I created a quick UserScript that does just this. Hacked together but seems to work well. You can find it here [0][1]

[0] https://gist.github.com/evanreichard/96d89512cbfe23e5d7a8147...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/qGUltI8.png

I was going to ask how to install it but figured I should be able to figure it by myself. After a few web searches and reading this Hacker News discussion¹, I installed GreaseMonkey and it was super-easy from there.

Many thanks! It works like a charm.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896078

Very helpful, thanks for sharing! I'm installing it now.

This is one of the few things where I think the new Reddit is actually a little better. Same basic idea as at your link, but make it so that those guidelines that are running down to the left of the subtree are the thing you click to collapse, instead of having a separate invisible (until you mouse over) collapse column next to the guideline.

The Refined Hacker News extension for Chrome has a “collapse root” button on each comment that I think does what you want.

+1 for the extension. Been using it since forever on Firefox and Brave.

Link: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

Note that the extension is also for Firefox (and, I'll attest as well, is great).

Great extension. Thank you for recommending.

Hackerdaily [1] has a nice interface for collapsing comments too, though it suffers from the same issue on mobile that the main HN site does. The collapse button just follows you down the page until you are through all of a comment's children, so you can always collapse without scrolling back up.

https://hackerdaily.io/29482351/comments

There are lots of interesting HN-specific browser extensions, if you know where to look.

One I came across performs automatic voting. On pageload, it scans for comments starting with "So..." or ending with " lol" and downvotes them. I'm not sure who this is for. "Communication peeves" comes to mind, but doesn't quite fit. I'm don't know what the word is for this.

My 5 cents: This makes it way too easy to accidentally collapse threads as the clickable area is hard to tell apart from whitespace. (Speaking from regular and annoying experience with on old.reddit.com.) I, for one, much prefer the HN style buttons.

I know I'm late to the party but this could do what you want: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427429-hacker-news-context... (disclaimer, I made it)

I did this to toggle all the comments via bookmarklet: https://greptips.hashnode.dev/hacker-news-toggle-comments

A little bit of UX like this would go a long way towards fixing the problem where the first root comment gets all the activity, because people get sucked in to one of many subthreads as they scroll past.

It would be also very useful to know how "deep" you are into a comment thread.

Slashdot has that. Ability to collapse would be enough for me