
Ask PG: Can we limit reply count/depth? - jballanc
The popularity of HN is only growing. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that every discussion can and will take more turns, more different directions. I&#x27;ve watched as so many different online forums for conversation have broken down under the strain of a growing user base. You either end up with uber-deep threads that only the participants, if anyone, can follow any longer, or you get a dog-pile of nearly-identical responses to popular posts.<p>I understand that HN has always been an experiment, so why not experiment with a different way to manage the conversation? Writing a top-level post is more challenging than a follow-on reply. I suspect you&#x27;d find that top-level posts generally display more novel thought than the majority of reply posts (not all -- there are some very high quality replies -- but most).<p>Similarly, when a reply thread gets very deep there is a good chance that the conversation has strayed from what is interesting to the general population. At this point, it would probably be better to continue the discussion in email or some other communication medium.<p>I still come to HN primarily for the comments, but I find myself increasingly opening a comment link only to find a first comment followed by a page of replies to replies to replies; almost a straight line across and down my browser window. Sometimes I will scroll to see if maybe the second top-level post has a different take or covers a different question, but more often I close the page and move on...<p>...obviously this is just a thought. I wonder if there other things HN might try to maintain the level of discourse with its ever growing audience?
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dangrossman
If you use Chrome, install Hacked Hacker News to highlight unread comments and
Hacker News Collapse to make the threads collapsible.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacked-hacker-
news...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacked-hacker-
news/hlddllcemddpbekleofllndfidcgbgdp)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
collapse/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjngdljolljhifdph)

~~~
Pyrodogg
Or the Hacker News Enhancement Suite which does both!

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm)

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sp332
The "reply" button is not available just after a deep post is submitted. The
length of time it's gone increases with depth. This is to prevent flamewars. I
think it's a good comprimise, since after a while people have "cooled down"
from a flamewar but might still have something interesting they want to say.

------
arh68
Most annoying is finding a huge, interesting comment page (200 comments),
reading half of it, then coming back later to see 400 comments. No visual diff
= scanning and scrolling. Searching the page for "minutes ago" shows me in-
the-last-hour posts, which is a happy medium.

Hierarchical comments lead to problems like you describe: 1 8-deep thread can
come up from the bottom and dominate the comments page. Sense of time is
destroyed as who has time to scan the leaves of a vertically-serialized tree?
The same discussion will happen in 3 or 4 branches, confusion builds, and
sometimes "see my other post below" comes out. What a mess! Maybe that's just
the natural, irreducible 'mess' that comes with human conversation, but I've
got a hunch it's not.

~~~
mjn
For usenet and mailing lists, this is handled on the client side by
read/unread tags on messages. Web forums haven't yet found a way to do as good
a job imo, leading to a lot more reload-and-scan type activity that feels even
more twitchy than the old kind of check-for-new-messages twitchiness.

Reddit does notify you when there's an unread direct reply to one of your
comments, which is a replication of one part of that functionality.

------
Peroni
Rather than limit the reply count, I'd much rather see a collapsable comment
system. Can't imagine it's top of PG's priority list though.

~~~
jballanc
I thought about this too, but it seems to me more like sweeping the problem
under the rug than addressing it directly. Personally, if this encouraged even
two or three people engaged in an interesting conversation to contact each
other directly, instead of continuing to engage semi-anonymously on the
internet, I think it would be worth it.

