alt Hacker NewsIt should be rather simple to add an (optional?) article-view which roll's up a chain of comments from the same author, and presents it as a flat collected text. Each comment would a single paragraph, showing if there are comments from others, to this specific paragraph, which could be shown as an overlay, inline or on the side. No functionality would be lost, but it would improve readability significant. I don't understand why twitter and similar services, never made an attempt to improve their chaotic system. I mean on Twitter there are even bots doing this on external websites.
Once it started becoming common to start attaching screenshots of text to Tweets (many years ago now), I wondered why they didn't think to allow add "text attachments" similar to how images and videos are attachments. You put a description of the post within the normal text limitations, and tap a thumbnail to load a long (maybe even markdown-formatted) text and read it. It keeps the feeds short both visually and in bytes.