Improved commenting with Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Improved commenting with Markdown

github.com

65 pointsAmorymeltzer30 comments

Seems that Github is recognizing that more and more non-dev types are interacting with Github in various ways and are providing tools to help them out.

I suppose it's fine, and certainly easier than teaching newbies Github-flavored markdown.

One complaint: Using the aA icon to hide the different headers menu. Headers are not just "bigger text" as the icon indicates. They should use a different icon that indicates its for headers and has nothing directly to do with font-size.

Is this why GitHub unicorned for a bit yesterday? I'm looking forward to the engineering blog post talking about what went wrong and how they fixed it.

Disappointed that Github still haven't responded to the issues raised in the open letter a few weeks ago.

Yeah, that's pure arrogance! Time to reconsider GitLab or Bitbucket!

Not responding to group shaming isn't arrogance.

It wasn't shaming, it was a voice of desperation! GitHub is an arrogant bunch. And I'm not saying this only because of the "Dear GitHub"!

Writing a public letter to a business (of which you are not a customer) as if your problems are theirs to fix, is one of the most textbook example of "exaggerated sense of one's own importance" that I could possibly imagine. Those people were, and are, clearly not very important to Github at all.

Well, those people _are_ very important. If GitHub was a platform only of paid customers without the plethora of open-source projects by non-payings customers (which are important customers still even if they don't directly contribute to the bottom line), it wouldn't have a commercial success in this magnitude either.

Anyway, it's an observation, I don't have data to back it up, but I see a lot of new projects actually starting with Bitbucket these days.

Power users can remove it by putting this in their user style:

    .toolbar-commenting{display:none !important;}

Use with e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...

Or by adding `github.com##.toolbar-commenting` to your favorite adblocker's custom lists :)

Power users? how is disabling few icons empowering anyone? The space is still there, blank and wasted. Do you scratch all the button/knob markings off in your car because you are a power driver?

Power users, power buttons, power driving, power washing, power living. To each their own. If he wants to remove buttons, so be it.

>Have feedback on this post? Let @github know on Twitter.

This probably isn't new, but I just noticed it. For shame.

Using github regularly was what got me to learn markdown and I'm very grateful as I've found it useful in lots of different places. I'm not convinced this change was really worth doing, especially if it was at the expense of features people have been asking for.

I don't think that the belief that feature X was created at the expense of feature Y is a reasonable assumption. Who knows how this feature came about? It could have been a Githubber's 20% project, or weekend hack project, or largely down to a 3rd party library.

I didn't assume it was, I hoped it wasn't.

This seems much harder to implement than a comment rating system so we don't see +1 spam.

I doubt that. This update is entirely client-side, while a rating system requires data management server-side in addition to the user interface elements.

That doesn't mean ratings are difficult, just more difficult than this.

Besides, the developers in place to build this update may not overlap at all with the developers in place to implement new rating functionality.

Does anyone know a similar component/library to do something like this on your own website. Most I've seen try to build a full Word-like editor, without the markdown aspect?

I've not used it myself (yet), but Prose Mirror (http://prosemirror.net/) is the one I have bookmarked and has been featured here on HN in the past and seems to be very full featured and from the demos it seems flexible everything from the full WYSIWYG-style editor that some users may want to this sort of simple toolbar over a Markdown field.

Fugly and distracting!

Why the downvotes?! Okay, I use some strong language, because while Bitbucket is introducing Projects [0], GitHub is working on bells and whistles! In the time of Medium.com, we know there are better ways to allow formatting controls!

I understand GitHub is in desperation to go beyond programmers, but this is a ridiculous expansion goal!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950730

> Why the downvotes?!

Probably because of the needless profanity and lack of an explanation for your statement (my best guess, I did not downvote you).

> bells and whistles

These kind of features are completely unnecessary for developers, but are useful for the less tech-savvy team members. The markup is not hidden, so it provides a way to learn some basic MarkDown (good!). That in turn improves communication, which improves your product.

Beware of the fallacy of believing that because someone finds the time to polish their product or add seemingly simple features, they don't invest resources in more complex features or research and development. These are not mutually exclusive goals, even though resources are by definition limited.

It's a pipe dream - only technical people use GitHub and this is just a distraction. Instead of trying to keep their core audience in a world with a growing number of alternatives, they are trying to do the impossible - make this a Google Drive. That's why I on purpose used "fugly", because I'm tired of relying so much on unreliable people. But this will change.

Many technical companies use GitHub, and many employees of same are not particularly technical.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Any data to back your bold statement with?

Where was your data to back up when you said "only technical people" use GitHub?

Where's your data to back your unpopular statement? Mine is the obvious conclusion based on wide observation since the early days of GitHub till now.

While Markdown isn't difficult, it isn't someone everybody is automatically aware of. This makes discovering and learning it even easier, both for newbie technical users and non-technical people that e.g. have to use GitHub to report issues, work on docs, ...

Yes, you might call it "bells and whistles" or "polish", but that polish is one of the reasons that GitHub is where it is (instead of Bitbucket, despite Bitbucket having the better free offering etc). They've gotten were they are by being easy to get started.

GitHub is here because they've pioneered some stuff and people use it by inertia. And inertia doesn't last forever!

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