Did you read all 55 pages of this?
I did. And let me tell you, I want those hours – literally, hours – of my life back.
Anyway, the rest of the thread will always be there for completionists. I’m not proposing that we do away with a regular chronological view at all. But for uh, cough busy people who have, like, lives and kids and stuff, we need a way to get to the essence of the discussion in an epic thread (or just the useful bits) without devoting our lives to clicking “next page” – that’s what this is about. Give us the Reader’s Digest version, mang! The highlights reel! The BEST OF! THE GREATEST HITS!
Hell, the sad part of threads like that is that there are 20-30 posts that are freaking brilliant in there, but good luck excavating them out of the 55+ pages of cruft and diversions and bickering and thread-jacking to get to them. What I propose would save these posts from obscurity, that is the opposite of hurting the site and removing casual discussion.
Have all the casual discussion you want. It’s like Jay Leno with Doritos. We’ll make more.