Hello again,
I don’t really think the smiley faces we have currently should stay. I mean, look at them! They’re a little creepy, in my opinion. We want something a little more subtle, don’t we?
I’m not sure about you, but I think that traditionally the new posts are supposed to appear first. It’s a bit of a pain to scroll through all the posts to find out who replied.
These are just my personal ideas.
Hm? Topics with posts appear at the top of the homepage, new posts go at the bottom of the topic, and you enter a topic where you left off last time.
Maybe that last part is confusing you?
Hmm, maybe it glitched for me. But still, it feels a bit awkward for it to be descending, whether or not it scrolls down.
There are some forums where you can set for new posts to be at the top of a topic, but I don’t think discourse ever had that in mind.
I prefer to have them sequentially. 
Doesn’t make much sense to put new posts at the top.
You’ll first have to go down to start reading 
And you can always use the static post navigator to go down quickly if there are a lot posts.
And as @riking said you go to the post where you left which is an AMAZING feature 
The descending post cascade suits me, but I’m an old hacker from Usenet.
Post cascades at least follow the usual reading conventions, but the post-specific replies seem to get shoved in and disrupt the flow a bit. All in all, it’s workable.
Think of them as sneak previews (for the replies bit) or context reminders (for in-reply-to or quote expansion).
You expand it when you intentionally want to read it out-of-order.
I agree on the smiley faces, when I see this “=P” I don’t imagine this " "…
Not sure what your problem is… :P I can do smileys just fine. :D
c^:
All clear.
c^:
Using them isn’t the problem, their sprites are creepy…
This one looks rather… yea.
I do not want to pull up old threads, but maybe we could have some more discussion on the simleys.
I personally do not like the “:)”-Smiley, I think 
does not look like someone smiley, but rather like someones laughing diabolically and I hate it. Any other opinion on this? Why not use a normal one like this one:
