The idea behind threaded comments is they're a separate thread so to have them "folded in" is counter intuitive. It's already evident that this sort of "threading" is a problem, if you look you can see users referring to each other by name which doesn't associate the reply with the parent, which makes the conversation hard to follow. Imagine this with 10,000 replies...

If you don't properly thread the comments then you will very much cripple the way a conversation can evolve, I run one of the largest forums and if there's one thing that absolutely sucks it's a lack of proper threading, it seriously restricts how long a topic can survive and how useful it can be.

Is there any setup that can handle 10,000 replies well? I've always thought of it as an unsolved problem. Even with threading like HN, you have "more" and I almost never click it. I think /. used to have similar paging. Reddit?

The idea further down this chain of branching off sub-conversations has some merit IMO.

Ah I got you. I have considered this multiple times, but a flat system still appears better for me. Yes, it is a very important issue and I will try to come up with a better solution, probably hybrid.

Something I like is the idea of "forking" topics, conversations evolve and if a new comment thread becomes over a few replies there's generally a good chance it has become its own conversation which can then involve into another conversation etc etc etc.

If I was trying to keep the system as "flat" as possible I would consider deciding on an arbitrary cut off point (total replies, or total "levels" of replies) that automatically forks a thread into a new topic and then in the original topic would display in a similar style to a comment but with "this comment has generated a new topic, 2 replies... load preview / go to topic")

not sure if that's explained well enough, but I think that would solve the problem.

That's a great idea. Maybe it needs good auto-categorization to implement well, but another idea is to not bother with the thresholds at all -- every comment can potentially spawn off a new wave of replies, so why not just fork into separate threads immediately? The top level view gives you the flat view of the top level thread, and by diving in through the replies you can keep flat views of each sub-conversation. If every comment is treated the same, then it truly doesn't matter how old the comment you're replying to is because you could be sparking an entirely new discussion.

I couldn't find any nested comments, but I think it would be good to not flatten them so that you can actually see the conversation directly, like we're doing now

http://pivory.com/#user/3/2498 they're easy to make.