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Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

Threaded comments are a good thing. This seems like a UI problem. One suggestion:

1) Put the thread reply text field at the top of the comments and show new replies at the top, at least for the user who made the comment.

2) Replying anywhere else should require clicking on Reply under that comment.

This makes it intuitively clear that thread replies are not replies to a thread comment.

This would take users some time to adjust to, but should fix the problem.

I know at least one site that does this. Ahem.

EDIT: Looking more carefully at the second screen shot, it looks like they did this. Seems like a non-issue in that case. The first screenshot for some reason doesn't have that change. Who knows if they are A/B testing or what. Strange that the OP did not notice this difference.

View on HN

Threaded comments are a bad thing. I've gone through this thoroughly in a blog post (http://blog.iroquote.com/post/45908133231/5-reasons-why-thre...), but here is an overview of why:

1. Screen width limits the depth of threaded replies.

2. Indented replies look horrible on mobile screens, and make the depth of reason (1) even smaller.

3. We (typically) lose chronological order.

4. A complex comment tree makes it cumbersome to track who replied to what.

5. Non-techy users don't get it well, which eventually leads to a inconsistent tree.

I think the search for an ideal comment system is a problem worth solving. IMO it is best solved by:

1. A single thread in chronological order.

2. Quote feature, like in forums, to allow direct replies.

3. Some summarization technique to highlight relevant comments.

That's what I'm doing at my startup, and I would like to see other approaches too, because it's about time we figure out how to do an intuitive and powerful comment system.

I find that 4chan's comment system is surprisingly effective, especially being able to mouseover a link to a comment and have it pop up.

That is a nice feature, but not possible on mobile.

I have to say, having used newsgroups, forums, and reddit for years and years, I totally disagree - conversations by their nature are threaded, not linear - people need to have the freedom to break off and discuss tangents without impacting the main thing.

With the quote feature you just end up with giant quote pyramids and impossible to track discussions.

That said, with Facebook it seems they have a) broken the chronology, which is insane, and b) not made it damned obvious that it's a threaded system, hence the confusion.

Giant quote pyramids are a big mistake of old forum systems. But imagine quoting without quotes-in-quotes. Combine that with "click on quote" to see the post.

BTW, HN also breaks chronology.

HN only breaks chronology on sister threads, where it doesn't matter.

In 8 years (or whatever) of reading HN comment, I've never once had an issue with chronology of comments.

If there were no threads, it would be such a mess, it wouldn't be worth reading.

Well the chronology is following a branch :)

I completely disagree. Single threaded conversations are hijacked by the loudest and often most annoying commenters, don't allow interesting diversions, don't allow recovery from dead end conversations, don't organize information naturally, and are just generally horrible. They quickly follow Godwin's law, and there is very little chance for recovery. A few comments by idiots and the thread is lost.

Hacker News without threaded replies would be a disaster. The most interesting discussions are often thread branches, and I'm very thankful much of the uninteresting stuff and endless self-important debate is isolated where it belongs - in a thread.

In simple cases, as with a few comments on a photo by someone with 500 friends, threads are overkill and likely to degrade the conversation. On large board with hundreds of commenters, threads are essential.

Your points are either wrong or symptoms of bad UIs, not threaded comments.

Understood only by programmers? Have you tested that theory? It's wrong. Threads are all over the internet and used competently by all kinds of people. Even my mother understands threads.

Hard to follow a thread? I can't even describe how much better threaded comments are than Iroquote, even if horizontal scrolling is required.

So yeah, I disagree 100%.

You're free to disagree, as I disagreed with you.

A few more defenses to my opinion: single threaded conversations can be saved from annoying idiots through a highlighting feature. I'm talking Slashdot comments (which are threaded but what I refer to is hiding vs highlighting according to karma). Threads are not the only way of filtering relevant content.

It takes just one commenter to make a thread inconsistent, and the theory is easily tested: just pick a topic in Reddit and soon you will find one. Also the limit in reply depth causes inconsistencies: once you get to deep into a reply tree, the narrow space left by the indentations eventually forces someone to reply to a higher level in the tree (specially mobile). It's just a technical limitation, not a social theory.

If a discussion ends up diverting considerably from the OP, just start a new discussion. That's what Branch.com focused heavily on. They are single threaded, but work slightly like multi-threads. It works nicely. Note also that they have a highlighting feature, and another mechanism to suppress spammers.

You have good points defending threads, but I'm not alone against them. I'm sure even Facebook carefully considered threads for their comment system. Many Facebook groups have intense activity (not your normal 30-comment on a friend's photo), I've even witnessed one with over 700 comments. The OP shows us they seem to be experimenting with threads, but they are not going for it 100%. Even Google+ is single-threaded for large discussions. Why?

This thread between us is a PERFECT example of why threads are necessary. We are having a conversation that would not happen if there were no threads, and which I would hesitate to engage in because it would be side-tracking the main point. We'd have all sorts of people telling us to stay on topic. Look how you're responding to individuals and they can see your response. Look how easy it is to follow the discussion.

Sorry, but IMO, you are dead wrong on this.

And you're worried about "inconsistent threads" from naive users? Imagine what naive users do when there are no threads...

Just start a new thread? And lose the audience? Pollute the top-level namespace with tangents? How do you pull people back into the discussion. This is not a solution.

Thread depth limit has never been an issue on HN because most discussions die out by that point and people move on to other top level topics. If it were an eternal discussion with endless threads, there are plenty of solutions to the UI issues there, but that would a rare use case where such depth were needed.

If I'm dead wrong, explain me how Branch.com is being successful as a "good web conversations platform" with a single thread layout. Plus, explain me their decision to make Branch "better and simpler" (http://bulletin.branch.com/) by removing their branch feature (creating new conversations as a reply to a comment). They just abandoned their only threading feature (heck, their company is named BRANCH), to make the experience better.

I'd also like to see you explain how Google+ made their Disqus competitor with single threads. Are Branch and Google also dead wrong?

I forgot, Google+ is killing it and Google always has top notch UI. Actually, G+ is having issues because they are ordering comments to sort out the junk and losing chronology because single threads are horrible.

I don't know much about Branch and I haven't seen it used on any major sites. Seems the threaded providers are doing quite well and leading the pack. Nobody complains that Disqus has threads and I see all sorts of ignorant wack jobs successfully using threads in the corners of the Internet.

So yeah, maybe Google and Branch are wrong. Not much of a stretch.

Sorry if t threatens your startup but best to know you're wrong early.

Thanks for the "wisdom" but I've done my research already. There is no consensus on the web that threaded is hands down the best way to do it. Some prefer flat some prefer threaded. I'm just building flat++, fixing the worst problems.

There is plenty of evidence that the battle between these two isn't won. On the full threading side: Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Disqus, LiveFyre. On the flat (or 1 level nesting) side: Branch, Google+, Facebook, Discourse (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/discussions-flat-or...), Vanilla Forums, etc. Seems like a fair fight to me.

I've been a bit more mindful of this in the past few hours, and I have to say, I disagree even more.

Disqus does threads nicely, and every discussion I look at benefits from threads, and would be a disaster without them.

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