Ask PG: Please revert the change to break up discussions in multiple pages? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Please revert the change to break up discussions in multiple pages?

199 pointsjacquesm26 comments

If this is to reduce the load then it will have the opposite effect (far more inbound connections) to some extent and it completely spoils the flow of the site when you're reading.

In active discussions things will jump around from one page to another all the time depending on the votes and there is a positive feedback effect from those things on the 'first' page of a discussion getting far more votes.

I don't think this experiment is an improvement, please consider reverting the change.

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I hate to pile on, but please revert this change. It also makes HN feel too much like reddit.

I think the problem is it's not enough like reddit - reddit makes it really easy to get past long comment threads and load more comments.

Edit: I might be biased having used reddit for so long though, it's definitely an interface I'm heavily accustomed to. Reddit's collapsing + loading strategy is something I like a lot and really miss here.

I miss Reddit's [-] button. It collapses an entire discussion, which allows a 1000-comment discussion thread to be readable: Read the root, read first child, collapse first child, read second child, collapse second child, collapse root, read next comment. You don't need to scroll to read all of the interesting points in a post!

I would just throw Greasemonkey at the problem, but I jump between computers too much! I'd rather see a native solution.

pg doesn't seem to be interested in doing that. I created a script (http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...) and sent him something to cut and paste in order to add it to HN. Would have been minimal effort but apparently not going to happen.

Personally, I'm opposed to any kind of comment hiding because it all affects comments in the same way: People contribute but are ignored because it's always easier to just move on than to keep clicking 'more.'

I agree, and TBH - I like being able to scroll through hundreds of comments (at most) to skim what I am interested in. It's much more difficult to do that when comments are hidden.

reddit doesn't paginate.

Actually it does but pages are 500 top level entries long and even more with Reddit Gold.

It doesn't paginate, it hides low-scoring comments and let you load them with AJAX. Pagination feels much worse than that, I basically never go to another page because I feel it's not worth it. However, I can't stop compulsively clicking on "load more comments", even when I know they're not worth it.

Not only low-scoring, you can choose sorting method yourself. Still, you're right that paginated comments are appended on the page rather than loaded as a new view.

My emphasis was on the fact that the number of loaded by default comments is rather high, making pagination necessary only on the very top commented stories, whereas on HN, as it is now, even quite noncontroversial entries' discussion threads are strongly chunked.

Ah, I agree with you on that.

And I can't just open up a bunch of discussion tabs towards the end of work and read them on the train home. Or anyplace else without an Internet connection :(

Agree. It makes reading the comments much less fluid, and adds N (nr of pages) more decisions to reading them.

There's also a bug with the feature: it's easy to end up "orphaned" on a page of comments, with no way back to the article.

Just a few moments ago, I replied to a reply of a comment I had made earlier. I got to that comment via the 'threads' link in the top bar. After I submitted my reply, I was taken to what normally would be the main article comment page, but in this case was some kind of limbo page of comments, seemingly unattached to an article header.

It was basically a 'more comments' page, except without the means of getting to the prior page.

(Specifically, it was this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=6St6XsAdgY - and I don't even know how durable that link will be, as it seems to identify a closure, I would guess.)

PG said that the pagination is "To cut load. I'm not sure it helped much though, so I may not keep it."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936

I really tried to get used to it but I find it completely breaks the way I interact with the site. No way to easily scroll back to other parts of the thread to re-read a passage and so on. Endless back-and-forth in order to get the whole picture of a subject.

I feel that most sites that pull this stunt do not do it to reduce the load but to increase ad views, a problem that HN fortunately does not suffer from.

Clicking on more feel like I going out of discussion.

Or at least consider loading "more" comments on the same page, and not on a new page.

When slashdot changed their discussions to use javascript to control the display sorting/loading, it resulted in non-js users needing to use extra clicks to sort their daily reading.

Lately slashdot has removed the option to sort their discussion without javascript. I stopped visiting the site since I couldn't get as much out of reading their discussion with their default sorting of the discussion. (js isn't great on phone browser.)

I was sure the change was already reverted since I didn't notice the link in the end and there seemed like a lot of comments on the first page. Oops.

Add my down-vote for this new feature. I've always suspected PG kept the HN interface simple so we, as hackers, would implement our own hacks on top of it. I'm just to busy. Ultimately it's PG's to do with as he wishes, and I'm not going to knock success.

Also a pain for browsing on the iPad.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the spam that's showing up at the bottom of comments lately?

I highly doubt it. I suggested a solution to the comment spam to him via email and he said that the spam comments get killed quickly.

For anyone interested, my suggestion to the spam problem was to not make the URLs in a person's comments clickable until they passed a certain karma threshold.

This is almost certainly due to load issues.

Edit: as jpadvo pointed out, Paul has already confirmed that this is to lighten the load on the server. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936

Only if you have 'showdead' on. A bigger problem is that the sort does not seem to take the 'dead' status of the poster in to account.

I don't see what the problem is.

After a while, we'll all get used to clicking through the pages of comments. If you're not interested enough in conversations surrounding an article - you won't.

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