Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on HN.
With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn.
So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post.
And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize.
If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier.
But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.
With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn.
So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post.
And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize.
If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier.
But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.