4 ms·

I've seen you mention this [More] comment a few times now. I like it, though what if you change the design of the More functionality?

by kovek 6y ago

nathancahill 6y ago
Also, what do the traffic stats look like for the second/third pages of big threads like this one? Pretty steep falloff?
- dang 6y ago
  I assume so, but haven't looked recently. I'll try to do that and report back here later. Feel free to ping me at hn@ycombinator.com if I forget. Edit: ok, for this thread so far, 95% of views are page 1, 4% are page 2, 1% are page 3. For https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026, which had a "more pages" comment at the top: 93% of views were page 1, 5% page 2, 2% viewed page 3. For https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647, which did not have a "more pages" comment at the top: 96% of views were page 1, 3% page 2, 0.5% page 3. Radically overgeneralizing from that, it seems likely that the pinned comment at the top helps a bit in terms of directing people to later pages. How that compares to the mammoth-single-page scenario is hard to say because we don't know how many readers would be scrolling down that far to see those comments. There's likely a power-law dropoff no matter what we do.
  - kovek 6y ago
    If you are fine serving more data, you could trigger a "More" automatically when the user minimizes a comment thread, and add the "More" comments to the bottom of the page? Also, to encourage people exploring "More" comments, maybe some comments inside the 2-3 megathreads showing in the first page can be minimized at first? I wonder what are the thoughts on these design. I really like how Hacker News is designed, thank you!
    - dang 6y ago
      My thoughts: the first suggestion is too complex for HN and would amount to a sort of infinite scroll, which users here would probably hate (many have said so pre-emptively!). The second suggestion is probably a good idea. I worked on it at one point but it turned out to be a little harder to get right than I expected. Will probably return to it.
dang 6y ago
Yep, the intention is to change the design by getting rid of it. HN used to just render entire threads in one go, and once we release some performance improvements we hope to do that again.
- jvolkman 6y ago
  In the meantime, how about just placing the More link at the top of the comments section in addition to the bottom so it stands out better?

I've seen you mention this [More] comment a few times now. I like it, though what if you change the design of the More functionality?

by kovek 6y ago

I've seen you mention this [More] comment a few times now. I like it, though what if you change the design of the More functionality?

nathancahill 6y ago

Also, what do the traffic stats look like for the second/third pages of big threads like this one? Pretty steep falloff?

dang 6y ago
I assume so, but haven't looked recently. I'll try to do that and report back here later. Feel free to ping me at hn@ycombinator.com if I forget. Edit: ok, for this thread so far, 95% of views are page 1, 4% are page 2, 1% are page 3. For https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065026, which had a "more pages" comment at the top: 93% of views were page 1, 5% page 2, 2% viewed page 3. For https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647, which did not have a "more pages" comment at the top: 96% of views were page 1, 3% page 2, 0.5% page 3. Radically overgeneralizing from that, it seems likely that the pinned comment at the top helps a bit in terms of directing people to later pages. How that compares to the mammoth-single-page scenario is hard to say because we don't know how many readers would be scrolling down that far to see those comments. There's likely a power-law dropoff no matter what we do.
- kovek 6y ago
  If you are fine serving more data, you could trigger a "More" automatically when the user minimizes a comment thread, and add the "More" comments to the bottom of the page? Also, to encourage people exploring "More" comments, maybe some comments inside the 2-3 megathreads showing in the first page can be minimized at first? I wonder what are the thoughts on these design. I really like how Hacker News is designed, thank you!
  - dang 6y ago
    My thoughts: the first suggestion is too complex for HN and would amount to a sort of infinite scroll, which users here would probably hate (many have said so pre-emptively!). The second suggestion is probably a good idea. I worked on it at one point but it turned out to be a little harder to get right than I expected. Will probably return to it.

dang 6y ago

Yep, the intention is to change the design by getting rid of it. HN used to just render entire threads in one go, and once we release some performance improvements we hope to do that again.

jvolkman 6y ago
In the meantime, how about just placing the More link at the top of the comments section in addition to the bottom so it stands out better?