How would you modify Reddit's UI to rapidly visualize long, branching reply chains?

Question

I'd like to build a website that is kind of like Reddit but the purpose is to have people collaboratively tell stories by chaining their responses to each other. so person 1 writes a sentence, person 2 responds with a sentence, person 3 responds with another sentence, etc. all the way out to 100+ submissions.

Further, if people don't like one of the sentences in the flow, they can add ANOTHER sentence parallel to it instead (but branching off the same previous sentence).

So as you can see it's basically a long branching tree of sentences.

How would you visualize this? In the Reddit interface, that would become unwieldy because the horizontal real estate it would take is just too wide, it would be impossible to see smoothly on one page.

Answer 1

Please excuse my horrible paint drawing.

This may be a UI built more for fun and discovery that absolute efficiency, but I propose keeping the sentences in a single coulmn as they go down the page (visualized by the dark gray bars within the vertical lines), then when the user hits one of these splitting branches it becomes a carousel/swiper view where the user can swipe from the current chain of sentences (shown by the green bar) to one of the parallel chains of sentences (show by the red bars). By swiping, the whole chain subsequent sentences in that chain are moves to the current column and the user can continue downward through the chain.