Two-Dimensional Comments
timf: An alternative would be to collapse 2nd level comments and below.  You choose which thread to get involved with by clicking in.  There's probably a greasemonkey script that does this.That's how I read the site without any help from the UI, I don't find it to be that big of a deal. If there are more than ~5 comments on a topic, I will scan all the top level comments first to get a feel for the conversations and then dive into what I want to read.