There's been plenty of discussion and dozens of suggestions on how to make comments tidier / more limited / self-cleaning / auto-expiring. The option of hiding non-upvoted comments after 30 days has even been brought into play by Jeff himself if I remember correctly. 

No point collecting ideas *again* that won't be acted on anyway, and discussing the merits and problems of long comment threads - we've done that plenty of times and the result appears to have been "it's not big enough a problem that any change is needed". Nothing about will have changed fundamentally on the front end - but it might on the moderators' end. If that's the case and you guys are drowning in comment garbage, make yourself heard and complain. As it stands, this looks like *one* moderator's take on the issue. That is of course incredibly valuable insight in itself, but do other mods feel the same way? If they do, they should chime in and say, "this needs to change."