Also, collapsing comment trees would be great so as to avoid having to scroll past dozens of comments in a long-winded discussion of something only tangentially-related to the submission.
(See I have to do this, otherwise there is no way to indicate assent. For PG to know this is popular, if he just looks at the regular site page, he would need a huge string of such comments.)
Perfect, thanks. It'd still be nice if it was a site feature so I wouldn't have to install that script on every computer I browse HN from, but it's a great band-aid solution. Thanks again.
As an alternative, I think it would be a good idea if some people could detach such branches, moving the entire branch into a separate topic.
I would leave the top comment both as introduction for the new thread and at its original location, with a link to the new topic.
I also think it might be possible to somewhat automatically detect such branches. That would make it easier for the 'some' that get this power to detect them.
However, if one has such software, it might be better and easier to 100% automatically collapse all candidate threads with a generated remark "this appears to start a new topic", ideally with keywords describing what the topic is about)
