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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

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.