After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads.
Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam).
But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ?
(I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)
Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.