Show HN: Using flamegraphs to read big HN threads
I'm not sure if it helps much. It emphasizes deep threads. Do we care for deep threads? Well, not really. Usually we want to see threads with a lot of votes and a lot of replies (breadth-wise), and when navigating we want to be able to follow the thread of replies to an individual comment. You can comfortably list all parents of a comment on this flamegraph, but basically you'll end up reading a random thread w/o knowing first if it will be interesting.<p>And the problem of big flame-tongues is more of a HN/reddit reply format, i.e. I don't know if it can be solved by another UI. People using the default UI in such threads reply only to the first comment, because it's the only way to be seen. Nobody reads past few first top-comments.<p>I guess it's very much opinionated, because people first time on 4chan tend to get lost, but I've long came to conclusion that the imageboard reply format is the best there can be, especially with some simple UI tweaks. You can follow threads easily, you can reply to any number of comments, you can link several discussions into one. It's easy to spot a post with lots of replies. It's easy to scroll, unlike HN comments. The downside is that 3000-comment thread would terribly slow down your browser, about the 1000 is the upper-limit I guess, and usually threads are just split into series of multiple threads on the 500-post mark. But that obviously wouldn't work anyway if the main feature is to order posts based on the number of votes. So, alternative UI like that for HN wouldn't help very much either.<p>What would really help on HN is the ability to collapse all of the children w/o collapsing the parent-post itself, and showing multiple top-level posts on a single page when children are collapsed. This way you could browse for the discussions you are interested in and expand them further.