EDIT:
Just to clarify. This post has gained over 200 points and 70 comments on the last hour. It jumped from top 5 posts to low end of the top 50 posts in seconds and is rapidly sinking. Just curious what decision led to the hiding of a popular post.
However, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC-funded startups are involved in a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In keeping with that principle, we took a hands-off approach with yesterday's thread.
Today's post, however, is a follow-up to yesterday's. Indeed it's basically the same story. There are well-established moderation rules about that: repetition is bad for curiosity [1]; we downweight follow-ups [2] unless they add significant new information (SNI), defined as information capable of supporting a substantively different discussion [3].
Moderating HN less does not mean not moderating it at all—that would be a gigantic loophole. Having bent the rules drastically to accommodate yesterday's thread, I don't think it would serve the community to do the same thing all over again the next day. Indeed, we've gotten a significant number of emails about this post, asking us why it was on the front page when the same story was so prominent yesterday. That's because HN users are used to the site not being overly repetitive. People come to HN for new and above all different things (diffs are what's interesting [4]), and we need to take care to preserve that property.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: I posted a related comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27439412.
album: https://imgur.com/a/QcHG9VK
In the first screenshot, notice that the highlighted comment has no replies. Here's a link to the page I was on, anchored to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?p=3&id=27424195#27429786
In the second screenshot, after navigating to the comment directly, there are in fact replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429786
The bug is that those replies should be showing up in the first link, shouldn't they? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430242 is a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429786, but when viewed on the original page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?p=3&id=27424195#27429786, it's absent.
I know that "more" pages shift toplevel comments around, but I've never seen child subtrees get completely pruned with no indication that they exist at all unless you navigate to the comment directly.
Sorry for the distraction. I didn't want to email this for a few reasons, some of which might be invalid. However, it does seem to be a slightly-serious bug if true, since a recent refactoring must've caused deeply-nested children not to show up when browsing top-level "more" links. I'm not sure anyone else has noticed yet.
(If this is intended behavior, sorry!)
Good luck bug hunting.
We're experimenting, in order to deal with this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27437362.
(Wish it was a different color, or included the descendant count.)
Ideas about how to get this right are welcome.
From analyzing it today, one alarming thing I noticed was that in all recent threads with "more" links, the conversation never seemed to nest more than one or two levels deep. But the moment you go to an old thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231208#21232605, the "more" links turned out to be hiding 9+ comments.
But, like, it's not a horrible thing to constrain the comment subtree. If you were feeling like it was the way to go, my only feedback is to trust your judgement on that one. Personally, I thought it was an interesting new dynamic, even if I had my own (probably-unjustified) concerns.
Anyway, best of luck, sorry for the mistaken bug report, and keep trying new experiments! It's really cool!
14 years was a really good run. I suppose even lisp has its limits. :(
Yeah, adding the descendant count would make it pretty good. Hard to think of anything better.
I’ll be honest: I’m really worried this will become another tool for moderators to control discussions, while concealing the fact that it was a moderator (rather than algorithmic) decision. But no one can stop you if that’s the kind of control you want for your team.
The flip side of that is, since 2018, your team has done a stellar job, as far as I can tell. I don’t know if something changed, but things seem calmer now. I can’t even recall the last worrisome moderator decision, and I’ve found myself arguing on your behalf more than once.
Dunno. You’ll get it right; you usually do. Thanks for being welcoming about ideas, and good luck wrestling with transpilers and performance issues.
Or just open your browser console and run the JS directly:
[...byTag(document.body, 'a')].filter(x => x.innerText == 'more').map(x => { x.innerText = `${byClass($(x.href.split('item?id=')[1]), 'togg')[0].attributes['n'].value - 1} more`; });
seems intuitive to piggyback on the same fading ui hint as comments, having a bright "more" indicating standing of hidden comments...