This should be a standard feature in HN.
The other pain point is the up/down arrows being so close to each other on mobile that I have to zoom in, vote, then zoom out.
The other pain point is the up/down arrows being so close to each other on mobile that I have to zoom in, vote, then zoom out.
Back then, I used a comment's score as a way of finding more interesting comments. I totally understand why this feature was removed, however, without it, I'm left to look for comments that get a lot of replies to weed out the boring comments from the interesting ones, and keeping track of indentation while scrolling through hundreds of comments is tedious. I'm sitting in front of a computer that should be able to do this for me.
I'd be interested if they tested it, but I can't say for certain if I think it should become a feature or not.
• The placement of the up/down arrows, as you noted.
• On text submissions, such as "Ask HN" submissions, the submitter's text is greyed out similar to the way down voted comments are greyed out.
• If you want to see dead comments, which are by default completely hidden, you can turn on the "showdead" option. That makes them visible...but they are greyed out so that it is hard to read them.
Remember, people who do not want to read any dead comments will have left "showdead" in its default state of "off", and so won't see these at all. The only people who see dead comments are those who explicitly said they want to see them.
You can test it on the comments on this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213213
There are several dead comments near the bottom that are visible if showdead is "yes", and invisible if it is "no".
I almost wrote [this comment has been flagged, click the timestamp to read it], but why encourage people?
It also neatly dodges the problem of deemphasizing toxic posts on threads; the content simply isn't displayed in the thread, but is available in a more readable form just a click away.
It will also do nice things for the formatting of the threads themselves (flagged comments on nested threads won't take up much vertical space).
It's obvious to me which approach has been better.
So? Things break and then I uninstall them.
Made even worse because there's no way to fix it if you accidentally vote incorrectly.
I work on a semi-relevant project called Product Pains where people can post and vote on product feedback publicly about any app or website. After seeing this thread, I posted this feedback about HN: https://productpains.com/post/hacker-news/make-comments-coll...
The idea is that a lot of votes on a piece of feedback creates a social responsibility for the team to respond and ideally implement the feature. We're still in early stages but consider voting on this and/or posting other feedback for HN. They could definitely use it. :)
I, too, would like to see collapsible comments on HN, but I also want to keep the interface simple. It never needs to be flashy, just functional.