Comment by peterkelly
9 years ago
The collapsing comments thing is great, but what I'd really love to see is the ability to display only the top-level comments, so then I can drill down to sub-comments I'm interested in reading. Often I find that there'll be one sub-comment thread I'm not particularly interested in (e.g. discussion trails off into a completely different topic) and end up scrolling a lot to try and find the next top-level comment.
When I was at HuffPost, we briefly had a comment interface that let you switch between depth-first and breadth-first comment listing. We retired it pretty quickly with our entire comments system, but I remain convinced that some version of that is the way to go.