Traverse: Visualization of Complex Nested Discussion Trees

This is a great format for drilling down! A few recommendations:

* Hovering out instantly resets, which causes you to lose your place. How about a (user-configurable?) timed gradual reset so you can get back to where you were if you accidentally hovered out for a second.

* I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around a flat list as nested - this just might be old habits. Maybe a user setting to indent nested children?

* The colors indicating score could be on more of an obvious scale - I'm having trouble instantly identifying whether green is better than purple, etc. To me, a pale color is less exciting than a 'colorful' color, but pale is used to signify most popular here.

* Maybe you can click+drag to pin multiple comments. The singletons have tiny slices and there's often many of them - it would be nice to view them all at a glance.

* Related to previous, maybe a filter for how deep the subtree is, or by score. Sometimes you don't want to see it all, or want to see only the best (or the worst).

I really like (in the radial presentation) that the newest comments are as accessible as the oldest, and that multiple sort options are available at once without the need for a round trip back to the server (the radial presents age, colors in the radial present relative popularity, the side bar presents global popularity).

I'd recommend click instead of hover, because now as I drill down into a comment, a tiny wrong movement can reset things.

Other than that: cool!

Took me a while to figure out how it was supposed to work, when you click something you can't drill down anymore, you have to hover to drill down.

Due to the tiny comment box, the lack of context and being unable to quickly scan the discussion it is a lot less intuitive than just having the tree-based comments. In a normal comment thread I can quickly scan the text, with this I have to hover over several very small targets to be able to read a tiny portion of each comment.

Not sure what problem this is trying to solve.

This is a cool idea. I'm not convinced that having all the comments in a sidebar with size constraints is going to be that useful, though. It might work better with traditional chained comments but having the radial diagram floating to one side.

Also it's easy to imagine posts starting out too small to click on and getting lost in the noise. (Not that this doesn't happen in other formats.)

Great to see a novel approach to handle deep discussion trees. Reddit obviously benefits from this approach, HN not so much. HN discussion trees tend to be shallow, in my experience. It is also not clear to me how this UX translate to mobile. Cool demo though. Keep up the good work.

I can see this being useful as a visualization tool for social research. Would it be possible to link Traverse from voice recordings of conversations?

This is cool, I want this for hacker news discussions

Anyone tried columns for hierarchy instead? May be easier to traverse and understand.

I'd like to see this accessible on a mobile device, which it's not. It's regardless a unique and quick way to browse a deep set of comments.