It is occasionally useful to know if anyone is in the process of typing out a response to a comment. Also, it could sometimes be helpful to be able to read what has been typed so far, although many users would probably not want to have public what they haven't sent/saved yet. Perhaps it could be an available option to make both of these things public in Flow.
Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2
You mean to avoid edit conflicts? Yeah, I agree that would be useful.
There won't be an issue with edit conflicts. This is a structured messaging system, not a flat file. Edit conflicts disappear.
Actually, edit conflicts do not disappear; they merely no longer lock, as I noted in the en.Wikipedia discussion.
If comment A is edited while comment B (to comment A) is written, there is a conceptual edit conflict; under FLOW, it won't lock, but comment B will no longer be responding to the current comment A.
Of course, if comment A is edited after comment B is written, we have the same disconnect under FLOW as at present. It's considered "bad form" to edit comments with replies, I was just saying above that we will still have edit conflicts; they just won't block.