
Ask HN: What do you think about HN's comment thread system? - aerialcombat
I&#x27;m talking about the tree structure and how it gets nested into certain depth.<p>Do you think it serves the purpose well, or do you think there&#x27;s a better way?
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Udik
I find deep threads that wander away from the topic distracting and sometimes
frustrating. Especially on mobile, there's no easy way to collapse the thread
you're currently on without scrolling back to the root comment, which might
not be easy to find.

Maybe it would be nice (though hardly matching HN's spartan philosophy) to
allow the community to assign titles to subthreads, for example: "subthread
about housing costs in SF". That would allow me to skip it without having to
read multiple comments before realizing I got into the rabbit hole of a topic
I'm not interested in.

~~~
aerialcombat
Yeah it's a tough problem. Maybe it's a problem without a clear answer. I do
think it's more intuitive when reading a tree structure until it breaks
somewhere in the middle and starts again. Then I'm lost. But I think about a
flat system where I have to connect all the dots myself in the head, and it's
not so pleasant either. It'll probably have to be some type of hybrid system
where it takes the best of both worlds and combine nicely into one. I have yet
to see such system, personally.

~~~
krapp
The tangents themselves aren't really a problem - the threaded format
encourages sub-discussions which diverge from the main topic.

A flat system could go one of two ways - all comments could be replies to the
article itself, which would kill discussion, or any comment could reply to any
number of other comments, or even other threads, which is how the flat layout
of imageboards work. Although that also usually requires adding direct
references to the ids of the comments or boards being replied to.

Hacker News could probably do more to make threads more readable and make
navigation easier. One feature I've seen in webmail archives is links to
sibling threads along with parent and OP - although that could get cluttered.
Reddit also automatically paginates threads which go too deep, so the viewer
doesn't see comments beyond a certain nesting level on any specific page.

Discovery tends to break down with long threads, regardless of the layout. I
don't think there is a solution that won't require the reader to have to read
a bit and possibly encounter content they find uninteresting. I liken forums
to parties where you're wandering through a crowded room, listening to
conversations other people are having. You can't expect to just immediately be
entertained, it takes time to get context. With forums, features like karma
are supposed to guarantee that the higher quality content is easiest to find
(assuming some objective meaning of "quality" not defined here) but you still
have to lurk and read.

In the end, though, that's supposed to be part of the fun.

