@Encosia, I think you touch on an important issues - it's the flatness (or I would say two-dimensionality) of standard collapse/expand tress that's the problem here. Tree data, when it gets big, simply does not lend itself to good visualization in traditional 2D. You either end up panning too much or collapsing and essentially losing your orientation within the large view. The same is true, btw, for more complex graphs, not just trees. Although you don't see many of those in discussions, you do see the same problems in my field, which is project management. Discussions, however, do often have one comment replying at the same time to more than one previous comment, and it's a shame that the default visualization is always a tree and not a graph. The solution, I think, can come from novel approaches to visualizing large graph (or tree) data, such as ZUI (zoomable UI). You can see an example of what I mean here: http://feedback.gigantt.com/knowledgebase/articles/98039-team-view We (at Gigantt) use zoom to take trees/graphs, that would otherwise require panning dozens of screens to navigate, and turn them into something that can fit just one normal-sized screen by using the extra zoom "dimension". In short, discussion boards could be ripe for innovation using ZUIs, and we're actually considering designing our in-app discussion feature in just this way.

Is the banking system more corrupt because of more regulation, or is it the other way around?

Wait, so this blog is creative commons as well? Can everybody else just grab quality material from SO and post it on their blog? Cause all I can see is "Content (C) Jeff Atwood" at the bottom... Step 1: Build an awesome community tool that attracts millions of programmers Step 2: Close down any question that's too popular or, god forbid, fun. Step 3: Post same question on own blog...