Taking some liberties with the situation, behavior, impact framework:
Situation
Today I found myself thinking: “I had forgotten that you can always ask @deeplow to split a topic if you notice that questions appear which sound interesting but are not strictly on-topic (may not be of interest of everybody in the thread), next time I’ll call that out early.” Trying to keep the distinction clear while, in practice, creating sub-threads is without doubt a bad idea in hindsight.
(Suggested) Behavior
As someone who has recently joined the forum, I think it wouldn’t hurt reminding that the above is an option from time to time. 
Impact
At a personal level, I think such a reminder would make after-the-fact observations of “it’s too late now, people won’t join the conversation anymore” feel less unfair, and the forum feel more inclusive to newcomers. After all, structured conversation is a skill and requires practice too. (That was not a quote by the way, only the retranscription of my perception.)
I hope this makes sense and helps increasing the number of collaborative conversations on the forum!
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Yes! Although reminding people is kind of hard (because I have to remind myself to do that and people may find it annoying), I think whenever I split threads I think I can give some context to people.
From my moderating experience the best possible situation for starting a sub-thread is when an adjacent topic sparks out of another one and someone mentions @deeplow or flags the topic to ask for it to be split.
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the perfect - It’s especially fruitful if I get there within the first 4 or 5 replies to that off-topic as it has already engaged users in the new topic, hopefully hasn’t alienated the other thread and can be easily split
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the bad - when I get too late to the conversation and it’s already too entangled to split “cleanly”. In these cases I just ask people to stop the off-topic and open another thread for that if they want.
edit: now looking back at it, I actually am in favor of people deviating in a different direction from the original thread. Isn’t this how real-life conversations happen?
Of course this means more work, for me. But if people call me out to when a thread can be split (by flagging, for example), it’s not that complicated.
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Thanks for the reminder; I should’ve asked for a split elsewhere but just sat around expecting it to happen since I wasn’t sure whether it was worth splitting.
Sometimes I worry that threads will fission into an unmanageable tangle of threads if we split too often. If it wasn’t for the off-topic policy and limited participations in those threads, the splitting could go nuclear (pun totally intended).
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