Feature discussion: replying to multiple comments in story

I researched the last two years of meta and didn't find anything. I also searched in GitHub for "reply" and didn't find anything.

I also expect this to be closed, because I don't see a good way to do it, but perhaps someone has a magical idea to make it work.

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Sometimes in discussion threads I get multiple replies to a comment that I want to reply in the same manner. Most of the time I just reply to one of them, but I feel this might not be ideal.

My initial thought is to allow some kind of additional metadata via Markdown such as reply:c_wurzhr that would signal that this post also replies to a different comment. This would add a small single-line reply to the c_wurzhr comment with a link to the reply.

My main issue with the idea is that it would make it too easy to add a lot of noise to comments. Maybe it could be limited to 1-2 additional comments to reply, or perhaps that you could only multireply to responses to your own comments, or something like that.

The other big issue I see is that implementing it would be painful, esp. to do in a performant way.

But hopefully we can have a quick discussion, discard the idea, and if someone else comes up with the topic, we can go back to this thread.