Responses as full posts
Why Tremr used one publishing model for both an argument and its replies.
Tremr deliberately had no second-class comment object. A response was a post with its own author, title, rich body, media, tags, reactions, voting, sharing, bookmarking and reply controls.
That made it possible to answer an essay with an essay, bring source material into an argument, or branch into a detailed sub-conversation without moving to another tool. A response could stand on its own, but parent and ancestor relationships always preserved the path back to what prompted it.
Different ways through a discussion
One ordering cannot serve every reader. Threaded view exposed the tree and its branches. Latest helped a returning reader find what had changed. Top Rated surfaced the contributions the community found most useful. Response and participant counts showed the scale of the discussion before a reader entered it.
The engineering consequence
Reusing the post model gave responses a much higher ceiling, but made the read side more demanding than a flat comment list. Each post needed ancestry, response counts and feed membership that were cheap to retrieve. Those derived references were denormalised for reading and updated through background jobs, trading write complexity for practical conversation browsing.
Threaded view preserved the structure of a conversation and expanded its branches. 
Parent context and thread depth remained visible on mobile.