Proposed technical changes with the goal of helping grow the Indie Hackers forum

Here are my best guesses at how to make the community more vibrant:

1. Speed it up.
2. Make comments more accessible. A pattern that I have noticed in my own behavior is that I come and scroll down, looking for items with a lot of comments. I click on some, but then find myself dealing with the subsequent delay. Since there's no other good way to get to the comments, I either pay that price or give up on reading interesting material.
3. Make new threads harder, comments easier. Currently, it's easier to create a new thread than it is to read from or comment on old ones. The result is lots of threads, all sparsely populated. Since the community is really formed through comment interactions, maybe this should be reversed.
4. Make old threads more apparently accessible. This could be as simple as changing the search indicator from an icon to a search box.
5. Pagination instead of infinite scroll.

Any thoughts?