> It's actually more than that: when there are lots of sub-comments, it helps to see the immediate "mother" of the comment node you're reading. Imagine a comment that has two replies, and the first reply has dozens and dozens of sub-replies and sub-sub-replies, which typically veer into all sorts of adjacent issues. By the time I'm done with the 1st reply and its dozens and dozens of sub-replies, it is often unclear what the initial comment (or even topic) was. It is then very helpful to be able to glance back up to the initial comment across the now-collapsed first reply and its dozens and dozens of sub-replies, before reading reply #2. Simply navigating to reply #2 doesn't give you that.

I think I get what you mean. Instead of adding 3 different collapse commands, WDYT about adding one command to collapse the current comment and one command to move up to the parent comment?

> I mean this page of the HN site: https://news.ycombinator.com/active . It has the currently actively discussed stories, and is a great way to catch up after not reading HN for a day or two. A kind of intermediate step between best ( https://news.ycombinator.com/best ) and the homepage.

Interesting, I don't know `/best` and `/active` exist. `/best` seems to be a list of stories (up to past 4 days) sorted by `points`.

`/active`, on the other hand, and `/news` as well are quite weird. I don't really know the algorithm behind the order of sorting submissions in those.

In the meantime, I guess open the `Story View - All stories` with `sort_by=popularity` and `time_range=past 24 hours` might do the job.