Hacker News Reader

There’s three possibilities, although I’ll warn you now that none are great.

1. In an attempt to improve perceived performance on initial load a decision was made not to load all content in at once. In the case of a Twitter thread containing potentially hundreds of items that’s reasonable, for product descriptions less so.

2. The widget being used to display a product description on the product page itself is also used elsewhere on the site, but in a context where space is constrained to fit a grid. They got round that with a read more link.

3. Sadly the most likely for product descriptions, in an attempt to determine customer interest an arbitrary cut off was chosen for how much of a description is shown. Metrics are then tracked on which descriptions are expanded, and taken as a proxy for customer interest in those products.

I suspect that for a surprising number of sites it's secretly #3: they track the clicks to keep track of what you're reading on the page.

> 1. In an attempt to improve perceived performance on initial load a decision was made not to load all content in at once. In the case of a Twitter thread containing potentially hundreds of items that’s reasonable, for product descriptions less so.

In an age where web pages are several MB large, bandwidths surpassing 100Mbps, and GPUs alone with 11GB of RAM, we can't render more text on a screen.

This page right now contains around ~8kB of pure text, and everything is already expanded as opposed to most other comment sites. I'm aware that formatting, layout, data modelling, messaging etc increases that amount, and that's fine, I'm just baffled that it's possible to have a slower experience with percievably the same amount of brain-data as 20 years ago, but with hardware that is magnitudes better.

We shouldn't lose this much to UI fluff.

The bottleneck would in this case be within YouTube servers that have to fetch the comments. Nothing to do with UI. Since comments work on scale it is possible it takes quite a bit of resources to load them instantly with the video.

It's not directly related, sure. But it's certainly a second order effect of UI choices that has brought us here. They manage to compute (batched and not real time) personal ads tailored to you, load media for this, push a whole bunch of data from your clicks to further this tailoring, push metrics, grab libs from 40 different locations, etc, etc, etc.

If we wanted to do some work around getting more text to users and improve the reading experience of sites with at least a portion of them designed for that purpose, we certainly could.

HN doesn't show every comment if there are too many comments, FYI.

How could it be one?

Loading text, or anything statically, is faster than many megabytes of JavaScript frameworks.

I think web devs have collectively broken their brains if they think this.

Try going to a reddit page from google nowadays... it shows, like, one comment and then “click to read more”. Oops, you were on the amp page, so now it’s loaded the exact same page but non-amp. Click to read more again. Now the long comments are still not shown fully so you have to click each one to read the whole comment. Now the thread replies are still collapsed so click those to read the replies. This is absolutely infuriating if you’re in a place with patchy internet. With HN I can load a comment page and read it top to bottom for ten minutes, with reddit I’m clicking non-stop just to see text on a text-based website!

First rule of reading reddit: edit the url and replace the leading "www" with "old".

What a fantastic user experience!

I keep an account and remain logged in for the single purpose of using the "Preferences" setting that I always want the old version. So I can now just use the regular www-URLs and still get the old interface.

EDIT: Checking my preferences, there is an option on the bottom that actually is disabled and says the opposite: "Use new Reddit as my default experience". So I guess that's on by default and you have to disable it.

I have that set too but still use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redir... to make sure I don't accidentally share a link to that awful new interface.

I also love it when there is an ellipsis menu … and once you click it there is just one option in it.

Edit: another of my favorites is a Cogweel icon for the contextual settings, another cogweel icon on the other side of the screen for the account settings, then a hamburger menu for navigatio, then an icon to display all apps (like the numpad icon) and then an another menu when I click my profile picture.

Every time I'm looking for a preference it's like it's Easter! :)

Performances and money. You don't want to make the db, cache and network operations to get the comments for every users, only those who really want to read them which are not most of them. At the size of google, you save millions or dollars with such trick.

At the cost of a crappy and sluggish user experience, of course

Everything is a matter of compromise. What's important is to make them consciously, which I believe Google did in that case.

Yet they insist on auto-playing the next video when most users will not be interested in that. Serving all comments is much less data than even the initial buffer of the video. The real reason I think is that a user reading comments on youtube isn't watching ads during that time.

Auto-play means more views means more ads means more money, yet. But I don't think it's the same for comments.

Comments don't have adds. They are a feature that cost money, but don't bring any.

This is what mobile first design gives you In mobile it might be welcome On desktop or any big screen environment this is just silly

There have been very few times that I have enjoyed clicking on one of those, even on mobile.

I think it's actually close to what I'd like without getting there. The "click to read more" essentially gives me an overview of the comments. When you click on an individual comment, it expands to give you a more detailed view.

I think what I really want is something more akin to org mode, where it's expanded/contracted by default (configurable) and when I hit a single key, it expands portions to reveal more detail. I often find when I'm in the middle of a thread, I start to think that I'm wasting my time and want to collapse that thread in some way so I can start searching for where I want to reinsert myself. I rarely want to read every single comment on one of these services. Basically, I think the intention is on the right track, but the execution is poor. Getting it right would be tricky, but I hope someone tries and sets a better bar than the one we have.

Gmail even does this on long emails! It’s insanely annoying.

I can't explain Reddit, but for Twitter it's a side-effect of how they decided to create the "simple" linear view.

Tweets are actually structured as a tree similar to Reddit comments, but while Reddit essentially displays a depth-first traversal, Twitter opted for a breadth-first traversal so it can show all the immediate replies. Almost every "show more" is for going one level deeper in that tree.

(With some caveats/custom rules, at least - if a subtree only has 1 reply it'll often be shown in-line, then there's tweet chains like this one)

Another possibility: this destroys the "reader view" that some browsers have. Since the reader view usually skips ads, it is considered undesirable.