We have the technology, we can do both!
The page is drowning in useless javascript gimmickry anyway, it should be possible to add some actually useful javascript to seamlessly switch between linear, conversation and tree view. You know, to aid the user in his interaction with the content rather than fancy stylesheets and sliding widgets.
The more I look at discourse the more it infuriates me.
The complete disregard of time tested interfaces (Usenet and the authors own StackOverflow) just doesn't jive at all with their wild claims to "reinvent online discourse". Unless their idea of reinvention translates to repeating every mistake made in the past 30 years...
What they did is unleash a terrible forum software that will undoubtedly be forced down the throat of a great many users for no reason other than it being "the next hip SV thing".
local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.
False.
In the early days, browser designers took care to use different link colors for visited/unvisited links (gasp!). Nowdays, in the age of fancy JS gimmicks and contrast-less design, we are overriding this functionality because it apparently looks better (if you don't see the extra information).
Forums with diffent link colors for visited/unvisited posts and threading work pretty well. It's not to hard to implement something like this with JS (unless one wants all posts to be open/visible as default).
edit: In yesterday's discussion I posted some advantages of a discussion system based on tree structure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175660
Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.