Hacker News Reader

Comment by minionslave | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that they don't want it to be like reddit. Same reason why there are no comment notifications.

When you have a new comment notification, you are more likely to respond. People are more confrontational on reddit because of this reason. Whereas on HN, you tend to write a thoughtful answer and leave it at that. Threads are shorter on average, so the conversation is less likely to get out of topic.

Collapsed comments are usually ignored, because people are too lazy to dig that deep, that means some really good conversation might get buried.

I kinda like HN comments style better, I hope they keep it like that.

View on HN

Actually, dang has mentioned that collapsible comments are on the way (eventually), so at least in that case the staff doesn't appear to believe it would have too negative an effect on the community. And if it winds up being implemented in javascript, most HN users probably won't see a difference to begin with, because they'll refuse to turn it on, and post a thousand threads ranting about it.

>Collapsed comments are usually ignored, because people are too lazy to dig that deep, that means some really good conversation might get buried.

I kind of see this as a feature. The deeper into a subtree you go, the more tangential the conversation becomes, and the less likely it is that it will be relevant or interesting to the community at large. Willingness to follow a comment tree shows intellectual curiosity and investment in the conversation.

With a completely open tree, like Hacker News has now, most comments are noise to most people.

I think Slash supported all that already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(CMS)

My point being, HN tried (and IMHO succeeded at it) to be something different and these little things might have helped to become what it is. If we keep moving to support all of Slash's features, HN might be doomed to become Slashdot.

Are we really "moving to support all of Slash's features" with folding comments? It's hardly a radical feature - most comment systems support it in some form, and many users are already running plugins for it on HN. I don't see anyone arguing that the Hacker News Enhancement Suite is threatening to doom us all.

Vouching up dead comments was potentially a much more volatile change but it seems to have worked out for the positive. I also remember people complaining that Show HN was killing the site literally on the day it started, yet it seems to have become an accepted part of the culture. What makes Hacker News unique is its connection to YCombinator and Paul Graham. Without that, it's little more than a poorly designed Reddit clone.

I would also like this, sometimes you don't care about a specific thread and scrolling pass it takes 3-4 screen. Very annoying.

an alternate feature to collapsing threads would be a button that pops up when the next comment on the same level is off the page, it might make subthreads easier to follow too.

for ex. user x hours ago | next

I think what happens on the larger posts, is that the direction of the top comment steals way too much focus from the topic of the second top comment.

Yep. It's just too easy to hijack a post on accident. One solid and accurate comment that is only tangentially related to the post can turn the entire comment section away from the topic at hand.

Even if you want to say something about the topic at hand, without collapsible comments (especially on mobile), it becomes difficult to figure out how to insert back into the original discussion.

That my biggest complaint about HN though. I think conversations would be a little bit easier if we had comment notifications.

You could try http://www.hnreplies.com/ - it uses the API to check.

My biggest wish would be a visual indication which comments I haven't seen, yet.

I use Hacker News Enhancement Suite for this. On the front page it shows total number of comments, and new comments since you last viewed a submission. Comment trees with new replies are all highlighted with a dark orange, while the new replies themselves are highlighted with a bright orange.

It also adds collapsible comment trees, inline commenting and other features I'm probably not even aware of.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

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