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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

I'd prefer to see a higher quality of conversation and fewer pointless comments. The longest comment threads on HN are often the least interesting. The type of thread that comes to mind is one that starts with a comment that's not quite flamebait, but a strong opinion that's just wrong enough that lots of people feel forced to reply to correct a fallacy, and trigger an ensuing argument. [1]

How about putting a lower score weighting on comments with lots of replies?

[1] This thread from yesterday illustrates this perfectly, in my opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374839

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What about shading the top-level comments with a different background color so that it's easier to scroll past the long comment threads?

This also sounds good to me! -OP

I would _really_ love a collapse button that floats down the screen as I scroll, so I can hide an entire reply chain after I'm deep into it already.

That's a good idea but how would you recall which one you are collapsing? Color code them? Hover over the button to show the original comment as a tooltip?

That sounds like a good idea to me. I find it damn near impossible to tell when a comment thread has ended, because the only indicator of a new top-level comment is the number of blank pixels to the left of it!

> The type of thread that comes to mind is one that starts with a comment that's not quite flamebait, but a strong opinion that's just wrong enough that lots of people feel forced to reply to correct a fallacy, and trigger an ensuing argument.

Right. But we can't control what people say without making changes to HN policy on moderation.

What I'm suggesting requires no policy change and would allow you to skip over that entire conversation quite easily with one click.

So yeah, I agree with you in principle that the navigation problem is easier to address, but I'm not really happy with reddit's solution of collapsing threads. It kind of stinks, because you might be halfway into a thread when you decide to collapse it, and then you have to scroll back up and try to figure out which nesting level you were at, and so on. I use the thread collapse feature on reddit frequently, but I also hate it just enough to not want to see it copied here.

I was originally going to suggest some alternatives, but thinking about this made me conclude that this is an unsolved UX problem and I don't know the answer.

Ohhh I see what you're saying. I think I have an idea here!

Color code the indentation space of comments and make them click able to collapse them. Then as you're reading, you just remember in your head you are reading about "red" right now, and "blue" is sort of interesting but at some point you decide to collapse the current blue in order to skip to the next comment at the blue level. No scrolling required. Make sense?

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