Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Just off the top of my head you know what I would like to see as an email interface: Reddit.

Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies. Different users can reply in a threaded way to all the recipients of the message etc.

Obviously it would need in-line attachements and in-line pictures.

It would be interesting to allow a vote system on messages. Rather than file them, you down or up vote them. But in your box, you have more than one vote so you can apply more or less weight to info. Along with tags and groups and many other things that I can think of...

That would be cool.

View on HN

Google Wave tried to fix that problem but with the radical change in the way we use email, it failed.

I think wave failed more because the UI was horrible and of course it was linked to Gmail rather than being usable with exchange/other mail systems.

If you had some sort of standard with various different native clients, then it might work.

> Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies.

As in Gmail?

But when you open a message with lots of replies, there's no structure, and you can't reply to one person's comment (like I'm replying to your comment here). This would be messy in gmail.

  > you can't reply to one person's comment

You can, but it doesn't maintain proper threading. It just groups them all together and sorts by date.

As in Google Groups?

You think that google groups is an analogous email client?

No, but Google Groups brings the innovations mentioned above to email lists, so it's an analogous comparison.

Do you use reddit?

As cookingrobot says, gmails threading is one dimensional and super clunky when you have lots of replies. It auto collapses to far so you can't easily reply to a particular message in the thread.

Reddit has the best comment threading system of any site online. Quora is near the worst. HN is just slightly frustrating.

I thought reddit and HN were using the same system. What's the difference?

Hacker News is written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

Reddit used be written in Lisp, but they switched to Python early on: http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

I do agree that they look alike, Hacker News was inspired by Reddit.

Not the same exact software, just the same way of representing comment threads.

Collapsing threads, for one thing.

It's like, one line of javascript different (the equivalent of if score < threshold: thread.collapse())

I don't care about the code. Collapsing is a significant change in UX.

EXACTLY!

No one seems to get this, not HN, not Quora, Digg (though that doesn't matter any longer...)

Its about increasing the information consumption rate and navigation rate. Collapsing is critical to navigating threads with thousands of comments, even tens of comments!

Any UX designer who does not see this, is, in my book, worthless.

Inspect the source for both sites. I have to admit, I felt a little nauseous when I first read HN's markup & styling.

voting aside (which I'm not convinced belongs in email), what is the difference between reddit's comment system and the threading algorithm used by muas like pine?

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