This is probably the last chance I'll get to let everyone know that Hacker News has recently started to paginate comment threads (see my submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746568, which apparently very few people saw).
I definitely have an axe to grind because it breaks my code, but I really believe it's very bad for discussions. In particular the case of only a single comment and it's children appearing on the first page of comments on threads with large number of comments is the biggest problem. It leads to only one response to the article being heard and has the side effect of greatly encouraging piggy-backing on the "first post", as it were.
edit: when I say 'my code' I mean my code that's forked from wvl's hckrnews.com extension and any other extension that highlights new posts since you last opened the discussion.
Additionally, I have a habit of opening a browser window and all of the discussions I want to read each in its own tab.
This browser window may be sitting in the background for hours if I'm busy, and by the time I get to read it, reach the end and press "More" I'm presented with "unknown or expired link" which, to me, is the culmination of disrespect for the reader.
Yes, I agree that having only a single parent comment is very poor UX. It is compounded that often by the time you get to the bottom of the page the "more" link is expired!
This is especially bad for HN because of the "unknown or expired link" problem.
If I am 3 pages deep in a thread and press the "More" button then if I have been on the page for a certain amount of time I get the dreaded "unknown or expired link" and have to click back to the start and through a load more pages.
Almost 2 months ago HN started doing this at short time spans (high traffic?), and coming back to default behavior. (I commented here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3627285 ) This becoming definitive is not a good thing.
I definitely have an axe to grind because it breaks my code, but I really believe it's very bad for discussions. In particular the case of only a single comment and it's children appearing on the first page of comments on threads with large number of comments is the biggest problem. It leads to only one response to the article being heard and has the side effect of greatly encouraging piggy-backing on the "first post", as it were.
edit: when I say 'my code' I mean my code that's forked from wvl's hckrnews.com extension and any other extension that highlights new posts since you last opened the discussion.