I couldn't help myself. Always desperate to find an opportunity to shove my 2 cents into the world. So imagine my glee when you provided me with another one!

Yeah, I think both (A) defaulting to auto-expanded threads and (B) making them annoying to collapse make HN worse than it could be.

You tend to read the top-level thread because it's already there. And then it ends up being longer than you expected, or you're trapped in a subtree that just won't end, or you just want to see what other people are saying. And there's no good way to move past it.

Would be nice to click the indentation to collapse the thread anywhere inside the tree.