remove comment/post hierarchy and do everything via mentions

[surprisetalk]

Instead of keeping the parent id as metadata, include links in the body and it'll automatically add as reply/comment. Then add a nice replies API and hide the reply link on the frontend. By convention, the first text of a reply should be the parent link.

[akkartik]

What Zulip does is:

• Posts have one bit of structured metadata. Zulip calls it the 'topic' but it can be anything. The topic is just a string.
• Every post has a hyperlink. Everyone does this these days.
• Other than that, posts contain hyperlinks. They can contain hyperlinks to other posts. All this is just text. There are UI affordances to create a few different default kinds of links. But clicking the button just plops some text into the text box, and you're free to edit it after. Examples:
  • a "quote" with text and a hyperlink of where you got it from.
  • when you upload an attachment it turns into a thumbnail and a hyperlink to open the full version.

Hmm, I'm not sure what happens when I rename a topic in the UI. Does Zulip modify every single utterance within it? Because the exported JSON just contains topics per utterance as strings. Seems weird.. 🤔

[surprisetalk]

I made an experimental branch with this change a few weeks ago and did not like some of the downstream implications (which I don't remember haha sorry)