I think you're probably right. I haven't thought about what kind of metric to look at, but it should be pretty easy to at least get close to where the interesting conversation started.

Undisciplined

If there's a high-value embedded comment lower in the subtree, it would hopefully have been zapped appropriately, though, right?  And practically speaking, it's not usually that onerous to read a subtree.  It's rare for them to cross the "see more replies" boundary, empirically.  Or at least, that's my sense.

elvismercury

Stacker Saloon

saloon

> And then what to show for it?

That's tough, because the interesting topic could have started anywhere in the tree. Just showing the parent comment might not give any sense of why that subtree generated so much value.

Even if there are good LLM summaries of the conversation, they will still have to decide where to send users who want to check out the thread.