Am I doing that, or are you? Because it is is a forum that only allows quoting to a depth of three, and you’re arguing that it ought to be a forum that allows quoting to a depth of … what is your ideal depth, by the way? That might help me understand your position. Infinite?
But anyway, taking as a given that is me who justifying what ought be the case, I don’t think it is absurd for me to say that ILP ought to act in a certain way to encourage better discussion, despite that the discussion we’re trying to discourage is currently the norm. We do that by adding and removing forums, locking threads and issuing warnings and bans, and generally by setting and applying moderation policy. That’s all aspirational: if ILP were perfect, we’d never change a thing.
Which returns us to the question: does limiting quote depth improve the quality of discussion? I maintain that it does.
Sauwelios, you may have manifested the hypothetical that Ecmandu described: I would like to quote to a depth greater than three in order to quote your reference to all three quote depths in one post. It’s a contrived situation that only comes up in a discussion of quote depth, when we might expect our needs to exceed the bounds (in fact I think it follows from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem), but still, well played. =D>
But let me express my reply without the quote: in your P-S scenario, you’re effectively saying “you said that I said that you said …” (i.e. S is effectively saying “R said that Q said that P said…” At best, at this point, you’re arguing over what you said, rather than over the content of the topic, right? When was the last time you had a real-world conversation in which a sentence like “you said that I said that you said …” actually served to advance the topic?
And again, I’ll concede that there might be a times where such a references is useful, but they are exceedingly rare. Most often, by far, deeply nested quoting is used because people click “quote” as a way to reply to a specific post, and then the person their talking to does the same thing, and again and again.
Next most often, the thread has effectively split in two, and several people are having one conversation between several other peoples’ conversation and they’d like to keep the context by recreating their sub-thread in each post. In that case, I’d argue that the context is fairly effectively kept by keeping the three most recent posts in the sub-thread, and that if more quotes are truly that valuable they can be added serially instead of being nested.
And finally, we get a post like yours, where quoting it to a depth of only 3 is not really quoting it at all. I would be surprised if any other such posts exist on ILP, and I again applaud your ingenuity, whether or not it was intended. Hofstadter would be proud. =D>