearrange the posts in chronological order? Answers that are "voted" to the top sometimes appear incoherent, as they refer to content of prior posts in a manner that assumes the reader has also read those prior posts. That then forces the reader to do what moving that post to the top was supposed to make unnecessary--read the entire thread.
2 Answers
Great question! (+1 
) It's going to be interesting to watch how this unfolds. You've hit on an important difference between the new Answers and the old Forum.
Short answer: yes, there is such a button. Right under "# Answers", between a question and its answers, there are three tabs: Most Votes, Oldest, and Newest. These change how the thread is sorted. What you're looking for is Oldest.
Current users have been trained that thread replies will always appear in chronological order and phrase their responses accordingly, responding directly to the posts that came before them. This sort of back-and-forth dialogue can be very helpful, and we certainly don't want to stifle that. You can, of course, still view posts in chronological order.
But you're right: this behavior doesn't work as well with voting. Thanks to answers being sorted by votes by default, it will now often make sense to reply to other users' answers simply by leaving a comment, as some users have already started doing. When every answer is self-contained, the order of the posts no longer matters so much. This is fantastic when you come across a thread you've never seen and want to quickly find the best content. (If you wanted to read more, you could then sort chronologically and go through the whole thing.)
In the same vein, it will be nice to more of a 1-to-1 correspondence between threads and questions, if you know what I mean. A little more structure goes a long way toward making the forum useful to visitors of all sorts.
But there will still be plenty of threads that are more conversational, and where voting is less relevant--e.g., there's no "correct" answer to De Dónde Eres?, so votes (and their cousin, the Accepted Answer) have less of a place there.
Thanks, Rocco, I understand much better now.
p.s. I tried to add this as a "comment" but it didn't take...hmmmm...
comments - Comments are for adding quick remarks to a post.