Here is a good recent comment-heavy thread to stress-test: https://www.orangecrumbs.com/hn/?story=48736605&feed=top

Some things I noticed:

- The comments are not in HN order; "vibecoded prediction market–style" is at the top in OrangeCrumbs, but near the bottom on actual HN; actual top comment ("I'm struggling to understand why I'd ever use this instead") is buried in the middle on OrangeCrumbs.

- Other comment sort options are interesting

- It is difficult to read a deep thread. Requires clicking once for each level. (I just found keyboard shortcuts that kind of help, like [)

- The left and right sidebars are kind of distracting. So I find the mobile view easier to read. I do think sidebar can be better use of wide screens; perhaps try muting the sidebars and/or allow them to be toggled? I find the right sidebar more useful than the left one.

- Keyboard navigation: conflicts with Vimium. The only "natural" keyboard shortcuts I could discover were arrow keys + SPACE. (`?` was also natural, but unfortunately Vimium had priority.) Personally, I prefer skimming HN threads with the mouse scroll wheel and a few occasional clicks. (It seems it would require a lot of keyboard shortcut keys for a similar reading experience)

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Here's my take on rendering comment-heavy HN threads: https://hn.leftium.com/i/48736605

- Render comments at 3 levels of detail: Full (top level), one-line excerpt (2nd level), grouped into single color strip (everything else)

- Make threads expandable at three levels of detail:

1. Expand all direct replies only

2. Ungroup: expand collapsed comments as one-line excerpts

3. Expand entire comment sub-tree.

This is the way I found myself wanting to read long threads: skim the top level or two for threads I found interesting. Keep recursively skimming like this for the interesting comment sub-threads.

Some other features I plan to add:

1. Expand/highlight all comments by specific user(s). Currently OP is highlighted. (But not auto-expanded, yet.)

2. Filter for certain words in thread: typing a query automatically expands matching comments; parent comments may be expanded as one-line summaries for context.

So my reading process is scroll with the mouse wheel until I find an interesting comment thread; occasionally click to toggle those threads between collapsed and higher levels of detail.