Updated January 23, 2011 at 1:30 pm: By a landslide vote of 21 to 8, non-threaded comments wins.  I have a clear mandate to change things back to the era before those latte-sipping threaded comment advocates took control of this site, and I will implement the change as soon as possible.  Thanks for participating in the poll.

It is clear from the different way in which some of the mobile device interfaces work that there is an underlying ability to request comments in threaded or unthreaded format.  I will dig around in Word Press to see if this is something that can be made optional.

[Original post from January 11 below]

Some readers are having problems with comments now that threading has been enabled.

The sequence of comments is no longer first in, first out, but rather is ordered within the threads making it hard to find updates scattered through the whole post.

An RSS reader will “find” all new comments based on timestamps, but someone who is just browsing for updates will have problems.  Conversely, for complex discussions with various subtopics, it can be difficult for someone reading the entire set of comments to follow each argument.

Please comment here whether you want threading left enabled or not.  I will decide the outcome based on feedback received up to Saturday, January 22.