Wow…didn’t think that’d work.
I see both of them.
I see an animated Time magazine cover (in kayaker’s post).
OK, I can see the Time cover (animated no less!) on iPhone-Chrome but not on PC-Chrome.
Ditto. The cover shows up if I click the link, but it doesn’t show in the post itself.
Whereas I saw a 3 in a grey circle, and nothing else in the post.
That’s the count of how many times the link/image has been clicked.
WTF is going on? All of a sudden replies are nested below posts. This was NOT the case for me an hour ago. I am not going to bother clicking to see replies for every single post.
Sorry, but nesting replies further up the thread is going to absolutely kill any kind of discussion.
Alice Cooper!
Replies appear nested under the post but also appear again in chronological order as part of the main thread.
Aha, you are right! 
Seems a weird way to do it, but as long as new replies also appear at the bottom, I guess it works.
For the love of God, why? What possible function does doing it both ways serve that wouldn’t be served by having it in chronological order with quotes?
Actually, I can think of one big benefit. Sometimes, a poster will post something that other people ask a question about, and the poster will answer. Then, hours later, someone else comes in late and sees the post in question, and often asks the same question, without bothering to see if it’s already been answered, especially if it’s a long thread (some people here are notorious for doing this). If they saw that there was a nested response to the post in question, they’d know to check before asking the same dang question. In theory.
It gets even goofier: the post I am quoting has a reply icon at the top and replies at the bottom, so you can expand a single post at both the top (using that little swoopy reply arrow) and at the bottom, showing an entire sub-conversation attached to one post.
Or you can ignore the feature entirely.
Also, there is apparently a function by which you can delete a post: click the “…” at the bottom (of one of your own posts) and you will see a trashcan. It looks like a post does not actually vanish until 24hrs after you delete it.
It’s just a shortcut to the replies to that post. It doesn’t work very well, so most people ignore it.
People, pay no attention to the man behi… erm… to the Replies box!
And when will they be turning off the avatars for those of us who don’t want to see them? Or is there a way to do that from my end?
They wont turn them off. It remains to be seen whether we can turn them off.