Nesting is both good and bad. For hacker news it's good, because those are more "asocial" conversations - I don't know who I am replying to, I don't personally

Nesting is both good and bad. For hacker news it's good, because those are more "asocial" conversations - I don't know who I am replying to, I don't personally know any of you folks and I don't really remember to who I replied. However, a lot of forums (phpbb and the like) are more "social" - you get to know the people, you want to read what they have to write even if it's not a reply to you. You just want to follow the whole conversation. Usually it's doable, because the forums are rather small in audience, people know each other and so on. Yes, it wouldn't work for reddit or digg or slashdot because there are tons of people there and you just can't read everything. But for a smaller forum? Yes, I want PhpBB style conversation rather than nested one.