[SpicyLemonZest]

I think that's affirmatively a bad idea, even given a solution to the UX problem. Maintaining a healthy discussion forum requires the ability to terminate bad discussions that are causing problems, and making decisions effectively requires that there be a seam-ful distinction between the thread where a decision is discussed and meta-threads where someone else in some other context wants to talk about the same issues. I see where the intuition for your idea comes from (I can't just declare that my friends have to stop talking about a road trip because I'd prefer to ride the train, I can pull someone out of the circle for a side conversation freely), but it only works in closed groups where all participants are invested in their reputation and there's no clear decisions to be made.

[JuniperMesos]

> Maintaining a healthy discussion forum requires the ability to terminate bad discussions that are causing problems, and making decisions effectively requires that there be a seam-ful distinction between the thread where a decision is discussed and meta-threads where someone else in some other context wants to talk about the same issues.

A moderator who claims to be maintaining a healthy discussion forum and terminating bad discussions that are causing problems, is likely to actually be stifling dissent - or discussion that an individual moderator finds personally embarrassing - or just exercising a personal vendetta against somebody. This is as true in open-source software project issue thread moderation on Github as it is anywhere else.