

Ask HN: Two-Dimensional Comments - harpastum

Person A is one of the first to read a story, and has an interesting comment to make. This comment is immediately voted up, and there are several replies. Then Person B adds their interesting comment at root level. This comment goes to the bottom of the list, below all of the replies to Person A's comment. This leaves Person B's comment to be read only by those that make it all the way through.<p>The current system takes up a lot of vertical space for each reply, making it less likely that people will make it to the comments below. My idea is to put replies to comments directly to the right of the original comment, moving horizontally as more comments are added, so that each comment and its subtree takes up a much smaller amount of vertical space. This will allow those following a conversation to scroll from left to right, and those looking for different conversations to move from top to bottom.<p>Having a very wide site would probably cause no end of trouble, and I'm not saying that it's the optimum solution. I just think that it is an interesting idea to consider.
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inerte
Horizontal scrolling bars are a no-no. None expects them. Mouse wheels and
page-down and space bar doesn't work. It breaks how users expect the page to
behave.

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harpastum
Granted it's confusing for people unfamiliar with the site, but I'd argue the
population here is ideally suited for unorthodox ideas.

An interesting example of a horizontal site is the Urban Outfitters Blog:
<http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/>

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timf
An alternative would be to collapse 2nd level comments and below. You choose
which thread to get involved with by clicking in. There's probably a
greasemonkey script that does this.

That's how I read the site without any help from the UI, I don't find it to be
that big of a deal. If there are more than ~5 comments on a topic, I will scan
all the top level comments first to get a feel for the conversations and then
dive into what I want to read.

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run4yourlives
Why wouldn't you just hide them and put a link up to expand the thread like
Slashdot does?

