

Ask PG: Can we limit the number of replies to a comment? - jballanc

Something I've noticed lately is the increasing occurrence of the first comment in a thread amassing 20, 30, or more replies. Seldom do these replies represent more than half-a-dozen or so unique points. More often it is people re-hashing the same points with slightly different wording, or people with largely unrelated points attempting to ride the coat-tails of whatever has managed to float to the top.<p>Either way, this trend seems detrimental both to the depth of discussion (encouraging more noise in the initial replies, at the expense of replies to the appropriate children or grandchildren), as well as the number of original top-level comments visible on the more popular topics. The number of times I've opened a thread to find that there is only <i>one</i> top-level comment on the first page of replies is troubling.<p>So, can we limit the number of replies to a single comment to something like 10 or so?
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tptacek
Won't this just give us 10 rehash comments and _no_ good replies?

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DanBC
There are extensions that allow you to 'collapse threads' - they appear to
work on most browsers.

EDIT: I realise that this doesn't help the problem that you're talking about.
It is a bit of a problem when people only respond to the first comment -
especially if that comment is only just related to the article.

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ScottWhigham
FWIW - you might like using the greasemonkey script "Threadify" if you don't
already. It makes it easier to navigate past those long comment threads:

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/110317>

