HNHalfLife aims to increase discussion half-lives on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

HNHalfLife aims to increase discussion half-lives on Hacker News

github.com

107 pointsllambda23 comments

Another way to boost discussion time would probably be to cut page load time in half.

What's the current excuse for 4 second page times (on nearly pure text pages) and up to 30 second new-post times, with hundreds of advanced developers around offering free help?

IIRC these are wait times deliberately engineered by pg/said-advanced-developers for various reasons. I remember reading that there is a cool-off period to discourage hasty comments and fast growing off-topic comment trees. There also appears to be intentional slow load response times for posters with certain negative comment thresholds. I cannot officially confirm any of these.

I agree though, the restrictions are arbitrary and unnecessary.

I thought the cool-off time was enforced by setting progressively longer times for the "reply" link to appear as threads lengthen. The idea is that as exchanges get longer, the probability of needing a "cooling off" period before replying increases.

The problem is the same factors that slow negative discussion also block positive discussion.

Also, I highly doubt the front page is purposely designed to take 4 seconds to load - doesn't happen all the time, but too often.

like any self-respecting hacker, PG cares a lot more about having fancy expiring hashmaps of closures than having fast code ;) what do you think 'fnid' means in http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=5DHNoqDkUn ?

just kidding.

or am I? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099372

haha.

An ex-HNer commented a while back, while leaving the community, that the primary deterrent was the culture change to where discussion was not valued. He stated that the primary draw to "Old HN" were not the articles themselves, but rather the long-tailed intellectual discourses that happened in the comments.

I often see comment threads die out on HN far too quickly, and the parties lose interest often. Any change that would promote more critical insight and stimulating conversations gets a profound thumbs up from me.

I'd like a simple interface to go back and browse/read those old threads (even if read-only). Has anyone done that?

(I had some archived but lost the archive... I know.)

For example, pick a date and see all the threads that started on that date.

However, I also have concern for the load/overload this might place on the HN systems. So... maybe present time is the best, all things considered. But I do miss the tone, quality, and signal/noise ratio of those early threads.

Woah, didn't expect to see this on the frontpage!

I made this some time ago and have been using it ever since. The script is pretty simple but makes HN a lot more pleasant for me personally. I'm glad other people are finding it useful :)

Oops...

I accidentally down voted you. It's very hard to browse HN and vote comments on the iPad...

Thanks for the plugin.

Here's a completely different solution to the same problem:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

Grab the browser plugins from there, and then use hckrnews.com as your front page.

I use this almost exclusively but I think it actually shortens the discussions - you see the stories immediately when they are new and with little comments and then you have to make a conscious effort to come back to them.

To me, the big orange numbers on the left are the first thing that pop out at me, pulling me back into older stories with significant number of new comments.

A simpler way to do this is to keep stories around on the home page that continue to receive comments

better a tab 'active' next to 'new'

I've been using this for a long time: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnc...

HNHalfLife's "new comment" indicator seems a little subtle to me. I like how HNCommentTracker makes the new comments really stand out. However, I like the saved page idea. (Will it indicate that there are new comments on your saved pages?) HNCommentTracker also shows new comments on the "threads" page. Does HNHalfLife do this?

The saved page is actually already provided by HN, but pg decided to bury it inside your profile where most people don't notice it. All my script does is prominently display the saved page on the navbar.

And yes, it will indicate new comments on the "saved" page. The script basically stores a last accessed timestamp and number of comments. On the frontpage (and saved page, etc), it just checks to see if there are more comments than the last time you accessed the page.

Unfortunately, it does not markup the "threads" page at all.

this may not even be a good idea.

HN has high content comments, not a lot of back-and-forth. I think that's worth preserving.

The problem with HN comments is that you may make a very thoughtful and lengthy reply to someone...and no one ever reads or sees it because stories scroll off the frontpage so quickly. And it isn't easy to check up on old discussions you participated in, so your thoughtful comments are buried.

I think it is detrimental to the community and encourages all the wrong kinds of behavior.

And it isn't easy to check up on old discussions you participated in

That's what I use the "threads" link for. It's worked quite well for me.

I'd also made something recently to try solve the same problems. ie working with discussions and threads as apposed to the front page. Check it out here: http://christopherdebeer.github.com/hnCommentWatcher/ check it out if you have a chance.

The user-swatches are a good idea. I've been toying with a similar concept but applying it across the whole site. I really dislike how HN doesn't have avatars...I visually recognize avatars a lot easier than reading usernames.

I made a "highlight user's comments" script (https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHighlightUser), it'd be cool if you could incorporate something like that as well. Sometimes I want to quickly identify all the posts by a single person in a thread.

Very nice work :)

I'm actually working on something exactly like this right now. I just started last night, but it's mainly for fun/learning

I've written something similar as a Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kikfikaiccdaabdilg...

Code is here: https://github.com/tkahn6/hn-newcomments-chrome

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