There is a firefox greasemonkey script called "Hacker News Threadify" [1], which claims to do just what you want. It works pretty well too.

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/110317

Thanks WCJ, this was quite helpful.

but this is an inherent feature on all forum type sites. Should we all install separate scripts for each webpage we visit?

No, only the ones you want to unilaterally change.

It works great!

Extremely helpful, thank you!

If you use chrome, I can recommend the Hacker News Enhancement Suite extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

just installed. Now Hackernews is readable. Thanks Fuzz!

Collapsible comments have looked liked garbage on every site on which I've seen them used. I think having flat, always-open comments on our threads is actually a much better way of doing things.

Really? I find it makes it incredibly hard to follow a conversation. With no layering visuals or collapsing feature, large threads with multiple replies become very confusing.

I'm glad somebody pointed to the greasemonkey script to add collapsing. I expect it will make my use of HN much more pleasant.

I think it's fine as it is. I'd prefer it to be unwieldy, as to discourage overly meta discussions.

Like others mentioned, you specifically are not at a loss because someone wrote a script to solve it.

I agree, I think this would help reduce a lot of clutter, and I think it is a feature that should be standard in comment systems.

I was so hoping that this was someone showing off their realtime Hacker News comments firehose page.

Yeah, that whole scrolling thing is so tricky.

You'd seriously rather click than scroll? Strange idea of easier...

Collapsing becomes useful when nested comments have many siblings.

It is indeed easier to collapse a tree of comments and read the next sibling than to scroll through many comments looking for a specific indentation level.