What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.
Let me mention my recent app for an alternative view of the HN comments (Hackeray) [1][2]. I'm sure this is not for everyone, but for me this view really helped to read the comments more clearly and basically absorb any big discussion here.
I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
Not to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout.
Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.
Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.