[eduren]

Do you think it would help to have a comment reply notification built into HN? Most of the time if I decide not to add a follow-up comment it's because the user I'm replying to has no way of being notified that I did. Or do you think it would just exacerbate the urgency issues?

[Chathamization]

That might be somewhat useful, but the thing is after a few hours your conversation with the other person is going to be no better than a private message (since no one else is going to see the topic). Web forums bump the topic back to the top, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the "news" angle. It might be interesting separating the two - have the submissions act like they do know, but have the comments for the submissions be in individual threads in a separate discussion forum.

[overcast]

Something other than the awful threading would be nice. It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations.

[krapp]

>It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations

It's been implied that this is an intentional means of keeping engagement low, as the quality of comments tends to diminish over time, while the likelihood of flamebait and spam increases as comment distance diverges from the root. This is also apparently the reason there are no notifications for new comments. I don't know if it's true or one of those features the community is reading too much meaning into, which only exists as it does because pg wasn't interested in expanding on it.

In any case, I really hope they consider adding more ways to sort the threads - sorting by time rather than karma would be very helpful. They could even keep the karma sort the default so no one else has to complain about the layout changing.