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This might be as good a thread as any to ask this: What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticin
by wvenable 5y ago
This might be as good a thread as any to ask this: What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often. Most recently with the Elon Musk Twitter purchase thread and today with a relatively benign article about Netflix:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31120094
Hacker News is really not setup for such long threads -- you basically get one top-level comment for the entire page! That's not very engaging. It's just a feeling but it seems some topics are getting an order of magnitude more comments than usual.
- chrononaut 5y ago> What's going on with the 1000+ comment threads on articles lately? It used to be pretty rare but I'm noticing it more often Higher number of active users?
- sillysaurusx 5y agoYep. Exponential growth over N decades will do that. You can see it in the IDs. HN recently rolled over to 30m. I remember posting a comment about it. That was like a month ago. It’s now past 31m.
- mplanchard 5y agoPossible I’m missing something obvious, but how do you see someone’s user ID? If I click on my or someone else’s profile, I just get a link with id=<username>.
- chrononaut 5y agoI had the same thought and I realized that they were referring to comment IDs. Yours is 31131117 for example.
- mplanchard 5y agoAh, that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!
- bombcar 5y agoAnything that triggers the HN post or flight response gets tons - especially if you can low effort post identically with everyone else. Good times.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Thorentis 5y agoYes, Hackernews really needs a revamp in terms of viewing threads and commenting. The old reddit style would work quite well in my opinion.
- mgdlbp 5y agoEven though HN recently added the prev/next buttons, I find it much more convenient being able to click on the indentation bar in Reddit to collapse the comment that the bar drops from. Specifically, I often decide partway down a thread that I've read enough of it and want to move to the next one—on HN, this entails scrolling up to the parent comment of that thread to click its [-] or next button, disrupting the flow of reading. The root/parent buttons are supposed to do this for you, but they're only useful if the thread in question is top-level or only one comment deep, which is decreasingly the case with increasingly popular posts. The click-to-collapse in Reddit is sadly only implemented by some subreddit themes (and in the redesign), but in the default theme the visible bar is still useful for clarifying the level of indentation of a comment following a deeper thread that puts its parent out of view. Also, is there an accepted name for this sort of 'indentation line'? New Reddit gives them the 'threadline' class, a name I don't see anywhere else. There's something similar in IDEs for collapsing indented code blocks, and the vertical lines in Win32-like tree views seem related, but I can't find any names for those, either. Searching only reveals a few post-redesign Reddit threads complaining about the click-to-collapse being unintuitive. But considering all the 'HN secrets' threads we have here, that seems to make it a perfect fit.
- Thorentis 5y agoI really like the press-and-hold to collapse children interaction in the mobile Reddit app, along with the button in the bottom right to jump to the next top level comment.