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Ask PG: Can we limit reply count/depth?
The popularity of HN is only growing. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that every discussion can and will take more turns, more different directions. I've watched as so many different online forums for conversation have broken down under the strain of a growing user base. You either end up with uber-deep threads that only the participants, if anyone, can follow any longer, or you get a dog-pile of nearly-identical responses to popular posts.
I understand that HN has always been an experiment, so why not experiment with a different way to manage the conversation? Writing a top-level post is more challenging than a follow-on reply. I suspect you'd find that top-level posts generally display more novel thought than the majority of reply posts (not all -- there are some very high quality replies -- but most).
Similarly, when a reply thread gets very deep there is a good chance that the conversation has strayed from what is interesting to the general population. At this point, it would probably be better to continue the discussion in email or some other communication medium.
I still come to HN primarily for the comments, but I find myself increasingly opening a comment link only to find a first comment followed by a page of replies to replies to replies; almost a straight line across and down my browser window. Sometimes I will scroll to see if maybe the second top-level post has a different take or covers a different question, but more often I close the page and move on...
...obviously this is just a thought. I wonder if there other things HN might try to maintain the level of discourse with its ever growing audience?
- Peroni 13y agoRather than limit the reply count, I'd much rather see a collapsable comment system. Can't imagine it's top of PG's priority list though.
- jballanc 13y agoI thought about this too, but it seems to me more like sweeping the problem under the rug than addressing it directly. Personally, if this encouraged even two or three people engaged in an interesting conversation to contact each other directly, instead of continuing to engage semi-anonymously on the internet, I think it would be worth it.
- ScottWhigham 13y agoYes, I installed the greasemonkey script "Hacker News Threadify" and it makes for a much better experience.
- sp332 13y agoThe "reply" button is not available just after a deep post is submitted. The length of time it's gone increases with depth. This is to prevent flamewars. I think it's a good comprimise, since after a while people have "cooled down" from a flamewar but might still have something interesting they want to say.
- arh68 13y agoMost annoying is finding a huge, interesting comment page (200 comments), reading half of it, then coming back later to see 400 comments. No visual diff = scanning and scrolling. Searching the page for "minutes ago" shows me in-the-last-hour posts, which is a happy medium. Hierarchical comments lead to problems like you describe: 1 8-deep thread can come up from the bottom and dominate the comments page. Sense of time is destroyed as who has time to scan the leaves of a vertically-serialized tree? The same discussion will happen in 3 or 4 branches, confusion builds, and sometimes "see my other post below" comes out. What a mess! Maybe that's just the natural, irreducible 'mess' that comes with human conversation, but I've got a hunch it's not.
- krapp 13y agoI find nesting works best for headers, but not comments. Though from what I understand, killing threads before they get too deep is part of the reason the hierarchical structure exists here, and i've come to assume that any ugly and awkward UX i encounter on Hacker News is meant to be a feature. Adding a few things like thread collapsing and sorting would make navigation a lot easier. There are already userscripts to do this, however.
- hobs 13y agoYeah it might add some overhead, but showing what has changed since you last visited the page (different color for the comment seems straightforward) would be pretty cool.
- mjn 13y agoFor usenet and mailing lists, this is handled on the client side by read/unread tags on messages. Web forums haven't yet found a way to do as good a job imo, leading to a lot more reload-and-scan type activity that feels even more twitchy than the old kind of check-for-new-messages twitchiness. Reddit does notify you when there's an unread direct reply to one of your comments, which is a replication of one part of that functionality.
- dangrossman 13y agoIf you use Chrome, install Hacked Hacker News to highlight unread comments and Hacker News Collapse to make the threads collapsible. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacked-hacker-news/hlddllcemddpbekleofllndfidcgbgdp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacked-hacker-news... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collapse/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjngdljolljhifdph https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
- Pyrodogg 13y agoOr the Hacker News Enhancement Suite which does both! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...