It's pretty difficult to have a conversation of any kind, let alone a productive one, without threaded comments. I feel like the site is stuck in the 90s along with Fark.
I disagree completely. When you have threaded comments, what happens is that people post their (often reactionary) opinions in response to OP, and then other people respond in kind to those opinions. On occasion you get a witty quip or a good story, but there's just no meaningful flow of conversation. It's soapbox vs. soapbox. On the other hand, non-threaded discussions, while more difficult to follow, read like actual, real-life conversations. You have a chance of having a pleasant discussion (or even changing someone's mind!) on those sites.
I post on HN or Reddit when I feel like adding a point of data to a debate. I post on MeFi when I want to talk to my peers.
(Admittedly, even sites like MeFi can't compare to talking with people in real life. There's something to be said for taking control of someone's locus of attention while you're talking, which you simply can't do when you have to talk in discrete, comment-sized chunks.)
With Mefi, one could always quote someone in reply to make things clear. Some of the best discussions online happen over at Metafilter. (I find HN interesting due to it's SV audience, but it functionally feels like an old version of reddit.)
What hurts both G+ (and HN) is the absence of a specific blockquote markdown.
None of italicize everything quoted, "put quotes in quotes (especially for long passages)", nor > prefix quotes with a greater-than sign work particularly well IMO. Though I suppose they generally suffice.
Blockquotes have been supported in markdown as the ">" prefix since the very beginning. It's a mystery that HN doesn't support it when even reddit does.
Funny, I was just having a real-life conversation in which I was saying that I prefer the Metafilter style and find it difficult to follow HN/Reddit threaded conversations because it's non-trivial to find updates and all the action ends up in the first thread when there might be some good stuff below.
Chowhound has a nice compromise where it's threaded but all the comments you've already seen are folded by default. I'm sure there must be other communities that do the same thing.
Reddit partually folds comments based on score, but yeah some JavaScript to be more aggressive at first (and auto expand if you want to go deeper into a thread) mightnhelp
It's definitely a matter of taste, and it's fine that different folks prefer different stuff. The flat model works well enough for Metafilter -- we're constantly seeing thoughtful, responsive conversations on all kinds of topics in the site's discussion threads -- but it's a virtue of the web that there's a variety of models out there so different folks can have their preferences met.
The benefit is that it's easy to follow everything, like on ongoing conversation. I've been following this post throughout the day and I have no idea where the new comments are. Perhaps I've just never taken well to threaded comments, but I'd much rather have to mentally follow threads if that means I can at least read everything as it's posted.
My general preference is for threaded rather than flat comments. If you want to dive into a particular aspect of a topic in depth, they allow for this.
I've seen flat discussion style particularly on G+. While I strongly feel it doesn't scale well, what you do get for small discussions is a conversation which feels a bit more like a handful of people talking in a room. Assuming people are clueful enough to read the preceding comments and take them into account (observed more in the breech), there's more of a chance for side conversations to work their way back into the main stream.
The problem is that, as with a discussion in a room, the discussion tends not to scale well. Past a half-dozen to a dozen primary participants, continuity tends to be lost. Threading allows for break-outs of specific interest. Sites such as reddit (with RES) that allow expanding or collapsing of specific sub-threads (RES's "hide all child comments" is great for busy posts) are particularly useful. I find that navigating reddit threads on busy posts to be somewhat challenging: too many open/close options and long threads are cut off too soon, particularly when you're viewing just that thread.
HN wants badly for a specific "response to comment / post" feature. You can view your threads but have to find and respond individually, and responses to anything but recent comments get lost.
Greatly improves my user experience on both sites. I suppose this kind of thing isn't built into the sites themselves because of concern about the extra server or client storage needed. Super useful though.
I'm experimenting with a forum which lets you switch between threaded and flat format for threads... although I'm a bit worried that, once people actually use it, it might be confusing if group a is browsing in one mode and group b is browsing in another, still I don't know if you have to have one or the other exclusively. The way that the structure of a forum affects the nature of discussion is an interesting problem, though. And probably one that's been thoroughly solved but.. eh.
