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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

I have a piece of feedback.

The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc).

One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse button constantly. You can literally scroll and collapse as you read, it is always in the same spot.

The functionality is most welcomed, and I'd take this design over not having it. But it could be slightly better with a subtle design change.

View on HN

The argument against that is that with the collapse button so close to the vote arrow, we would be guaranteed to get misvotes, especially on mobile. The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some, but only so much.

Easily solved with some margin and padding, heck maybe even a media query for the mobile users!

To be honest I would rather have the vote arrow moved somewhere else. I'm often more interested in collapsing a comment thread than voting. I'm not sure if this is something only I care about though.

It'd be hard to say what most users prefer. I would venture to guess that we're all conditioned to vote before collapsing comments simply because we've never had the option to collapse comments until today. So behavior preferences will change over time.

However, I'll hypothesize that it's preferable (overall) to have more friction on collapsing comments. A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems. Furthermore, the problem of a mediocre top-level comment with mediocre nested comments being at the actual top of the discussion is mitigated by the ability for people to downvote the thread, as has been done (with varying levels of efficacy) until today.

> . . . forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.

Excellent phrasing. As a fairly long-time user who lurks more than he comments, I can concur that much of the best conversation I've read and participated in happened to be such nested gems. Serendipitous, indeed.

>A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.

Is this actually data-driven or just a guess on your part? My experience is that a mediocre comment rarely ever gets good replies.

Anecdotal; comment vote scores aren't exposed so I'm not sure if an analysis is possible, even with what's been loaded on to BigQuery [0].

Maybe "mediocre" is the wrong word, as it implies an absolute judgment (on some non-existent scale of "quality"). I guess my intuition is derivative of the "don't judge a book by its cover", in that even if a submitted and upvoted story is not something I feel like reading, I still might read the comments to see the discussion.

Maybe someone internal to HN can do a quick calculation of how many child-comments surpass their parents (while accounting for the differences in visibility).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

Why I agree with you, and would argue for putting the vote arrows somewhere else, is that voting should only happen after someone has fully read a comment and at least given it a second to think about it. It makes more sense for the collapse functionality to always be in the same place so you can do it somewhat "mindlessly", but for voting you specifically don't want to be able to do it mindlessly.

Definitely agree, the collapse should now be prefixed and the voting should be moved elsewhere.

This design was the minimum change possible (which has a value, but usually a net negative one).

But it would be a backward incompatible change :D

So why not switching these two, putting the vote arrow on the right and the collapse button on the left? The tree controls I know all work that way that the collapse button is on the left.

> The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some

As long as the user is aware of the misclick, I don't see this as a likely problem, personally. Awareness of the misclick is, in my opinion, quite likely, given that they will see the arrows disappear and won't observe the expected thread collapse.

The vote arrows really could use some size/distinction love on mobile.

A subreddit I was on recently (sorry, can't recall which) has styled the collapse-sensitive region to be the entire indent region of a comment block. This is actually unbelievably awesome.

The HN app I use lets you click anywhere in the heading line to collapse/expand. Could you do the same here?

> The HN app I use lets you click anywhere in the heading line to collapse/expand. Could you do the same here?

Both the username and the date are clickable links in the HN interface (to the user profile and the comment itself, respectively).

I meant 'the empty space to the right of the line'.

If you're going with mobile in mind, would you consider replacing "-" and "+" with "collapse" and "expand"? Trying to hit one character on mobile can be frustrating.

I actually prefer it at the end, as HN uses the same (or very similar) theming for Desktop and Mobile. Before Reddit redid their mobile experience, having voting buttons next to collapse meant many inadvertent votes when trying to collapse on mobile.

Until HN has a good mobile theme by default, I'd prefer collapse and voting buttons to be well separated from one another.

But you can undo votes now!

So true! I'm not sure which I dislike more: random location for collapse or inadvertentle votes that require an undo action.

For me, at least, the most frequent use case for collapsing a thread is in the middle of it, when the discussion has veered off into territory in which I have no interest. In this case, I need to either scroll back up and find the originating post of the thread in order to collapse it, or scroll down until I find the beginning of the next thread.

What I'd like to see is a control that takes advantage of this right-side position of the collapse button to add something like the following, perhaps only visible on rollover:

  [-] all

In which the `all` link collapses all the way up to that thread's OP, immediately revealing the next thread below.

That's precisely the hack I mentioned a few comments back on ... some subreddit somewhere.

Essentially, the left-hand indent zones are collapse regions for the post topping that level of the hierarcy. It's sheer brilliance.

Can't find the sub, though I've looked for it. I thought it was a science one. Maybe politics -- somewhere I don't often go. Hrm, no, not there either.

100% agree with when the desire to collapse a thread occurs.

I think this old reference is on par with your comment, at least it's how I view and agree with it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355675

Realizing many comments down that you are wading into unwanted territory makes the side column incredibly useful to pulling the rip cord as it were.

Each comment has a significant vertical footprint(at least 2 lines after the upvote triangle) on mobile so maybe this opinion is biased, but I am also of the mindset that users shouldn't be alienated to a separate app to cover a relatively simple wart removal.

Heck, having a visible column in the left position to flick up or down for a collapse or return to parent becomes increasingly useful. But now I'm on a new tangent.

Coming from HN Enhancement Suite add-on I too found this annoying.

and it broke the plugin :/

A piece of kludgecode for Greasemonkey[Firefox] or TamperMonkey[Chrome/Chromium]. The script will all move the collapse links to the left margin on this page:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name        move_collapse_link
  // @namespace   com.kludgecode.hn.demo
  // @include     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
  // @version     1
  // @grant       none
  // @run-at      document-end
  // ==/UserScript==

  window.$destination =  document.getElementsByClassName('comtr');
  window.$source = document.getElementsByClassName('togg');

  for (var i = 0; i < $source.length; i++) {
    var row = $destination[i].getElementsByTagName('tr')[0];
    var cell = row.insertCell(0);
    row.children[0].appendChild($source[i]);
  }

Modifying the @include line by replacing the query portion of the URI with an asterisk, will cause the code to run on all HN "story" pages. Matters of preference ought to be within the users control. I like Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey because suddenly a lot of things are.

Perhaps also adding the first line (truncated if need be) of the Parent's comment would be a nice addition also?

It would help when scanning all the collapsed comments and seeing some context other than the Parent's username?

Nevertheless these enhancements are much appreciated!

That site is reddit, and they too introduced collapsing on the right side of the name. I have faith that HN will change it!

I like the button well separated from voting buttons. It's still too close to the "unvote" text, on mobile, which needs considerable love.

I was going to say the same thing. On mobile, hitting collapsing or unvoting is 50/50 right now.

I've been using this handy Chrome extension for years. It places the collapse button in front of the username.

https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider

Similarly, I've been using the userscript version of this (or at least something similar to this if it isn't the same) now available at https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/2960-hacker-news-collapsib...

> The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording

exact same thing happened on reddit when the feature was introduced

I can confirm, I personally implemented a reddit-like app and started with the [-] on the right. Realized that it was really annoying and placed it on the left.

This. It took me a minute to find the collapse link, but once I found it... What a time to be alive.

You mean seek the collapse button linearly. :)

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