[abruzzi]

If you were able to toggle HN from tree view to chronological view, it would be borderline incomprehensible. With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to because the placement of the post will usually make that obvious (I note that you did quote, but none of the responses to your post quoted you.) I see the same on reddit. There are UI change you could make that might solve this, but classic forums and HN/reddit each encourage different behavior.

To me HN and reddit are single use. I go in and read comments once, but I never go back, because when they go back, there is no way for me to know what I have and haven't read (maybe there is in reddit--I don't really use it and have no account.) There are probably things HN could do to mitigate that issue and still retain threading.

[krapp]

You can have a chronologically sorted tree view - sort each subtree chronologically and then the root comments, keeping the hierarchy. HN doesn't do it because it would undermine the goal of karma sorting, and potentially lower the quality of conversation*. You could arguably do it with a flat view (I've seen some alternate HN views posted as Show HNs that do so) but you would have to add chan-style greentext links to everything which IMO makes things uglier.

* It probably wouldn't really but HN is incredibly paranoid about that sort of thing. Pun intended.

[KajMagnus]

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861

If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context.

> You can have a chronologically sorted tree view

Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

[krapp]

I have a browser plugin that highlights most recent unread comments on HN with a yellow background, and counts new comments in the thread listings. One could even add "next unread" links as well.

I've seen imageboards that toggle between a flat and tree view with javascript.

Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point. Unfortunately almost no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time. Only a very fringe subset of nerds (myself included, I still weep for my HN clone in Hack that will never be finished, and my Godot client that will never be released) considers forum UI design to be interesting.

[KajMagnus]

> no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time

Not sure about that. To me it looks as if Facebook is self sabotaging, for example their local events page is broken and has been for years. FB-the-company seems defunct internally, and if they start fading away (slowly over many 10s of years), maybe forums will make a comeback (slowly). Also, if AIs destroy Reddit, this might be an opportunity for smaller forums that have ways to block boring AIs.

> Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point

Definitely not :- )

[throw0101a]

> With tree views like HN, nobody bothers to quote what they are reacting to […]

He says as he replies to a commented that did quoting. :)