No, I’m saying that this specific feature in this specific context is questionable, and you keep bringing false equivalence to the party and assuming my issue is not what you think it is.
Let’s take your example of iMessage (and FB Messenger etc etc). This is a 1:1 or 1:group message format where a message will likely prompt a reaction from another in the conversation, and chances are it will be a timely one. Thus, having that feedback is useful (outside of the meme of “typing… pause… typing… pause… typing… pause… then the message is just ‘OK’”) because it’s targeted and contextually useful. This also holds true for Slack where the locality inside a channel is useful, and the locality in a single thread is useful if the response is timely because it’s a current conversation.
In a Discord channel, the spread of people who will see the whole conversation and reply in a timely fashion is typically wider than the number of people who happen to be in a specific topic, waiting for an answer to that specific topic.
Now if you want to talk about displaying that on the node listing of topics, we have something to talk about.
Alternatively if you’re going to talk about replies in a forum broadly being shorter and more chat-like (where a response being timely is more likely), we have something to talk about.
But ascribing these behaviours to a forum is… possibly misleading for any message more than a couple of lines.
We will see once Invision 5 is out, they’re supposed to have that feature, and we can see how well it works in the real world of forums rather than spitballing how we think it might play out based on our respective experiences of forums. I do not believe it will be the stimulus it is being suggested, because the locality and timeliness just don’t align.
