Yes, that would be my first impulse but at the time and presently I am not in a position until next week to draft up a visual.
However, since I’ve got the inspiration blurb out of my head. Let me try use convention and simpler phrasing to make better sense.
Allow a mobile user a page down / page up like progress in a topic - without use of scrolling as the transition.
The idea is very much geared toward a read-only mode. If a user wants to reply at a point, something like a “jump in” button would take them to normal mobile thread view to reply or like etc etc
Sometimes a user simply wants to keep reading reading reading and scrolling scrolling scrolling breaks up the flow, especially in engaging long topics.
A single tap to with no visual transition. It’s the lightest and most focused experience and the topic-progress widget exemplifies this but for other yet similar purposes, particularly as there is no transition between post previews it struck me as perfectly good.
It also benefits single hand operation.