Thanks. Yes, I think you are right that we are going to need some sort of mechanism to discern read from unread comments. Collapsing is also something that we will likely have to implement.
Well, I think we need to be careful with collapsing comments. It promotes top comments too much and dampens further conversation. I actually like uncollapsed comments. I would never had read kleinbl00's comment down here if comments were collapsed as easy as on most other sites.
I'd like to see collapsing. Uncollapsed could be the default though. Even though there are 200 comments on "who are you," only 30 of them might be answers to the question. I'd like to know that without having to scroll through the sideline conversations -- not that kleinbl00's diamond ring opinions are uninteresting -- but they are not answers to the main question. It's a hard call. It would be interesting to see what the majority feel about the collapse option. EDIT: 29 not 30 - What does that say about this community? 29 introductions and 171 riffs on the theme.