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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to able to fold a nested conversation once I think that particular branch is going nowhere. HN should treat the folding as a signal similar to a down vote on that particular sub-thread. I often don't think any particular comment warrants a down vote, so I have no way to tell HN that the thread should be pushed back.

Plus everyone has been asking for a way to collapse sub-comments (and many plugins do it already).

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Personally, I fold almost everything once I've finished reading it. I don't think it's a a very strong signal about the quality of the comments.

On reddit, I often collapse long threads of comments if I'm bored of reading them (I have neither the time nor the attention span). It has no bearing on their quality.

On reddit, I find [personally] most of these threads are never-ending chains of well-trodden memes or loops; this isn't something usually encouraged on Hacker News. If a thread is boring or doesn't pique curiosity it probably isn't too encouraging.

Something that I always found a problem was getting "stuck" in the middle of a huge comment chain of irrelevant content, so I made a chrome extension to fix it:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-comment-col...

That looks fantastic. If I used Chrome I might even use it.

Its aesthetics are, well, not the best, though. Consider just a solid line?

Yeah, I need to work on it some more ... that's top of the list!

I do that too as far as Reddit, but I agree w/ OP. Reddit-style collapsing is useful for reading & skimming but it doesn't persist across browsing sessions. On the other hand, the 4chan UI will hide a thread and all its updates forever. Sort of like if you could collapse/downvote reddit headlines off the front page. (is there a plugin for that?)

[HIDE] on reddit will remove these stories and comments from your view.

HackerNew (apologies for my inability to present this link elegantly) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd... allows folding and dynamic loading, similar to RES. It also increases the font size slightly by default, which I am embarrassed to admit is rather nice.

Collapsible comments, please!

I've been using the Hacker News Enhancement Suite extension for Chrome with pretty good success.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

I discovered HN Special for Chrome a week or two ago, and I'll never go back. It adds every feature I've ever wanted (better, higher-contrast design; foldable comments; user info hovers, etc).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an-addi...

Interesting note: the same guy who wrote the original 2048 game wrote that Chrome Extension! Pretty great stuff.

HNES is the best, I hate using Hacker News on computers where I cant install my own Chrome extensions because of this.

Disclosure: I've contributed to HNES before.

(You mention they exist, but here's an open source plugin that does comment folding and nothing else: https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider)

Awesome! I've been waiting for a long time for the HN guys to implement this (though dang notes in a sibling comment it's probably coming, sweet!), didn't even think about greasemonkey...

I've made a few tiny edits so that it works with https (the github repo has this, but not on userscripts.org), as well as the threads page. Also, I put slightly less space between the [-] and the commenter name, it looks a bit better/more reddity.

I didn't bother making it work for anything but the greasemonkey script, or trying to upload it to userscripts.org. But it might still be useful: https://github.com/zwegner/HN-Comment-Hider

Treating folding as a downvote-like signal is interesting, but I would like the ability to collapse without it being treated similar to a downvote. Collapsing a branch would be useful in long threads even for branches about which I could not justify sending a negative signal.

Collapsible comments would be awesome, but having them count as a downvote wouldn't make sense to me. There are other reasons to want to fold a thread.

Agreed, folding shouldn't count as a down vote. However, in aggregate, if 100 users all folded a thread around the same half-way point, it's telling you something.

Yes, but to me, it's still too ambiguous without correlating it to downvotes - there would be a lot of noise to sort through from people closing threads just because they've read them, or don't find them interesting but not necessarily objectionable, or whatever.

Also, thread folding is reversible - maybe someone folds a thread but decides to periodically check it* if you count folded threads against it you have to recount every time someone reopens a thread as well. Downvotes, at least, are meant to be explicit and non-reversible, in that you can't directly un-downvote something (unless you can at some mystical karma level)

I can see how in extreme cases it would be a signifier but I don't really see many of those cases which wouldn't also have a lot of downvotes anyway, so i'm thinking it would be repeated work.

* a feature to let you peek at the last posted comment in a folded thread, btw, might be very handy...

Agreed. Something along these lines is very likely.

collapsing/folding would solve the 'rich get richer' problem as well

the reason comments at the top stay at the top is because of scrolling attrition -- the more you make people scroll to see more comments, the less they're likely to do it.

if comment threads collapsed like reddit (for example) then they'd be much easier to read through -- giving more exposure to new / low voted comments near the bottom

On reddit, I collapse conversations to show myself that I've read as much of that thread as I want to, not that I have any particular problem with it. I'll do it for a variety of reasons, the conversation strays into a topic I'm not interested in, or gets too technical. For me, collapsing is a positive, it means I read the thread instead of just passing it by.

While I support introducing collapsible threads, I don't think they should have any weight on the ranking.

I would like the same feature, but for a different reason:

The ability to collapse the top thread would help the next thread (and all subsequent threads) get some much needed visibility. Right now, the top comment and its replies often take up so much vertical space that I get tired before I ever get to the second thread.

"Hide" after "link" would be handy.

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