Yea it is rather frustrating when the top comment spawns an enormous tangential discussion and you have to scroll through it; it doesn't help that there are no indent guides to at least make it easier to tell when you've finally scrolled to the next top level comment. And all this is doubly annoying on mobile.
I do not want collapsible comments - I feel that this encourages "skipping" over discussion (which helps polarise and lower the quality of the entire thread)
Indent guides? Yes please. I often find myself wanting to find and read all the replies to a particular comment (it is often posing a question or defending an opinion I find questionable).
Actually collapsing comments helps. Often insightful top level comments are posted at a later time. These remain less read and less voted because of their position.
That's the thing that a lot of HN users don't get. A lot of thought has been put into how to get fewer comments on HN. You have shadow banning, thread depth delays, thread depth limits and so much more.
Dang has said that collapsible comments are coming[0]. and shadowbanned comments are reversible by the public now[1] - and people vehemently defended shadowbanning as being absolutely essential in maintaining the quality of the community. Plus, other features (like domain links) have been added which make the site superficially more like reddit[2].
There used to be a "feature" where links would expire very quickly, making it impossible to reply to a comment if you spent more than a minute or two with the submit form open. People argued that that was also an intentional feature, even when the staff admitted explicitly that it was a bug. The staff has attempted to add a mobile stylesheet numerous times, and yet people argue that keeping mobile users away was a conscious decision by pg to keep the site from becoming reddit. This site has become so paranoid about "becoming reddit" that it literally tells you in the site guidelines not to complain about the site becoming reddit.
It is entirely possible that, while pg did make a conscious effort to design the site in such a way as to attract certain users and repel others, that is not nearly as overriding and critical a priority as people make it out to be.
Agree with that. I wanted this feature for a while but after thinking about it, I think that it would be bad. It would change the focus on the first, second, and slightly third comment where all the other comments in the trees will be disregarded. But right now each comment is valued and has its place. There are less focus on the last leaves but it's still great.
If it's done, the first comments will have all the attention plus it will engage to a race to have the best first comment. We want to seek to engage people with real thoughts and deep discussions, regardless their position here. I have read so many long and great conversations between highly skilled persons, it's so valuable. We have to keep it like that.
I don't understand. I'm all for collapsible comments exactly because the current situation often puts all the focus on the first comment. Because that one will have a disproportionally large tree of discussion hanging off it, usually with one or two tangents that have not a lot to do with the featured article.
While the tangents can be interesting, when checking comments I actually really do want to read the top five voted top-level comments, because that gives me an idea what people think about the article.
Now I do have an HN-comment collapsing plugin installed (I forget which), and I use it for exactly this purpose. Especially when the singular large top-thread contains more than one large tangent that I don't particularly care about, it's absolutely great. Especially compared to the alternative, which is sort of eye-balling where you are in the thread and tracking with your finger or mouse cursor whether you're back at a level where people stopped talking about that thing (which is not always apparent if it's a short reply).
Now if I want to read what people think about what other people think (about what people think ..) about the article, I can always return to the tangent later.
I also believe having the feature built-in will be a net positive on quality of discussion. Even if you may prefer HN's tone of discussion over Reddit's, to assume that adopting any feature that Reddit has will result in a decline of discussion quality is pure cargo-culting.
HN's tone of discussion comes from the guidelines, stringent self-moderation and constructive hints from a moderator. Not from having messy comment threads and lack of UI affordances just because Reddit has them.
Isn't it really great how we can now have this totally tangent discussion on how you got downvoted, right in the middle of the gigantic singular top-comment dumping ground that always appears on HN discussion threads?
Not quite what I had in mind, but that sounds nice too. I just meant when you get to the bottom of some comment thread (i.e., next comment is de-dented), it would be nice to be able to collapse it there, too.
