Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design. Threaded's not great, but compl

Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design. Threaded's not great, but completely flat comments scale really poorly -- I can't imagine scanning a page with ~100 unthreaded comments, but I do that all the time at HN. A lot of the points seem like they could be improved a lot with a little javascript (ie, nuking unproductive threads), but, as the quotation below indicates, those changes probably aren't going to be made here. [1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (4 paragraphs from the end, "But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."