For me it improves readability on both slashdot and theguardian.
I am more likely to read an "important" (important or hilarious) top level comment in the first hundred or two of top level comments than in the first thousand or two of unnested comments.
Slashdot hides threads according to user "votes", theguardian hides nested comments after the first few, you need to click to read the rest of the thread, they only do one level of nesting.
I wasn't keen on theguardian's transition to threaded comments at first, but it does actually work better for me. Sure, I miss some great comments because I don't open a nested thread, but there are usually thousands of comments on articles I am interested in - time is the main factor in determining whether I see all the interesting comments or not. I run out of time, rarely read more than 2 pages of comments.
So collapsing threads does actually get me reading more of the comments - I am ignoring nested comments rather than scanning them, I am scanning top level comments rather than (usually) less relevant responses to a comment. Now that I am used to the system I can tell more or less if I want to click to open a thread for further reading
Slashdot (with it's community modded closing of threads and multiple levels of nesting) seems to work for me as well. I click to open less threads than on the guardian, tend to rely on the community reputation modding thing.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)
updated by @ultrajam: 10/23/14 02:12:09PM
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