[lvl102]

No, it’s a bit more complicated than that because the comments are threaded. It could take a few passing to find a gem comment. Also, the comments evolve over time meaning you might not find anything at the time of your browsing.

[glowingly]

That's sort of how I feel about comment trees. ~100-200 comments is the safe max for me, after that, sufficient garbage is present to degrade readability. It's subreddit/topic/ToD dependent, since some are difficult to follow from the beginning.

[endisneigh]

But even with a single thread you’d have the same problem. How would you know what’s useful beyond using votes and sorting?

[ItsMonkk]

I wish I could set multiple sortation options at the same time. So I might see the top 'best' post, followed by the top 'controversial' post, followed by the 'newest' post. Then the second best of each.. etc..

As for threaded, I like how StackOverflow handles this. You have separate top level answers, but underneath that is flat comments that can be filtered a tad for quality or totally unwrapped. That system works very well.