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Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

Wow that live stream update is a nightmare - I keep trying to read what's happened and things get pushed down almost immediately. A clickable (or w/e) "18 new posts" would make it usable.

View on HN

To save you the trouble, it's a stream of content free fanboyism and witless photoshoppery. Every single comment would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted here.

on reddit however...

If you actually used Reddit you would notice that most ignorant and outright trollish comments are downvoted into oblivion. You see a lot more awful comments, but that's only because Reddit is larger. They're treated the same.

Not if you make a comment like "iSuck, but I think I am better that everyone" on r/technology. I wish your description were true everywhere.

Comments like that usually come after a long, dumb tree that started out with good intentions. It happens on HN too. The difference is that I can collapse those threads on Reddit, or hide the story completely.

Collapsible comments on HN would be awesome. Too often I get deep into a huge comment thread that has gone off topic and close the tab after I lose interest and forget what the topic was supposed to be about.

The resistance to it probably comes from the belief that it would hasten HN's decline. Once you can collapse subthreads, what's the motivation to not contribute to the subthreads?

But Reddit at levels 1-5 is almost indistinguishable from HN at levels 1-5. The only differences between HN and Reddit are topic diversity, collapsing, and limiting comment display to the top 100 or 500 comments.

That has me using HN less in recent months. It failed to account for the inevitable with display tools, so a thread that would be perfectly navigable on Reddit is unreadable on HN.

> Every single comment would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted here.

Well, after reading the comments in this thread here, and some of the comments over on Google+, I'm gonna have to say you got that prediction wrong. =)

Every single site that has a live stream starts off thinking: "we're going to be cooler than the competition, our live stream will actually update in real time," then realizes "uh-oh, maybe there's a reason other sites don't actually pull the updates and show them in real time"

Facebook, twitter, stackoverflow, et. al. have all previously used the constantly-updating stream technique only to switch away to the "x new posts, click to view"

You can hit the pause button or scroll down a bit.

After scrolling down a bit the content continues to jump, but not by as much.

Scrolling down a bit doesn't help at all. Where's the pause button?

That is unusable.

The pause button appears after the first time the posts refresh so it won't be there until a few seconds have passed. Look for it top-right over the posts column.

There's a big pause button at the very top right of the stream. Once paused, scrolling works great. How is that at all unusable?

~ Because the pause button doesn't show up until a new entry is added to the list. Which happens after you've already scrolled down the page, so the pause button isn't even visible when it is rendered.

~ Because the pause button is light gray on white.

~ Because scrolling down the page, which in almost every other scrolling interface prevents any updates from affecting your scroll position (terminal, chat, twitter, etc.) didn't help.

~ Because the page just moves in weird, small jumps and feels like it's broken not like new content is rolling in. (They're actually accounting for huge jumps! and chose instead of move it in tiny glitches...)

Could be a browser thing. On chrome I can see pause button as black on light gray. When I scroll down the auto add affect reduces, scrolling down further the content is pretty much stable. I think its a pretty good reading experience on Chrome..

It "hops" every couple of seconds in a jarring fashion. It's really rather annoying.

The button is black text on light grey background, yes. I think the parent poster is more pointing out that the light-grey-on-white-background, which isn't very noticeable.

(I didn't know there was a pause button until read this thread.)

"We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

From Ratatouille, perhaps Pixar's finest film.

You should never have to press a button to take a page out of an unusable default state, but if that's going to be, the button needs to not be lost in a pile of clutter.

Be sure to send Google feedback.

https://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

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