Couple of thoughts - 1. The collapse war you wage on Reddit is easily solved by offering to collapse all children of the top-level replies (or defaulting them to collapsed and offering an expand for those who don't want to manually expand all replies). I think the RES browser plugin offers this already, and I've found it quite useful for pun-thread-heavy discussions 2. Shacknews.com (specifically shacknews.com/latestchatty.x ) has an implementation of threaded discussion that I think works well once you are used to it. All 2nd level replies are single-line and expand when you click on them to reveal the text. This can get annoying to browse if you are using a mouse, but I've found that using keyboard navigation hotkeys makes it pretty painless. Been a while since I have frequented their site, but if I recall correctly, the age of the reply affects its color (fades from white to grey) so that you can easily see where fresh new replies are popping up