I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.
I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.