Facebook drops the comment button, allows users to edit replies | Hacker News Reader

Facebook drops the comment button, allows users to edit replies

thenextweb.com

11 pointsm4tt14 comments

I was having the exact discussion with a friend yesterday of what the default behaviour in real time should be.

My friend was of the opinion that it should be Enter to post and "Shift+Enter" to add a new line. What facebook did today basically.

My stand was the oppposite. Shift+Enter for a new comment and enter for new line.

The reason being that even if I press enter thinking it would post my comment, the error handling (forgiveness to the user) is minimal and I can either click the button or be informed that to post I need shift + Enter.

However if I do it the way facebook does and press enter thinking it would take me to a new line without me realising that I posted a comment that is half of what I wanted to say.

Lesson: Let you interface be forgiving and give it priority over simplicity.

I've got this same issue with the StackOverflow comments system. Usually, I type something, and type enter to go to the next line. Oops, you posted the comment (luckily they have an edit function, but still...)

Usability wise, it makes a lot more sense to have "enter" be a new line. That's how it works in any textarea and document. We're trained to naturally expect that. Enter to submit only makes sense on one line inputs. Anything that resembles a text area should have shift + enter to submit(or control + enter). This is most intuitive.

>Usability wise, it makes a lot more sense to have "enter" be a new line.

I disagree. The paradigm they're using here isn't that of word processing a document, but rather quick text conversations. In pretty much every chat/IM program I've ever used, "enter" == "send", and shift+enter == newline.

Exactly! Dow you want the conversations to be one liners (witty or shallow) OR do you want people to have meaningful conversations?

Assumption: You cannot always have meaningful conversation with one liners.

I'm going to suggest that you're probably an outlier. I would think that a large majority of Facebook comments are one-liners. The typical Facebook commenter is writing multi-paragraph in-depth comments every day. So I think this change does a good job of optimizing for the general case.

There's no way 14 year old girls using Facebook are gonna figure out that shift+enter submits, all you'd see in that scenario is a bunch of people complaining about how they couldn't submit any commits... or not, as they wouldn't be able to submit.

I think physical keyboards should come with a "post/submit" key separate from the "newline" key, like the iPhone keyboard does.

I'm surprised the keyboard has lasted so long in nearly the same state. Some notable exceptions are the remapping of function keys on Apple keyboards, and the brilliant reuse of the caps lock key as a search key on Google's Chrome OS netbooks.

Why? Does this solve a perceived usability issue? It's just going to confuse its users.

When in a multiline text field, pressing Enter should add a new line. (If comment fields where single-line text fields, however, I'd understand the change.)

>Does this solve a perceived usability issue?

Editing, yes. When I leave a comment and see that I made a typo, I have to delete it and repost it, by which time someone has often already replied.

I don't quite like the hitting Enter to post. Though, I can deal with that. I do, however, like how we can essentially edit our posts. That was something that always frustrated me with Facebook comments.

It's horrible for usability. If you don't have JavaScript on, you lose the ability to submit comments entirely. Not that Facebook was very usable with JS off to begin with, but still.

I'm not one to complain about UI changes, but I truly think they'll need to tweak this. In fact, it should be the reverse IMHO. Shift + enter= submit and enter= carriage return.

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