Comment by Nemi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nemi | Hacker News Reader

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I just want to say that you NAILED a UX issue I see with Hackernews comments, at least for me - when I am reading through the comments on a HN post, I often find myself several layers deep into a conversation that I realize I am not interested in any more. Either some facet of the topic, or maybe a side conversation (like the one we having now about HackerDaily). I want to "jump out" of this conversation and back to the "main topic", but I have to scroll up until I get to root of this topic and click the collapse sign (-) next to the parent to easily get to the next conversation tree. However, I may be pages and pages down from where this conversation started and have to page up and up and up. Alternatively, I can page down and down and down to try to find where this topic ends. Neither works very well.

But what you do is provide a line of minus signs (-) at the top left that grows and shrinks with the tree and at any time I can click one of these to collapse a parent post! This is great! Being a UX aficionado I am tickled that you have not only seen the same pain, but found an elegant solution for it. Well done!

My current thought about how to fix this is to have a link called 'parent' or 'up' next to each comment timestamp. Clicking on it would scroll you one level up. Disadvantage: you'd have to click it once for each level you want to go up. Advantage: it's simpler than any alternative I know of.

What percentage of this problem would that fix?

This is an interesting idea! The problem is that you regularly get 8+ levels deep, so that's a lot of clicks. Maybe two buttons (for parent and for top-level parent) might do the trick?

That's a good suggestion—thanks. Maybe 'parent' and 'top', or 'up' and 'top'.

Thank you, this truly warms my heart!

I have poured too many hours of my life into this little detail. It still doesn't work great though:

1. It is hard to click on on mobile devices

2. It sometimes renders behind the comment or is not clickable (not always, just sometimes). I am afraid this has something to do with the way browsers render the CSS sticky position, so I might not be able to fix this. I am not very experienced in CSS though, so if you've any advice on how to fix this I would truly appreciate it!

Because of the above two issues I might need to go back to just a fixed minus button. :(

Isn't that the same thing that the [-] sign doesn in HN? Works the same way for me.

But scroll down. As you scroll down, the line of minus signs grows. When you are 6 comments deep into a conversation (where each comment is a reply to the last. The comments are all indented to the right), there is a line of 6 minus signs at the top left (------).

If you click on the second minus sign on the left, it collapses the conversation up to that parent without having to scroll up to that level.

I see! I can see the - signs but clicking them does nothing...

Yeah, I had this problem too on one page. I clicked on another article and it worked. Looks like it is a little buggy (founder take note!)

Yes, I am aware of the issue (see my recent comment on one of the parent comments).

I am afraid that it is an issue with the way some browsers render the CSS sticky position. If you have any CSS knowledge, I would greatly appreciate your input!

For my information, which browser do you use?

I tried both Google Chrome and Firefox (also, Brave)

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