@drq it'd be kinda hard to pack this into a coherent and usable user interface. Even trees are apparently hard enough for support to be hit-and-miss.

And there's an easy workaround that makes this feature less attractive: canonical branches. Post one answer, post links to it in other places where you want it to be.

And links can be accompanied by a comment that explains the relevance of the link. As my experience on Stack Overflow tells me, flagging something as a duplicate of something highly abstract might not help much (I have seen an embarrassingly high number of confused responses from people asking about asynchronous returns in JavaScript when duped to a comprehensive overview of this class of issues).

You can sometimes see me reply with links to my earlier messages or my garden. That's exactly this technique at work. (Maybe establishing a canonical reply thread for each page of the garden would reduce the discussion friction, but I'm not feeling *that* adventurous yet.)