Note that GP said 'was'. I cannot tell how it is now, but there definitely was a point in time when Slashdot went for a dumb JS-enabled-dynamic-interactive fad and totally screwed the usability of their comments section. This is what made me stop participating.

Yes when they first put in the Javascript it was a pain, of course NoScript fixed that.

Reddit was, is, and looks like it always will be, a mess. Even when Slashdot first put in the Javascript in place you could at least still find things on the site.

>a dumb JS-enabled-dynamic-interactive fad //

They still have that, so not so much of a fad. It works but at the time it got in the way for me too and probably contributed to me jumping ship as well.

HN crowd on /. comment moderation with slimmer graphics and collapsible comment trees (like reddit) would probably be close to what I think of as ideal.

In other words, the way it was before the JS and redesign failures. I agree.

There's a difference when I can't find anything on Reddit because there is so much and their means provided for finding subreddits necessitates third-party efforts to ease the search, and Slashdot's random interface constituting a huge question mark. Many, many times I can go to the top /. story in my RSS feed, then go to the front page and not see it there at all.

Slashdot's moderation UI is pretty much the only thing besides comment-nesting that survived the redesign of X years ago, which ruined the site for me and took me from reading most of my tech commentary there down to a handful per month. Good for them and their UI designers, but I'm still bitter. It really is a terrible site to use.

Reddit's default UI went the same way, if not as far, but you can turn the vast majority of the previews and other debris off so that it looks very similar to HN (and very similar to how Reddit looked around a year in, which was UI perfection for me). I'll agree that if I'm not logged in, Reddit is a confusing jumble. Turning off previews goes a long way toward making it a solid block of paragraphs of text, which is most easy to read. For me. :)