I think hackpad is a collaborative notebook and branch is a forum replacement - so I don't really think so.

One thought is that we can blend the two by making forum thread posts editable by anyone who has access.

Hackpad definitely has a problem that in a conversational pad, you don't know where to add new content... at the top, bottom, under some sort of related section or heading?

For instance in the shana pad, or the USV pad, we have new info to add but its not clear where it should be added... (I don't want to go and invite everyone to a new pad.)

"One thought is that we can blend the two by making forum thread posts editable by anyone who has access."
Sure, but I don't think the problem with forums is that you cannot edit other peoples posts..

Agreed that conversational pads don't work well, because we don't make it easy to have a linear conversation and non-linear ones (ala wave) are awkward.

If one thinks of hackpad as a notebook (similar too, but less formal than a document) - I wonder how you facilitate linear conversations in a notebook? In highschool we'd just pass the notebook around and append... Different pen colors were enough - not whole new pages.

In a work context, this conversation would usually happen in email I think, but email has broken subscribe/unsubscribe per- thread behavior and shitty archiving.. Still I think something like this needs to work on top of email to become truly relevant.

I know of someone (ex-yc) who's trying to do this for companies. Shadow on top of email but provide an interface closer to this and sub/unsub semantics. Kind of interesting.

(but i think the tech of doing it in a general manner is actually pretty hard)

I like the multiple pages metaphor because I think it's easier for people to grok mixing and matching pages among documents. So instead of moving a selection to a new document, I'd move relevant content to a new page in the same document, then move that page to be part of or referenced by another doc.

Yeah, but not 1 page per comment. That seems too heavy-weight.

Ie. it equates a comment with a brainstorm or a design sketch. Seems comments should be smaller things.

So you can have 10s / 100s of them

I think you solve it by making comments a little more heavy weight. They're really new pages, where the first line is a title line that needs some thought.

It's worth trying - I think that'll make it too little of a notebook and too much of a forum.