4 ms·
I'm not sure if it helps much. It emphasizes deep threads. Do we care for deep threads? Well, not really. Usually we want to see threads with a lot of votes and
by krick 6y ago
I'm not sure if it helps much. It emphasizes deep threads. Do we care for deep threads? Well, not really. Usually we want to see threads with a lot of votes and a lot of replies (breadth-wise), and when navigating we want to be able to follow the thread of replies to an individual comment. You can comfortably list all parents of a comment on this flamegraph, but basically you'll end up reading a random thread w/o knowing first if it will be interesting.
And the problem of big flame-tongues is more of a HN/reddit reply format, i.e. I don't know if it can be solved by another UI. People using the default UI in such threads reply only to the first comment, because it's the only way to be seen. Nobody reads past few first top-comments.
I guess it's very much opinionated, because people first time on 4chan tend to get lost, but I've long came to conclusion that the imageboard reply format is the best there can be, especially with some simple UI tweaks. You can follow threads easily, you can reply to any number of comments, you can link several discussions into one. It's easy to spot a post with lots of replies. It's easy to scroll, unlike HN comments. The downside is that 3000-comment thread would terribly slow down your browser, about the 1000 is the upper-limit I guess, and usually threads are just split into series of multiple threads on the 500-post mark. But that obviously wouldn't work anyway if the main feature is to order posts based on the number of votes. So, alternative UI like that for HN wouldn't help very much either.
What would really help on HN is the ability to collapse all of the children w/o collapsing the parent-post itself, and showing multiple top-level posts on a single page when children are collapsed. This way you could browse for the discussions you are interested in and expand them further.
- mssundaram 6y agoYou're speaking as we - I'm just gently curious who you mean? Have you surveyed (even informally) HN users? But anyways, I like your point about the usability of the imageboard format. I really don't like the Reddit/HN style
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dlkf 6y ago> What would really help on HN is the ability to collapse all of the children w/o collapsing the parent-post itself Is dang reading this thread?
- BelenusMordred 6y ago> ability to collapse all of the children w/o collapsing the parent-post itself, and showing multiple top-level posts Very much agree, for big threads here and on reddit I manually do this a lot without even thinking. It would be trivial as an extension or user script in hindsight. There's a lot of excellent content buried which is quite frustrating. Top level comments tend to add far more of interest than the typical to and fro that goes on inside the replies.
- jp57 6y agoYes. I would like a mode for HN and Reddit where only top-level comment are visible and threads must be expanded explicitly, with the same true recursively. If I'm not interested in a comment, then I'm not interested in its replies either. I've never understood why comments are treated differently from posts in this regard. The front page isn't presented with all comments expanded.
- phil294 6y agoWhile collapsing is important, I would really like all comments to be sticky, so that when you scroll down, (only) the first line of all parent comments are shown at the top in the usual nested way. This way, you always know where you are. I tried implementing this with a custom stylesheet for Stylus (Stylish), but I was unable to due to the site's markdown which is mostly tables with positioning.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago> Nobody reads past few first top-comments. Even as an exaggeration, this is probably untrue ?
- zwily 6y agoFor really busy posts, I would guess that approximately nobody even gets past the first root level comment.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoInteresting, how then do you explain the answers to the posts past the first root level comment ? ;p
- zwily 6y agoThose are the “approximately”s. :)
- BlueTemplar 6y agoYeah, there's some kind of exponential-like decay, but how strong it is ?
- trungdq88 6y ago> You can comfortably list all parents of a comment on this flamegraph, but basically you'll end up reading a random thread w/o knowing first if it will be interesting Agree, the new version of the page addresses this by listing the direct replies of a selected comment. But yeah, this prototype would need a lot more works on it to become useful. Anyway, thanks for sharing!