3 ms·
Most 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 = scann
by arh68 13y ago
Most 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.