Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.

Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site's greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what's going on.

This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you're never going to catch up and still give a shit.