I don't know if I'd ever want people to comment on cards or streams I was thinking today that if your browsing a stream and you have a thought that you'd like to add, why not have the ability to suggest a card to add to a stream?
The use model would be click on the suggest icon for the card and either select an existing card you may have from an existing stream for repost in the stream, or create a card right there. The next time the user of the stream logs in, they would see something like "Stream foo has n suggestions".
You review them, and post the cards you want into your stream and decline the ones that you don't want.
I think suggesting cards to add rather than allowing comments, encourages people to offer something more constructive to the stream rather than just "lol", "great thought, I totally agree." etc.
To me it seems like an interesting way for users to contribute to the stream and interact with one another while allowing the owner to moderate the things that go into it. It also does not pollute the site with a load of mindless comments.
The existing way to respond to a card it to do what I've just done which is to repost the other person's card to a new stream to which I can add my thoughts.
There may be tweaks we can make to this to make it lighter weight. We certainly need to add notifications around reposting, as has been discussed before (and is planned).
Another idea I posted in the old stream is that it'd be nice to have a way to reference cards from other cards. This would kinda add a way to extend people thoughts and share opinions without 'replying' to the card.
I don't think there should be a 'reply' feature in thoughtstreams since every card is not supposed to start a conversation but share a thought.
"a pinterest for your thoughts"
Reposting a thought is almost like pinning it.
I've also got in the backlog a notion of marking a card explicitly as asking a question with the very intention that people would provide answers. This also relates to a very early idea of being able to mark a card "resolved".
I imagine I'd have a stream for each project I'm working on, for example and even each idea I want to think about within each project.
I'll probably need the idea of "closing" a stream when done—almost a pull request with the conclusion.
...so you can branch off, consider a bunch of stuff, come to a conclusion, then "merge" that conclusion back into the parent.
I am surprised that parent streams don't reorder on the RHS when their child streams are updated.
It would also be nice if the parent-child structure was reflected in the URL.
Parent / child is badly named in the UI because they aren't really parent-child relationships, they are just related streams. Streams can have multiple "parents" so if it was reflected in the URL, you'd have multiple URLs for the same stream.
I agree that the RHS should order by last updated, however...
With the branching epic we've just started working on, most of these issues will become moot (and even the way I'm responding to you now will too).