I absolutely despise the phpboard type sites where you have to wade through 1000 low-quality replies [<= 1 2 3 ... 57 58 LAST => ] to find the meaningful ones.

I absolutely despise the phpboard type sites where you have to wade through 1000 low-quality replies [<= 1 2 3 ... 57 58 LAST => ] to find the meaningful ones. HN is not perfect (breaks above several hundred replies), but it is pretty good. I did kind of like slashdot's upvote-reason information. I thought it could have evolved better though. There could have been "browse serious answers" or "browse to entertain" to match them. That could be an answer to stack overflow's "death to discussion" kinds of things.