[hannah]

Just the last post with an [Expand] button would solve most of your objection.

My objection is threads which consist mainly of swathes of quotes including quotes within quotes. I don't see how your suggestion helps.

I kinda agree with James here. What he explains is what you see when you visit Reddit. But the thing I wanted to add. When I visit BN I am not logged in, then I see something and want to react on that...all I can click then is REPLY. and then we get to long quotes. You can only react without quoting when you are already logged in.

When you are not logged in all you can click on is reply then you get to log in and you get the quoting thing which we dont desire here. So maybe do change the website design or totally remove the quoting button as is delivers us a clean and tidied website.

I think James is right we cannot have best of both worlds here as it would ask the cooperation of all users.
The website will remain messy and the quote button will be used for its benefits which gives us the mess in the first place.