Before HN, before Digg, before any kind of social networking or all encompassing tech news sites, there was Slashdot. I still remember when one of the first questions to ask a fellow programmer was, "You on Slashdot? What's your number?"
And /. still has better comment setup than anything out there today that supposedly 'surpassed' it.
Sadly, I think you may be right. We can do better though, because it still sucks. Something merging the innovations in thread sorting from HN and cherry picking from large amounts of comments from /. would be nice.