It feels to me like some of that was having the same group of random strangers interacting. Rather than a constant flux of single comments.
Old forums had the opposite issue (with threads years old being "necro'd" back to the top, confusing everyone) but at least you could have a discussion over a couple of days.
I wrote my own tagging system for HN and it's hard to describe how much it changed the experience for me. only usernames feels a bit like being in a community where everyone wears the same clothes, uses a vocoder, and covers up their faces. if you squint you might be able to make out the nametag.
I would love to find ways to more easily identify users on here. The username, despite my best efforts, I mostly overlook or can't remember.
On Forums, with Avatar images, this used to be so much simpler.
I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered discussions.
Yes, and not in the least because one can answer/reference multiple messages in one post, thus bringing different conversation 'branches' back together. It also provides a nice chronological order to follow the whole discussions, which is hard in nested discussions.
However, flat discussions have limits: once you have hundreds of participants, it becomes nearly impossible to follow. I estimate that the limit to more or less comfortably follow flat discussion is ~50 posts/day, or 15-30 more or less active posters.