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HN distills some of the best ideas from its predecessors: 1) Scoring system for stories (Digg) and comments (Slashdot) 2) Community based story submission (Ku
by samaparicio 17y ago
HN distills some of the best ideas from its predecessors:
1) Scoring system for stories (Digg) and comments (Slashdot)
2) Community based story submission (Kuro5hin)
3) Infinite indentation (Usenet and Forums)
It's also interesting to note what they didn't include in the design: Subjects for comments
HN's approach is not without challenges
1) Following the conversation gets tougher when there are a lot of levels. Who said what?
2) By reordering the posts according to points the user gets disoriented.
- sofal 17y agoI think that having the ability to expand and collapse comment trees would solve the first challenge. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet.
- mixmax 17y agoProbably lack of time. I hear the lead programmer is involved in other ventures that take up much of his time :-)
- AndrewDucker 17y agoAlso, to belabour a point, lack of a notifications system mean that you have to repeatedly revisit a page to see whether your comment has been replied to.
- blasdel 17y agoAt least it's a single page: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=AndrewDucker http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=AndrewDucker EDIT: After clicking on the link I posted, I see you've already brought this up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983536 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983536
- blasdel 17y agoThere's also the disorientation from the score decay curve -- fresh posts get a big short-lived boost. I've been meaning to write a greasemonkey script to reorder all comments in chronological order, but preserving the indentation in a minimal form with links to instantiate the parent/siblings/children.
- jsdalton 17y agoNo mention of Reddit? I have always assumed that the HN comment system was more or less a clone of Reddit's. Maybe I'm wrong though.