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Comment by thebear | Hacker News Reader

I find the two-column layout hard to deal with. I think I have figured out an algorithm for visually determining the chronological order of the posts, without having to read the timestamp in each post. But my algorithm requires considerable visual and intellectual effort. Is there an intuitive way to see the chronology of the posts? BTW, I'm not a huge fan of facebook's two-column layout either, but at least the arrows pointing to the time axis show the order of the posts.

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You can use J/K to traverse through the stream in a chronological fashion. Not as quick is SPACE but the animations are a lot _cleaner_. You can also force a single column layout using the More button in top toolbar.

Thank you so much for pointing this out.

Multi column mode is actually usable for me now. Before I just couldn't make up my mind what to read next and it kinda screwed up my concentration, and single column had so much white space it was off-putting.

two? I have three on my monitor. I really hate what Pinterest did for UI... the multi-column layout with blocks of various heights. I scan left to right, top to bottom. This layout breaks that horribly. Maybe they were not the first but that is where I first saw it and right after they took off... I saw it everywhere. So I blame them for it. lol

As I learned from billnguyen's post, you can make it change the number of columns by zooming in and out. With the 3 column layout your mind immediately gives up on wanting to figure out the chronological order. Am I the only one who thinks that the chronology matters?

zoom in and out? I don't see that option in G+. And I very much care that things are in order. I can't understand random (or even a complex, non random, non time-based order). This is shit.

We meant zooming in the browser, using C+ and C-. And yes, I agree with the s--t part.

@jack-r-abbit: its just a setting in your browser, chrome makes it sticky so once you set it for your google+ page you should always see it zoomed in/out to your setting

oh.. ya I know how to zoom my browser. But that is gross. By the time I zoom enough to get two columns... everything is freaking huge. I'm not blind... I just don't want random sized blocks randomly thrown onto the page.

if you want single column theres an option under More called Steam Layout

That's brilliant (irony directed at Google, not billnguyen, whose posts are great).

You, sir, are a hero.

no, but its pretty apparent that the G+ team doesn't think it matters. 3 columns just helps my brain get on that same wavelength, whether I agree with it or not :)

I think you nailed it there: they obviously don't think that chronological order matters, and so much for that.

Facebook's stream hasn't been chronological (for most users) in a long time - I think years, and it doesn't seem to bother most users.

Mine is. They do reset the sort order back to "top stories" once in awhile which is annoying but I always just set it back to sort by date

Yes but the majority or people just use the top stories sort and are happy with it. I think people who want everything in chronological order are the type of people who don't want to miss a post - even though most posts on Facebook/Google + aren't important enough to matter if you miss them.

Actually I suspect a not insignificant number of people aren't even aware of Facebook's edge-rank shenanigans. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to point out, even to techy friends, that you can reset the sort to most recent (over and over, thanks Facebook). This normally comes after people complaining they didn't see some post or another from a friend/family member, because Facebook decided it wasn't "popular" enough. Then again most of my friends are the kind that only friend actual friends, if they had feeds 800 people deep I suspect Facebook culling most posts would be appreciated. The only thing that annoys me is constantly having to reset it, you'd think after N times they would take the signal of "your edge-rank trimming is abysmal", but no.

I want things in chronological order so I can tell if I have missed any post. But that doesn't mean I need to read every post. I do want to be able to decide for myself from the list what I view as a "top story". So I have them sort by date. and when I've scrolled back to something I know I've seen then I don't need to keep scrolling back. When things are random, I get stuff I've already seen mixed in with new stuff. That is not a very good user experience IMO.

This behavior baffles me. It happens often that someone will share a G+ post directly with me, so I'll receive an email and G+ notification thinger in the upper-right of Google pages. Then I'll visit <plus.google.com> and the post is nowhere to be found.

Don't take a sample size of one and extrapolate to everyone.

I did no such thing. I said mine is. Don't put words in my mouth, please.

Sorry if I misunderstood, but I made a statement about the large body of users and you replied with a personal anecdote. I realize there are exceptions, but my point (in response to the parent comment) was that clearly most users aren't bothered by a non-chronological presentation. Even Twitter seems to be moving away from that.

I too am not exactly sure how to read the three column layout, and that's certainly a frustration, but it does look considerably better than Facebook's layout on my 27-inch monitor just in terms of aesthetics. I imagine I would be less fond of the layout on a smaller monitor.

You can switch to single-column mode under the top banner "More" menu's "Stream Layout" option. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people that would like to use this feature are not aware of it (admittedly it's not the first place I looked).

Post order hasn't been reliably chronological in some time, FYI. They started messing around with it at least a year ago.

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