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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

I wish that when I read a large discussion (100+ comments) there would be a way to distinguish comments I have already seen. Because for a large discussion I care about, I'll revisit it several times to see what was added. Except right now, I have to rescan everythng.

When I was using micromobs.com for discussion groups, they had a very simple and elegant system: keep all comments in place to preserve context, but grey out the ones I have already seen. The problem on HN is that it would conflict with bad comments. Maybe use a different color?

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Yes, please, a way to see new comments in a discussion. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the current system is that interesting conversations get killed off too soon because nobody can follow what's being said any more. (Falling off the front page is also a killer for discussions. It would be nice if active discussion threads remained visible somewhere.)

I'm not the first person to bring up Usenet here, but it pains me that Usenet had way more functionality in the 1980s. (Which I don't mean as a criticism of HN, but a wish for more learning from the past.)

But how many users were there on usenet? The special thing about HN is that it keeps a quality of comments way above average without needing to be too elitist; I think that limiting the conversations (and thus the flame wars etc.) is a choice.

But to highlight new comments there are many different solutions already, take a look at the other comments :)

The special thing about HN is that it keeps a quality of comments way above average

That was in fact also a quality of Usenet, before it went out of fashion for unclear reasons.

It would be an interesting exercise to mirror (or even move) HN to a nntp-server. Personally I believe the signal/noise ratio would improve drastically.

The hckrnews.com browser extension does this with an orange bar on the left of new comments, and on the hckrnews.com homepage it will list how many new comments have been added to the story alongside the total count.

You could try out: hncomment watcher http://christopherdebeer.github.com/hnCommentWatcher/

I'd also be keen for a way to collapse the comment tree as I lose interest in responses to a particular reply.

For that I use this very nice extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpablc...

I use the HNHalfLife[1] userscript, and I know find it extremely annoying to browse HN without it. Thanks polyfractal!

[1]: https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHalfLife

I've just installed it (Chrome) but it doesn't seem to do anything, would you happen to know what I'm doing wrong?

Edit: Using the https version of news.ycombinator.com

I don't know, it "just worked" here. Click on comments page, close it and then it'll mark new comments when you return to it or see it on the stories list.

I made something like that a while back: http://dionidium.com/projects/greasemonkey/markasread.user.j...

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