I find the nesting of comments within threads too subtle. I can't "see" the nesting and have to work at it.
In the context of programming languages the research (quoted in Steve McConnell's books I think) seems to suggest that indenting by 3 characters optimizes the ability to "see" the nesting. Currently it's one character only.
Increasing the nesting characters is not free of course as it leads to very deep indentation. But there are ways of displaying very deep nesting though eg displaying ! for every ten levels.
Absolutely, so many parallel lines get insane. What about something like Disqus where you click reply to someone and it creates a link to the post you're replying to? Maybe that'd be cumbersome. Brainstorming...
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!